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Parliamentary Select Committees: Are elected chairs the key to their success?

By Mark Goodwin, Stephen Bates and Steve McKay

In the past two months, two of Britain’s richest men have been forced by Parliament to admit to, and apologise for, serious failings in their business practices that could end up costing them millions in compensation. Sports Direct owner Mike Ashley admitted to the Business, Innovation and Skills Select Committee that, despite being Britain’s 22nd richest person with an estimated fortune of £3.5bn, he had not been paying staff in the company’s main warehouse the minimum wage. A few weeks later, the same committee witnessed what many saw as a bizarre performance from another British billionaire, Sir Philip Green, as his failings in the sale of British Home Stores were exposed in between complaints about excessive staring from the committee members. These are just the latest in a string of high profile inquiries by parliamentary select committees over the past six years that have also seen Rupert Murdoch attacked with a custard pie, Michael Gove alleging a ‘Trot conspiracy’ in English schools and a vice president of Google being informed that “you do evil”.

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Do MPs need more support in understanding and writing legislation?

By Louise Thompson

The scrutiny of legislation is key to the role of MPs. It sounds relatively simple – asking lots of questions about what the government is planning to do and probing elements of bills to make sure that they will work properly, but the task facing them is a formidable one. Not only is the quantity of legislation increasing (particularly from delegated legislation), but the parliamentary timetable is busier than ever. Bills are also becoming much more complex, using terminology which can be tricky to understand. The language used facilitates the interpretation and implementation of the legislation. It is not written with Members of Parliament or the general public in mind. Yet, as this weekend’s discussions about whether the Scotland Act 2016 means that the Scottish Parliament can veto the UK’s decision to leave the EU show, the precise wording of legislation is important.

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Parliamentary sovereignty and the Human Rights Act 1998

By Matthew Burton

In a recent post on this blog, Chris Kirkland highlights the problematic nature of the concept of sovereignty in relation to the Brexit debate and the forthcoming referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union. On the one hand, Brexit campaigners argue that the UK has already lost its sovereignty to the European Union. A legally precise argument in this vein would point to the EU doctrines of supremacy and direct effect, which allow nationals of Member States of the EU to enforce EU law within the courts of the Member States, and requires EU law to take priority whenever it conflicts with a principle of domestic law. On the other hand, as the referendum demonstrates, the Westminster Parliament is free to legislate to withdraw from the EU whenever it wishes, and from a legal perspective at least, could do so without the need for any kind of referendum or national vote.

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The Consequences of Anti-Politics

Please note that this blog piece was originally published on the Crick Centre blog, and is available here. This piece has been re-published with permission from the author.

By Marc Geddes

The killing of Jo Cox on Thursday was a horrific attack on British democracy, which happened in the context of an increasingly bitter and hostile referendum campaign on UK membership of the European Union. Today, this attack overshadows every aspect of British politics, but more broadly it is arguably the extreme tip of an ‘anti-politics’ iceberg that is extending across the western world.

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How Twitter conversations highlight the different purposes of petitioning

By Cristina Leston-Bandeira and Viktoria Spaiser

Hashtag conversations over Twitter are common place. They are used to comment on TV programmes, conferences, general themes and now petitions. The new Petitions Committee of the House of Commons has been using hashtags to support the development of discussions associated with the themes of the petitions being debated in parliament. Are these discussions on Twitter just a lot of hot air, come and gone, or can they help us understand the different purposes of petitioning? In this blog piece, we find that, instead of just noise, these Twitter discussions help to identify themes linked to petitions, different levels of sentiment associated to petitions, varying levels of polarisation, but also those petitions that despite achieving very high numbers of signatures, actually have little traction.

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The backgrounds of MSPs and MPs: it’s about the parties, not the culture

By Paul Cairney and Phil Cowley

There is an interesting set of stories, by David Leask and colleagues in the Herald, about the background of MSPs. We take an interest as part of a team of scholars comparing backgrounds in Westminster and devolved assemblies and examining how parties decide between many sources of representation, from sex and race to employment and locality.

In this post we examine the latest data on education as a proxy for class. It suggests that there would be little difference between Holyrood and Westminster if they had the same balance between parties.

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Swapping Sides: Role reversal for parliaments in Dublin and Belfast

Please note that this was originally published on QPol on 27 May 2016, and is available here. It is re-posted here with the permission of the author and editors.

Recent election results either side of the Irish border have resulted in significant structural changes to the parliaments in Dublin and Belfast.

In the Republic of Ireland, following protracted negotiations between the main parties and independent member groupings in the aftermath of the unprecedented (though not entirely unexpected) result of the Irish general election, outgoing Taoiseach Enda Kenny just about managed to hold onto office. In so doing he becomes the first leader in the 83-year history of his Fine Gael party to be in government for successive terms. But it comes at the price of considerably diminished authority and a number of Ministerial seats being granted to independent TDs as part of deal to ensure their support. His party was 30 seats short of a majority after the election, and securing executive office required a) the support of several independent members, and b) the consent of traditional opponent Fianna Fáil, to govern on a ‘confidence and supply’ basis for three years.

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The Brexit campaign: has sovereignty been lost?

By Chris Kirkland

One of the main arguments of the Brexit campaign revolves around the concept of ‘sovereignty’. The basic argument put forward by the campaign is that if the British voted to leave the European Union (EU), then ‘we’, the people, would claw back ‘our’ sovereignty. Whilst this argument has been advocated by a range of groups and campaigners (here and here for examples), little attention has actually been spent on understanding the concept of sovereignty on which the argument relies. Here, I ask a series of related questions. What is sovereignty? And as a concept, is there a useful distinction between the holding and the exercise of sovereignty? I ask who the term ‘we’ refers to, and whether sovereignty, resides with Parliament, the electorate or some sense of ‘the people’. How does all this impact the forthcoming EU referendum, and especially the argument that sovereignty has been ‘lost’? These questions matter because both sides have engaged with a very technocratic debate surrounding the economics of remaining or leaving the EU, yet in doing so have arguably simplified a complex issue.

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Essential Guide: Nine ways research gets into Parliament

Please note that this blog piece was originally posted on Sarah Foxen’s personal blog and a version of it was published on the LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog. The post is re-published here with their permission.

By Sarah Foxen

I recently attended an RCUK-funded training day on research and policy. Part-way through one of the breakout sessions, it became apparent that my peers were sharing my frustrations with the training. We had expected to gain practical insight into how research feeds into policy, but instead the training had a rather more reflective focus, with the majority of speakers using their lectern time to perpetuate or challenge discourses surrounding academic impact.

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The Scotland Act 2016: New challenges for parliamentary scrutiny

By Stephen Herbert

The process of parliamentary scrutiny of the recommendations of the Smith Commission and the subsequent Scotland Bill has provided insights into the challenges that implementing the now Scotland Act 2016 present. The Scotland Act 2016 provides for the devolution of a range of new competencies to Holyrood. However, the passage of the Act is significant not only for the powers it confers upon the Scottish Parliament and Government but also the shift in the structure of Scottish devolution that will be a consequence of the Act’s provisions. The 2016 Act will result in a shift from a system of largely separate and clearly demarcated boundaries in terms of the distribution of powers between Holyrood and Westminster to an increasingly shared distribution of powers in a range of policy areas, notably with regard to taxation and social security powers. This will result in a greater degree of inter-governmental working than has been the case to date and will also present challenges to legislatures in examining these relationships. The issues raised, in this regard, by this shift in the structure of devolution are considered here.

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