Labour Members Of Parliament Research Articles

Why leaders can be bad: Linking rigor with relevance using machine learning analysis to test the transgression credit theory of leadership

Transgression credit is a form of deviance credit that occurs when people are more permissive towards transgressions by in-group leaders than by in-group nonleaders and out-group members and leaders. Despite rigorous experimental and simulation evidence for transgression credit, the ability to make such group processes research relevant to organizations and wider policy requires evidence with greater ecological validity. We examine transgression credit using spontaneously arising data from Twitter (now X) to test theoretically specified reactions to instances of transgressive leadership by the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Studies 1a and 1b compared Conservative and Labour Members of Parliament’s (MPs’) tweets in response to Boris Johnson’s unlawful prorogation of Parliament (Study 1a) and his publication of an Internal Market Bill that would break international law (Study 1b) with tweets responding to a nonleader, Dominic Cummings, breaking coronavirus lockdown rules. Conservative, but not Labour, MPs were more permissive of Johnson’s, but not Cummings’, transgression. Study 2 examined the semantic themes occurring among supportive and unsupportive tweets posted by the UK general public in response to Boris Johnson’s unlawful prorogation of Parliament. Across studies, the evidence is consistent with propositions from deviance credit and social identity theories.

Does United Kingdom parliamentary attention follow social media posts?

News and social media play an important role in public political discourse. It is not clear what quantifiable relationships public discussions of politics have with official discourse within legislative bodies. In this study we present an analysis of how language used by Members of Parliament (MPs) in the United Kingdom (UK) changes after social media posts and online reactions to those posts. We consider three domains: news articles posted on Facebook in the UK, speeches in the questions-debates in the UK House of Commons, and Tweets by UK MPs. Our method works by quantifying how the words used in one domain become more common in another domain after an event such as a social media post. Our results show that words used in one domain later appear more commonly in other domains. For instance after each article on Facebook, we estimate that on average 4 in 100,000 words in Commons speeches had changed, becoming more similar to the language in the article. We also find that the extent of this language change positively correlates with the number of comments and emotional interactions on Facebook. The observed language change differs between political parties; in particular, changes in word use by Labour MPs are more strongly related to social media content than that of Conservative MPs. We argue that the magnitude of this word flow is quite substantial given the large volume of news articles shared on Facebook. Our method and results quantify how parliamentary attention follows public interest as expressed on Facebook and also indicate how this effect may be stronger for posts which evoke reactions on Facebook associated with laughter or anger.

Séance Sitters, Ghost Hunters, Spiritualists, and Theosophists: Esoteric Belief and Practice in the British Parliamentary Labour Party, c1929-51.

This article explores esoteric identities and cultures in the British Parliamentary Labour Party c1929-51. The historiography of the Labour Party has tended to overemphasize the one-dimensional nature of ideological affiliation and identity amongst Labour Members of Parliament in this period along the lines of a rather simplistic left/right dichotomy. Moreover, some historians have suggested that after 1918 particular socialist traditions and currents had become marginalized or dissolved once the party had developed a clearly defined constitution and the experience of political power. The argument presented here is that a range of esoteric identities remained a feature of labour culture through to the general election of 1951 and beyond. Three currents highlight the complexity and fluidity of specific strands of labour/socialist identity; in particular, spiritualism, theosophy and belief in the supernormal and the fantastic. Spiritualism and esotericism attracted a range of Labour MPs and shaped their reaction to contemporary political problems and the purpose and direction of working-class politics. An examination of such individuals and beliefs raises some new questions and challenges existing assumptions relating to labour identities in mid-twentieth century Britain. Socialist spiritualists, ghost hunters, and theosophists viewed political identity, mobilization and practice as an activity that drew as much on the personal, the spiritual and 'other-worldly' as it did on the economic, social and material basis of society.

Parliamentary privilege—mortality in members of the Houses of Parliament compared with the UK general population: retrospective cohort analysis, 1945-2011

Objective To examine mortality in members of the two UK Houses of Parliament compared with the general population, 1945-2011. Design Retrospective cohort analysis of death rates and predictors of mortality...

Facing up to Facebook: politicians, publics and the social media(ted) turn in New Zealand

Social media have an increasingly important place in the lives of citizens, and their potential to expand the reach of communication messages beyond individual networks is attractive to those looking to maximise message efficiency. The influence of Facebook in Obama’s 2008 campaign success galvanised many politicians into taking it seriously as a campaign tool. Our study explored the Facebook wall posts (1148 in total) of New Zealand Members of Parliament (MPs) leading up to the 2011 general election to determine posting behaviours and differences. Among other things, we found that women posted more frequently than men and that Labour MPs posted more than their National counterparts. Additionally, most politicians do not invite dialogue with readers of their posts, rarely get involved in comment threads and mostly take a monologic approach, using Facebook as a way of broadcasting information rather than as a medium enabling two-way flow. In other words, same old, same old.

Minority-Ethnic MPs and the Substantive Representation of Minority Interests in the House of Commons, 2005-2011

Black, Asian and minority-ethnic (BAME) citizens are under-represented in the House of Commons. Nevertheless, the Chambers ethnic composition has become more reflective of the general population as a result of the 2005 and 2010 parliamentary elections. The article seeks to map and explain variations in the extent to which BAME Members of Parliament (MPs) use the Chamber to articulate issues relevant to minority constituents. We compare the content of all parliamentary questions for written answer asked by BAME MPs between May 2005 and December 2011 to the questions asked by a matching sample of non-minority legislators. We find that BAME MPs ask more questions relating to the problems and rights of ethnic minorities in, and immigration to, the UK. However, we also find that all British MPs are responsive to the interests of minority constituents where these are geographically concentrated. Building on theoretical predictions derived from (1) models focusing on MPs political socialisation and (2) on the electoral incentives they are facing, we discover that the MPs in our sample respond systematically to electoral incentives, especially in the politically salient area of immigration policy. While these findings are in line with an ‘electoral-incentives model, a ‘socialisation model’ is better suited to explain the larger number of questions on the interests of ethnic minorities asked by Labour MPs.

MPs for Sale? Returns to Office in Postwar British Politics

Many recent studies show that firms profit from connections to influential politicians, but less is known about how much politicians financially benefit from wielding political influence. We estimate the returns to serving in Parliament, using original data on the estates of recently deceased British politicians. Applying both matching and a regression discontinuity design to compare Members of Parliament (MPs) with parliamentary candidates who narrowly lost, we find that serving in office almost doubled the wealth of Conservative MPs, but had no discernible financial benefits for Labour MPs. Conservative MPs profited from office largely through lucrative outside employment they acquired as a result of their political positions; we show that gaining a seat in Parliament more than tripled the probability that a Conservative politician would later serve as a director of a publicly traded firm—enough to account for a sizable portion of the wealth differential. We suggest that Labour MPs did not profit from office largely because trade unions collectively exerted sufficient control over the party and its MPs to prevent members from selling their services to other clients.

Saviour siblings and organ transplantation

In Spring 2008, three elements of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill received considerable public attention. This was in part due to pronouncements by leading figures in the Roman Catholic Church, and in part because several Labour members of parliament requested a free vote on these matters. The three aspects of the legislation heavily reported in the news media were: the use of hybrid or chimera embryos for research purposes; removing the requirement for licensed clinics to consider the child’s ‘need for a father’ before providing infertility treatment services; and the use of preimplantation genetic diagnosis and tissue typing to create saviour siblings (children whose umbilical cord cells, or other tissue, could be used to treat an existing sibling with a serious medical condition). Each of these is ethically interesting in its own way but, in this piece, I shall look only at the third: saviour siblings. There are many complex arguments against embryo selection in general and saviour sibling selection in particular. Here, however, I will focus on just one: that the selected child might have its organs ‘harvested’ or be treated as an ‘organ farm’ for another person. I shall argue that this is a misplaced worry, as long as we are generally satisfied with the existing safeguards for tissue donation between living relatives. Those of us who think that the present arrangements for allowing tissue to be taken from an ‘ordinary’ child for the purposes of saving its brother or sister are satisfactory have no reason to be concerned about allowing tissue to be taken from a child created or selected for that purpose. For the arrangements are the same in both cases. Hence, if there is a genuine worry it ought to be about the law governing sibling donation in general – in which case this should be the object of criticism, rather than the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. Clearly, the prospect of permitting saviour sibling selection (which already happens, albeit rarely, within the existing regulatory framework) is something that certain people do find abhorrent. For instance, in his Easter Sunday Homily, Cardinal Keith O’Brien accused the Prime Minister of ‘promoting a bill allowing scientists to create babies whose sole purpose will be to provide, without the consent of anyone, parts of their organs or tissues’. Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe went further, speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Embryo Wars:

The Rejected, the Ejected, and the Dejected: Explaining Government Rebels in the 2001-2005 British House of Commons

The combination of parliamentary government and plurality elections in the British House of Commons is often assumed to produce highly cohesive parliamentary parties. However, the number and magnitude of backbench revolts against the governing party in the British Parliament has increased since the 1960s. The contention of this article is that particular forms of rebellion against the government are the norm rather than the exception in Britain. The reason, the authors contend, is that members of Parliament (MPs) who have been refused ministerial promotion or who are ex-ministers cannot be controlled by the promise of ministerial office and are hence free to vote against the government if they have variant policy preferences from the cabinet. This idea is confirmed in an analysis of Labour MPs' voting behavior in the 2001-2005 House of Commons.

Cast from the same pro-european mould ?

By pragmatically but positively engaging with European integration and by devolving power to new institutions in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland the 'New Labour' government elected in 1997 has firmly established the conditions for a system of 'multilevel governance' in the UK. Using survey data collected among Labour Members of Parliament, Members of the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly, this article explores whether these institutional developments have also been accompanied by the emergence of ideological divergences in the attitudes of Labour's elected representatives in Westminster, Edinburgh and Cardiff towards European issues.

• Air ambulance service needs improving.

The air ambulance service needs far greater resources, Labour Member of Parliament, Tam Dalyell told Ministers last week.

Select committee chairman appointed

The new Chairman of the House of Commons Social Services Select Committee is Frank Field, Labour Member of Parliament for Birkenhead.

Pressure for a Select Committee on Human Embryo Research and Genetic Engineering

By a commanding majority of almost five million votes, this year's Labour Party conference agreed that Labour Members of Parliament should not be permitted to let their consciences decide their votes on "issues affecting the reproductive rights of women." The targets for this censure were the 44 Labour MPs who backed Enoch Powell's bill to outlaw experiments on embryos. Conservative supporters of the Powell bill are countering their defeat by advocating a Parliamentary select committee to examine "matters of human embryo research and human genetic engineering." McKie comments that they are thus shifting emphasis from "fertility," which has public support, to genetic engineering, which generates fear.

Books

Well in the first place it is, as Mr. Jo Grimond, MP, says in his forewords, a tumely book. It looks as if the as if the UK is in for some pretty big changes in the traditional party system over the next decade, and this book deals with the dangers ahead — dangers that might profoundly influence our educational scene. More importantly however the book sets out to teach: it is a text‐book written by a professsional teacher who, for five years, was a Labour Member of Parliament and a Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Prime Minister.

The Structure of Democratic Socialist Ideology in Britain

This paper examines socialist ideology in Britain in terms of the beliefs and attitudes of two samples, a sample of Labour Members of Parliament and a sample of Parliamentary Labour candidates. Ideology is defined as a structured set of attitudes having a wide range and reasonable internal coherence. The paper shows that the attitudes of respondents with respect to a set of controversial issues in the Labour party, are structured coherently enough to constitute an ideology, and the structure is very similar for both samples. When measuring ideology along a left-right continuum it appears candidates are more left wing than Members of Parliament, and several hypotheses which might account for this are tested with a multiple regression model. It appears that background characteristics are very poor predictors of ideology, and an explanation of ideological differences is provided in terms of contemporary political events in British society, and the early political experiences of respondents.

Writing without letters

The late Dr. Mont Follick was a Labour Member of Parliament in the first post-war House of Commons and a dedicated advocate of spelling reform. I vividly remember a vigorous parliamentary debate, initiated by Mont Follick and supported, outside the House, by Bernard Shaw, which ranged widely over the field of spelling reform. When Mont Follick died, he left a generous bequest to the University of Manchester for the endowment of a chair whose occupant would concern himself with matters of spelling improvement and rationalization. The committee appointed by the Manchester University Senate to study this offer and its academic implications had many interesting and enjoyable discussions, and we eventually emerged with a proposal, accepted by the Mont Follick trustees, for the establishment of a chair of Comparative Philology with special responsibility for studies of graphic and phonemic representation (or some such formula). After exhaustive inquiries we appointed William Haas to this chair in 1963, and his subsequent activities and publications have shown that this was a singularly felicitous choice and a wellnigh ideal appointment.

Attercliffe, 1894: How One Local Liberal Party Failed to Meet the Challenge of Labour

The question of why the Liberal Party failed to absorb and channel the increased political activity of the working class after 1885 is one that historians continue to debate. This paper is an attempt to assess the viability of the Liberal Party as a vehicle for working class political aspirations within the context of a single by-election in Sheffield, a city with a strong tradition of Liberal-Labour cooperation. To put the 1894 by-election in perspective, one must first look briefly at the development of the Liberal Party in relation to the demand for Labour Members of Parliament in the last third of the nineteenth century.1.The Early Movement Toward Labour RepresentationThe beginning of the movement for direct trade union representation in parliament is usually dated from 1868, when William Newton of the Engineers, William Cremer of the Carpenters and Joiners, and George Howell of the Bricklayers stood for election. All three were defeated despite some Liberal support “notably (if secretly) from party headquarters.” In the following year the Labour Representation League was launched. According to its prospectus, “its principal duty will be to secure the return to Parliament of qualified working men", and it proposed to organize workers' votes regardless of party despite the radical connections of many union leaders. But its party affiliation was soon apparent, and by 1875 the League declared: “we have ever sought to be allied to the great Liberal Party, to which we by conviction belong.”

The Consensus

That education and party politics are totally linked there is no doubt. At any party's annual conference, educational motions figure extensively on the agenda. Indeed, in the elections of 1964 and 1966 teachers and lecturers formed one of the largest groups of newly elected Labour Members of Parliament. On the Tory side, with the exception of Esmond Wright, and a few others, the weighting has been consistently towards business and commerce. This difference between the two major parties accounts for the strong contrasts in their educational policies, contrasts that are too sharp for any consensus to survive without direction from Ministers and senior Party personnel.

PARLIAMENT AND THE LIBERTY OF THE SUBJECT<sup>1</sup>

PARLIAMENT AND THE LIBERTY OF THE SUBJECT1 Get access Rt. Hon. J. CHUTER EDE, P.C., J.P., D.L. Surrey, M.P. Rt. Hon. J. CHUTER EDE, P.C., J.P., D.L. Surrey, M.P. (Mr. Ede was for several years a schoolmaster in Surrey. He entered local government forty years ago, and become a Labour Member of Parliament in 1923. He was Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Education in the war-tims National Government, and was appointed Secretary of State for Home Affairs in 1945.) Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Parliamentary Affairs, Volume I, Issue 1, Winter 1947, Pages 10–23, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.pa.a052933 Published: 01 January 1947