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This Bill was defeated by only 30 votes [311 votes to 341 votes] at the end of the second reading debate on 8 June 1886. [1] What if enough MPs who opposed the Bill voted in favour and/or abstained to give it a majority? I assume it would have been rejected by the House of Lords. Would Gladstone have called a general election on the issue of peers versus the people, or governed with the support of the Irish Nationalists and waited for another five or six years before calling an election?