I began Business of the House Questions this morning by raising yesterday’s vote in the House of Commons to abolish the hated bedroom tax, which was won by a margin of 226 to 1.  Labour have discovered that thanks to government incompetence, at least 13,000 people have been forced to pay it when they should have been exempt. Iain Duncan-Smith is going to try and use parliamentary procedure to force these people into paying the bedroom tax again, but Labour will use an opposition day debate to annul this odious measure. The bedroom tax is a callous attack on the poorest people in our country that might end up costing more than it saves, and we don’t think anyone should have to pay it at all.

I then raised the horrific floods which are blighting many parts of our country and causing untold misery for thousands of people. The huge storm overnight has caused further travel chaos and left over one hundred thousand people without power.  On Tuesday at his Downing Street press conference the prime minister told us that money would be no object in dealing with the aftermath of the floods, but within 24 hours we were told that there would be no blank cheques. Then yesterday during PMQs David Cameron failed to tell us whether he would commit to spending more on flood defences in the future. I asked Andrew Lansley to come clean and finally admit that the government cut flood funding by £97m when they came to office in 2010 and changed the Treasury rules to make it harder to give flood protection schemes the go ahead! Typically he failed to admit it.

This week we learnt that Barclays intend to increase their bonus payouts by 10 per cent while cutting 7,000 staff in the UK. In 2011 the prime minister said ‘I want the bonus pools to be lower, I want the taxes that the banks pay to be higher and, vitally, I want the lending that they do to do business… to increase’.  As always with this government the results don’t match the rhetoric. Banker’s bonuses have increased by £600m since 2012.  Net lending under the funding for lending scheme for SMEs has fallen by £2.3bn since June 2012 and since the election banks have paid more than double in bonuses than they have paid in corporation tax. Labour have committed to using a bankers’ bonus tax to fund real jobs for young people, but all this government can do is refuse to rule out a cut in the top rate of tax.

I finished by reminding the house that despite it being Valentine’s Day soon the coalition seems to be falling out of love. Eric Pickles and Owen Patterson have been briefing against each other.  Apparently Nick Clegg thinks that Danny Alexander has ‘gone native’ and is basically just a Tory. And Tory backbenchers are busy describing their coalition colleagues as ‘harder to pin down than a weasel covered in Vaseline’. I understand that Lord Rennard is trying to sue the Liberal Democrats to be allowed to rejoin the party. He must be the only person in the whole country who would take legal action in order to become a Liberal Democrat.

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Angela Eagle is member of parliament for Wallasey, shadow leader of the House of Commons and writes the weekly Business of Parliament column for Progress. She tweets @AngelaEagle