Rebecca McKee and Tom Caygill report back from the House of Commons and the Study of Parliament Group conference marking 40 years of departmental select committees.
Tag: UK Parliament
Stephen Holden Bates (University of Birmingham), Mark Goodwin (Coventry University), Steve McKay (University of Lincoln) and Wang Leung Ting (LSE), consider the extent to which Commons select committees are based on consensus, in part 2 of their trilogy of blogs drawing on sessional return data.
Stephen Holden Bates (University of Birmingham), Mark Goodwin (Coventry University), Steve McKay (University of Lincoln) and Wang Leung Ting (LSE) discuss the impact of departmental select committee work on business in the House of Commons chamber.
Following reports that Rory Stewart, a former contender for the Conservative leadership was once a member of the Secret Intelligence Service, Andrew Defty of ParliLinc, discusses the history of spies in Parliament.
James Weinberg, University of Sheffield discusses his research into the psychology of members of the UK Parliament – and what it can tell us about the Conservative leadership race – in a blog originally posted by The Conversation.
There has for some time been an apparent consensus in parliament and government that the House of Lords has too many members, yet recent efforts to effect reform have made little progress. David Beamish explains how an apparent change of government position and the parliamentary tactics of a determined minority have slowed the pace of change.
It is two years since the Intelligence and Security Committee published its report into UK lethal drone strikes in Syria. Despite a commitment to ‘respond substantively to any report by the ISC within 60 days’ the government has yet to produce a detailed reply to this report. Andrew Defty examines the government’s record in responding to ISC reports and the changing nature of its commitment to doing so. This blog was originally posted on Democratic Audit and is reposted with permission.
Professor Sarah Childs discusses the implications of the parliamentary politics of Brexit, and prospects for future reforms at Westminster.
The official, substantially verbatim report of what is said in both houses of Parliament is an essential tool for ensuring democratic accountability. This record, Hansard, contains a wealth of data, but it is not always fully accessible and easy to search. Lesley Jeffries and Fransina de Jager explain how a new project, Hansard at Huddersfield, aims to improve access to the Hansard records and contribute new ways of searching the data.
Dr James Strong looks to history to understand the influence of the House of Commons over the UK’s use of military force abroad, in a blog from our recent Making Sense of Parliaments conference.