British Parliament Research Articles

"The High and Conspicuous Ground": The Logic of Immediate Emancipation and the Politics of the Decision of 1834

On 1 August 1834, slavery came to its permanent and quite uneventful end in the colony of Antigua. Antigua's planter-dominated Assembly was compelled by a series of self-miscalculations to grant immediate freedom to the colony's enslaved population rather than adopt the proposed the Apprenticeship scheme. The uniqueness of Antigua's decision lay in the fact of Antigua being the only "sugar colony" to take the action. The Antigua Assembly's decision was a landmark decision, a fact not lost on many contemporary observers including other regional assemblies and politicians, pro-slavery and abolitionists within the empire. Despite the importance of the decision to understanding regional history, academic historical examination and discussion on the decision has relegated it to a mere footnote in most histories, including histories of the territory. This article seeks to re-establish the importance of the Assembly's decision to understanding planter and slave-owner attitudes about slavery and freedom, as well as what self-interests affected each slave-owning group's attitude toward British mandated slave emancipation. The article begins with an examination of the historiography of the decision, offering an insight into the two main perspectives—economic determinism and humanitarianism. The main theme of the paper is the role and nature of economic determinism in compelling the final decision. The article also establishes, in line with Douglas Hall in his Five of the Leewards, that the decision was not a unanimous one, having passed by the single vote of the Assembly's speaker. The objective is to establish that the decision of the Assembly was not based on choice and consensus, and that the economic considerations were inextricably tied to political and legislative considerations, which the planters voting for the decision appeared to view as equally important. Finally, the author seeks to place the history of the decision in its proper posture, not as a footnote or peripheral event but one which establishes that the history of the region is complex and nuanced and based in large part in colliding personal self-interests, notwithstanding the groups into which historians and some contemporaries placed these actors. The decision of the Antigua Assembly to grant freedom to its then enslaved population requires greater interrogation, debate and understanding on par with the historical discussion that have surrounded the British Parliament's 1833 decision.

Canada – from its establishment until the modern day

This year Canada celebrated the 150thanniversary of its official establishment, when the Act of British North America came into force. However, the Dominion was established, the British Parliament retained the ability of limited control over Canada until 1982. The Autonomy was granted by the Canadian Act of 1982, which freed Canada from the remaining dependence of the British Parliament forever. Canada is a federal parliamentary democracy with a constitutional monarchy as a formof the government. Noteworthy, the power of the monarch is purely nominal, and is represented by the Governor-General.
 On the surface, if compared with other countries, Canada appears to be quite recently formed state. In reality, Canada has made significant progress in its development. Importantly, Canada is a member of the G-7. Leading countries and international organizations value the opinion and authority of the Maple Leaf Country. It is one of the most ethnically and culturally varied countries in the world, since it has always depended on immigration, which is governed by federal and provincial governments. Canada has one of the highest indicators of transparency of the government, civil liberties, economic freedom, quality of life and education in the world.
 The article examines the stages of Canada’s establishment, political structure, economic development and potential opportunities. The author also focuses on the importance of Canadian-Ukrainian relations and collaboration. Currently, Canada is a special partner and pays considerable attention to all events that take place in Ukraine.
 
 Keywords: Canada, provinces, territories, political structure,parliament, economy, Canadian-Ukrainian relations

Armenian Genocide Prerequisites in Travel Memoirs (With special reference to Noel Buxton and Harold Buxton’s accounts)

The findings of our linguocognitive research on a sound historical perspective establish a number of undeniable facts which will elucidate the situation of Armenians in Western Armenia in the pre-genocidal period.
 The linguistic material of Noel and Harold Buxtons’ accounts for the British Parliament, Travel and Politics in Armenia, published in 1914, has been studied with the application of a set of methods and approaches: the cognitive method of investigation combined with those of linguostylistic and linguocultural analyses on the extralinguistic basis and the method of purposive sampling. The book is an undeniable source of eyewitness facts which confirm the existing prerequisites for the 1915 Armenian genocide.

Advice Giving and Party Loyalty: an Informational Model for the Socialisation Process of New British MPs1

Post-election socialisation has frequently been identified as a source of parliamentarians’ disposition towards party loyalty. Yet a recent study of the socialisation experiences of new members in the British Parliament, using tenure as proxy for socialisation, found little evidence of an effect on party loyalty (Rush and Giddings, 2011, Parliamentary Socialisation: Learning the Ropes or Determining Behaviour? London, Springer). This paper develops a new model of parliamentary socialisation and uses the same data to demonstrate that post-entry socialisation did in fact change legislators reported likeliness to behave in accordance with their party leadership’s wishes. Specifically, a framework based on information exchange (advice giving) is used to show that positive interactions with party actors are associated with increased loyalty. Controlling for initial levels of loyalty, members who received more useful advice from party actors were more likely to rate themselves as highly influenced by the party leadership.

Normative Epistemology of Right to Self-Determination: A Case Study of Peoples of Jammu and Kashmir

This write-up surveys the applicability of right to self-determination in the elusive and curious case of Jammu and Kashmir. The paper keeps itself strictly within the ambit and scope of the right to self-determination as granted to peoples under United Nations Charter. I have divided the paper into three parts namely; Facts; the Law; and Analysis. The core question that needs to be answered for the normative application of self-determination is to find out if the State of Jammu and Kashmir is under alien rule. The central argument of this paper is that India was always a single unit, British consolidation and takeover of its reign did not change the characteristics of India as a political system or state. The scheme of British administration in India, structurally, had two units of administrations; one with direct administration under the Parliamentary supremacy of British Parliament and the second unit was the Indian States enjoying their autonomy but lost their sovereignty and international identity to British Empire. The relationship between the Indian States and English Crown was of paramountcy. I also try to examine the relationship among the Indian States inter se. When we throw some light on the jargon of Indian states and its legal relationship under the International Law, its crystallizes the concept the unity of India under the British Empire. I have also attempted to unfold the legal meaning of the term colony and has examined the legal connotation of the same. It is established that Kashmir has always found its place in the administration of British Empire of India and needless to say ancient India in incomplete without Jammu and Kashmir.

Ideology, Grandstanding, and Strategic Party Disloyalty in the British Parliament

Strong party discipline is a core feature of Westminster parliamentary systems. Parties typically compel members of Parliament (MPs) to support the party regardless of MPs’ individual preferences. Rebellion, however, does occur. Using an original dataset of MP votes and speeches in the British House of Commons from 1992 to 2015, coupled with new estimations of MPs’ ideological positions within their party, we find evidence that MPs use rebellion strategically to differentiate themselves from their party. The strategy that MPs employ is contingent upon an interaction of ideological extremity with party control of government. Extremists are loyal when their party is in the opposition, but these same extremists become more likely to rebel when their party controls government. Additionally, they emphasize their rebellion through speeches. Existing models of rebellion and party discipline do not account for government agenda control and do not explain these patterns.

Re-establishing Class Privilege: The Ideological Uses of Middle and Working-Class Female Characters in Downton Abbey

This paper argues that the British period drama Downton Abbey, which aired between 2010 and 2015 and encountered worldwide success, uses working class and middle-class female characters to promote the aristocracy and conservative ideas, while hiding behind historical accuracy and seemingly progressive patterns of behaviour. Through a close reading of four female characters, I will demonstrate how the series’ author, Julian Fellowes, uses the show to endorse his own political agenda, as a Conservative member of the House of Lords in the British Parliament.

The Spectacle of Divorce Law in Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust and A. P. Herbert's Holy Deadlock

The article examines the way Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust (1934) and A. P. Herbert's Holy Deadlock (1934) express popular dissent against the divorce laws of England in the 1930s. These novels satirized the legal process of obtaining a divorce as farcical and tainted by parties colluding to stage “hotel divorces” in order to satisfy the single-fault ground of adultery. This article argues that these novels helped to articulate widespread opposition towards the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857, which only allowed divorce to be granted for adultery alone. The writings also spurred parliamentary debate and ultimately paved the way forward for the introduction of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1937. Herbert played a unique part in the campaign for divorce law reform. Both as a novelist and as a parliamentarian, Herbert composed legal satires and successfully introduced the Divorce Bill into the British Parliament respectively.

British Cultural Complexity: An Entropy-based Approach

The present study aimed to investigate the complexity of British culture across the twentieth century. Different from previous studies concerning cultural complexity that used written texts as the experimental data, the present study employed a large data-set of speeches and debates from the British parliament, with the intention of examining the change of British cultural complexity from the perspective of spoken texts. Interestingly, the findings of this study were largely in accordance with those of previous studies that were based on written texts. First, this study confirmed the argument that culture is cumulative in nature. In addition, this study showed that longer N-grams generate higher entropy values. Nonetheless, discrepancies were found in this study, such as the different impacts of crises on the growth of cultural complexity in Britain and America. Furthermore, comparisons with previous studies indicated a lower complexity of British spoken culture than its written counterpart. We have provided possible explanations as well as the implications for future research.

Killing Citizens: Core Legal Dilemmas in the Targeted Killing Abroad of Canadian Foreign Fighters

AbstractFor the first time since the introduction of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canada is in an armed conflict with an insurgency that has actively recruited Canadians and directed them to use or promote violence against Canada. In the result, the Canadian government may ask its soldiers to target and kill fellow Canadians abroad or to assist allies in doing so. This situation raises a host of novel legal issues, including the question of “targeted killing.” This matter arose for the United Kingdom in 2015 when it directed the use of military force against several Britons believed to be plotting a terrorist attack against the United Kingdom from abroad. This incident sparked a report from the British Parliament highlighting legal dilemmas. This article does the same for Canada by focusing on the main legal implications surrounding a targeted killing by the Canadian government of a Canadian citizen abroad. This exercise shows that a Canadian policy of targeted killing would oblige Canada to make choices on several weighty legal matters. First, the article discusses the Canadian public law rules that apply when the Canadian Armed Forces deploy in armed conflicts overseas. It then analyzes international law governing state uses of military force, including the regulation of the use of force (jus ad bellum) and the law of armed conflict (jus in bello). It also examines an alternative body of international law: that governing peacetime uses of lethal force by states. The article concludes by weaving together these areas of law into a single set of legal questions that would necessarily need to be addressed prior to the targeted killing of a Canadian abroad.

British legislation against caste-based discrimination and the demand for the sunset clause

On 23 April 2013, British Parliament agreed an Amendment on caste to the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill (ERR Bill). The Bill received Royal Assent on 25 April 2013 and Section 97 of the ERR Act (that provides that Government ‘shall’ use Section 9(5)a to make caste an aspect of race) came into force on 25 June 2013. The Amendment will be made to the Equality Act 2010 by ‘adding caste as “an aspect of” the protected characteristic of race’ [Waughray, Annapurna. (2014). “Capturing Caste in Law: Caste Discrimination and the Equality Act 2010.” Human Rights Law Review 14 (2): 359–379.]. Importantly, although the Government’s timetable states that the legislation will be enforced not before October 2015, the considerable delay in implementation is consequential of the opposition from both Sikh and Hindu organisations. Most British Sikhs agreed that legislation against caste discrimination was unnecessary under British law. The Sikh Council UK (SCUK) declared that ‘caste allegiances were on their way out in the UK’ and demanded a Sunset Clause which essentially renders the caste legislation as temporary for a period of ten years, since the credence of the SCUK is that caste will have absolutely no significance for subsequent generations of British Sikhs. This paper provides an analysis of attitudes, primarily from the British Sikh and Punjabi Dalit communities, towards caste discrimination legislation in British Law, and in particular attitudes towards the proposal of the Sunset Clause.

Impartiality of the Chair: Politics versus Convention in New Brunswick's 55th Legislature

This paper will examine the nature of Speaker impartiality within the British Parliamentary system by examining the political involvement and the casting vote of Speakers. This will attempt to historically contextualize the role of the Speaker in the province of New Brunswick and explain the institutional circumstances of the unusual conduct of Speakers Bev Harrison and Michael ‘Tanker’ Malley during the third session of the 55th Legislative Assembly. This paper argues that the source of this irregularity was the close seat count between opposition and government members. This issue illustrates the difficulties of smaller Legislative Assemblies reaching the convention established by the British Parliament respecting the impartiality of a Speaker where a Speaker is apolitical, thereby divorced from partisan politics. In the British convention, which serves as the fount of parliamentary practice, the Speaker refrains from any active political involvement, and in return the Speaker is uncontested in upcoming parliamentary elections.

PREFACE

This collection of early common petitions in the English parliament has been some years in the making, and we owe thanks to a number of organizations and individuals who have made it possible to bring it to fruition. The original identification of the relevant body of material in the National Archives was completed for Mark Ormrod by Dr Lisa Haworth Liddy under a small grant from the Department of History, University of York; this work was supplemented by further identifications and the creation of critical editions of documents, undertaken by Mark Ormrod and Helen Killick, and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; we are grateful to Professor Alexandra Gillespie and Professor James Ginther, the Principal Investigators on these projects, for their interest, commitment, and support, and to Dr Kitrina Bevan, Dr Gwilym Dodd, Dr Holly James-Maddocks, Professor Linne Mooney, Professor Anthony Musson and Dr Matthew Phillips, who participated in workshops arising from these grants and have given freely of their knowledge in the making of this edition. Phil Bradford joined the editorial team at a later stage to assist particularly with the historical notes.

Industry and British parliament align on future of REACH

Industry and British parliament align on future of REACH

INTRODUCTION

The opening decades of the twenty-first century have seen a notable revival of interest in the records of the medieval English parliament. In 2004–2005 a team of scholars funded by the Leverhulme Trust and led by Chris Given-Wilson published The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England (PROME), a new electronic and print edition, with full translation, of the extant parliament rolls for the reigns of Edward I to Henry VII. Because PROME focuses on those aspects of parliamentary business that were committed to permanent record on the parliament rolls, it does not consider systematically the other available records associated with the medieval parliament. In particular, it does not reproduce the substantial numbers of unenrolled petitions submitted in parliament that were printed in the eighteenth-century edition of the rolls, Rotuli Parliamentorum (RP), though it does include introductory materials and appendices providing summaries and transcripts of these and other ancillary documents.

Cock-ups and slap-downs: A quantitative analysis of conspiracy rhetoric in the British Parliament 1916–2015

ABSTRACTIn view of the negative connotations associated with conspiracy theories, what have been the effects of the term's entry into popular vocabulary in the second half of the twentieth century? Has the ascendancy of the term “conspiracy theory” been correlated with a reluctance to allege conspiracy? In this article, the authors use Hansard, the record of British parliamentary debates, as a source of empirical data in demonstrating a significant and steady reduction in the number of conspiracy claims advanced in parliament; a pattern consistent with the broader marginalization of conspiracy rhetoric. This trend was reinforced by a trope that established itself in the 1980s and juxtaposed “conspiracies” with “cock-ups.” The British expression “cock-up” denotes a blunder or act of incompetence. In the second part of this article, the authors argue that the preference for “cock-up theories” over “conspiracy theories” reflects how a policy geared towards privatization and deregulation tended to characteriz...

Cock-ups and slap-downs: A quantitative analysis of conspiracy rhetoric in the British Parliament 1916–2015

ABSTRACTIn view of the negative connotations associated with conspiracy theories, what have been the effects of the term's entry into popular vocabulary in the second half of the twentieth century? Has the ascendancy of the term “conspiracy theory” been correlated with a reluctance to allege conspiracy? In this article, the authors use Hansard, the record of British parliamentary debates, as a source of empirical data in demonstrating a significant and steady reduction in the number of conspiracy claims advanced in parliament; a pattern consistent with the broader marginalization of conspiracy rhetoric. This trend was reinforced by a trope that established itself in the 1980s and juxtaposed “conspiracies” with “cock-ups.” The British expression “cock-up” denotes a blunder or act of incompetence. In the second part of this article, the authors argue that the preference for “cock-up theories” over “conspiracy theories” reflects how a policy geared towards privatization and deregulation tended to characterize government action in terms of incompetence, and not of malfeasance.

British Experience on Democratic Interaction between Power and Opposition

The article deals with complex interactions of main political forces inside the British Parliament, activities of Her Majesty’s Opposition in different periods of historical development of Great Britain. Constructive competition between Opposition and the ruling party is stressed as a phenomenon causing progressive development of the United Kingdom and coming to proper decisions concerning its further democratic course. Both power and Opposition are mentioned to be united by the same purpose which is flourishing and common good of their state, welfare of their citizens and stable vision of the future. Relations between power and Opposition are always complex, multidimensional and sensitive to any changes in the political era. Significant influence on the nature of their relationship is made through the transformation taking place in modern society and its scientific perception. In the UK it is the active Opposition provides dynamism and fruitfulness, so that parliamentary government has the ability to predict future horizons of its reign.
 Studying the many-sided British experience in the labyrinth of power seems to be extremely significant for Ukraine considering its complicated apprehension of contradictory interaction and between power structures and other political forces facing contemporary challenges.

“A Second Magna Charta of Highest Liberties”: American Protestants, Religious Freedom, and the Heritage of the Magna Carta

In 1644, Roger Williams was in England on a tricky mission to obtain a royal charter for his new colony, the Providence Plantation—forerunner of the state of Rhode Island. He had arrived in England in the middle of the English Civil War between King Charles I and Parliament, and on the heels of agents of the Massachusetts Bay Colony who were intent on obtaining a charter that would absorb Rhode Island into the Bay Colony. Somehow, in the midst of these turbulent times and the pressure of political enemies, Williams was successful in obtaining a charter for his colony. At the same time, he also managed to write several treatises on church and state, works that revealed a profound connection between his charter and the venerable Magna Carta.1 The most notable and remembered of Williams’s works was a 400-page book known as The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution.2 Addressed to the English Parliament, the work was a sustained, passionate, voluble criticism of the doctrine of civil persecution for the “cause of conscience.” Written in haste, under the deadline of his impending departure for Rhode Island, the book was not actually printed until after Williams set sail for home. This delay was probably a good thing—the contents shocked Parliament, generating fervent interest (a second edition had to be printed after three weeks to meet demand), as well as profound outrage.

Debating federal Europe in the British Parliament, c. 1940–49

Federalism, or the fear of it, worked as a catalyst in the British pre-referendum debate on Brexit in June 2016. In this paper, we focus on the pre-European integration context and ask what kind of an alternative federalism was seen to afford in British politics during and after the Second World War. We limit our discussion to parliamentary debates, which have only rarely been used as primary sources for studying European integration history. The British Parliament was one of the key political arenas for debates on foreign policy, not just in terms of informing the party lines but also guiding the public discussion. In the early part of the 1940s, the British federalist movement was able to generate political debate on the issue and gain the attention of many leading politicians. We argue that the approach to the use of the concept was politically charged but remained open to various context-based interpretations, which did not eventually lead to any concrete proposals. During the latter part of the 1940s, the majority of British MPs were open to different ways of creating unity in Europe. The emphasis on national sovereignty, however, continued. As a result ‘federalism’, attached to structures for unity, gave way to more pragmatic political solutions.