Parliament [LWN.net]

Parliament

Posted Mar 25, 2025 0:18 UTC (Tue) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
In reply to: Parliament by paulj
Parent article: OSI election ends with unsatisfying results

That first part is not convention. Parliament requires that the King's ministers must be accountable to Parliament, it lacks a mechanism to oblige ordinary folk to attend and answer for their actions, so the ministers have to be in Parliament, the two choices available are that they could be Lords (in the upper chamber) or commoners (in the lower). In both cases it is within the power of the Parliament to compel them to come tell it what they have done and why.

Junior ministers are frequently "elevated" (made into a peer for life) specifically in order to make them a minister. If you want your old friend Jim Smith to be Minister for Video Games you announce that Jim gets a peerage, Lord Jim of Someplace, and make Lord Jim your Minister for Video Games, fine.

Of course because the Parliament is a sovereign entity it could arbitrarily change these rules, for example to create a tier of ministers who are compelled to attend but are not in parliament, and the previous administration did look at that option. Rule changes don't tend to stick, the Coalition decided to fix Parliamentary terms, that soon proved inconvenient and so the change was abolished again. But of course the rules we have now are an accumulation of rules which did stick, so anything (in this sense) is possible.

The convention is that Great Officers (those cabinet ministers who, under various names over the years, represent the core competencies of the executive, often given as the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Foreign Secretary and the Home Secretary must be MPs, that's not a rule it's just that if they are not (as Lord Dave wasn't) the only place they can easily be obliged to answer for what they've done is the Lords, which is obviously a slight to the MPs and their constituents, ie basically everyone in the country. It makes sense for a government which held its own population - including many of its own party members - in contempt that they'd do so I suppose.

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Parliament

Posted Mar 25, 2025 1:19 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> It makes sense for a government which held its own population - including many of its own party members - in contempt that they'd do so I suppose.

Are you a Brit? I can't remember. I certainly didn't feel it contemptuous especially given the light of history.

Nor did I find it contemptuous for that particular government. There's been plenty worse. And it's pretty much an inevitable consequence of our system of government. How come one election we get a government with a massive majority on a popular vote of 40%, and another government where the opposition was wiped out with 51% of the popular vote? It's the SYSTEM that doesn't respect the people. It's not a true representation of the wishes of the people. At all!

Mind you, a complete representation of what the people want would presumably be just as bad the other way. We've seen it elsewhere. It wasn't a debating chamber, it was a dead-locked arguing chamber with the Prime Minister's job being a rapidly revolving door ...

We've got the government history gave us. We've got the government we deserve. And quite frankly I don't find it contemptuous at all that the government would want an ex-Prime Minister's experience to help. The older I get, the more I feel that experience is valuable. And to call it contemptuous because people are ADULT enough to stand up and ask for help from someone with experience???

Cheers,
Wol

Parliament

Posted Mar 27, 2025 13:20 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

Yes, it's contempt. It says to me that from their point of view the hard work isn't necessary. Dave could be an MP if he wants, and if constituents will have him† he doesn't want, so he isn't an MP, well too bad. But they made him foreign secretary anyway, because they had no better candidates. Miserable, just accept that you can't govern the country with what's left of your party and make way for somebody who can.

† In practice you would parachute him into a safety Tory seat, my grandmother's old place would work, one of the safest seats in the whole country, A rotting corpse with the Conservative logo would handily win if it was allowed to stand. But that would be an imposition on poor Dave's time. Local party might even insist on meeting him. Tedious.