The only two female members of the Intelligence and Security Committee are leaving the Commons at the general election, and the whole Committee will have to be re-formed after June. In a blog originally posted on the Democratic Audit blog, Andrew Defty says one of its reports has been rushed out before the election with the government’s redactions unchallenged, and a long-delayed inquiry into the UK intelligence services’ involvement in extraordinary rendition will now be pushed further back. Dominic Grieve is a promising chairman, but the ISC needs to get into shape quickly after the election.
Tag: House of Lords
James Weinberg discusses how his research blends political science, psychology and a healthy dose of humanity to understand the personal side of politics.
In this article, Matthew Purvis, Head of Research Services in the House of Lords Library, provides an introduction to the role of the House of Lords Library, what services it offers and how it works.
By Peter Dorey
House of Lords reform remains unfinished business, and looks likely to remain so for a long time yet. The preamble to the 1911 Parliament Act portentously proclaimed that Lords reform was ‘an urgent question which brooks no delay’, yet more than a century later, there have been only sporadic and inchoate reforms. Moreover, these have often been motivated by calculations of partisan advantage, even when depicted as being derived from important political principles. After the 1911 Act, the remainder of the twentieth century witnessed only three further laws pertaining to House of Lords reform: the 1949 Parliament Act, which reduced the Second Chamber’s power of delay (veto) of legislation from two years to one; the 1958 Life Peerages Act, which established a new category of appointed peer to sit alongside the hereditary peers; the 1999 House of Lords Reform Act, which removed most of the hereditary peers, but allowed 92 to remain pending further reform.
Please note that this blog piece was originally published on the Constitution Unit blog on 14 January 2016, and is available here.
Lord Norton of Louth argues that the Strathclyde Review recommendations are based on a false premise that there is a convention that the Lords does not reject statutory instruments. Instead of rushing into wider changes the immediate response to October’s tax credits controversy should be to address the inconsistency in the way Commons financial privilege is recognised in relation to SIs. In the longer term there is a case for a wider review of how both houses deal with secondary legislation.
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What is a good ethnography of Parliament?
By Emma Crewe
Ethnography is a methodological and theoretical approach to studying social worlds. Doing ethnography does not require particular research techniques but is a process of prolonged engagement with a group of people to find out how they act, think, talk and relate to each other. Ethnographers’ understanding of subjectivity is distinct from positivistic approaches; rather than attempting to remove their influence on the research findings, they make this part of their research. Such reflexivity entails turning back on oneself, reflecting on how you are thinking and on how the social interaction between ethnographer and informant impacts on perception and interpretation.
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Essay competition result
This spring, the Parliaments and Legislatures SG held the first essay competition open to all undergraduate students. This essay competition was open, where students were asked to write about a parliament, legislature, or a specific matter concerning legislative studies.
By Thomas Caygill
All too often, once legislation has entered the statute book, Parliament assumes that is the end of the matter and the end of its role. However it has been noted by the House of Lords Constitution Committee that Parliament’s responsibility for legislation should not end once legislation has entered the statute book. This is where post-legislative scrutiny enters the picture.