Parliamentary Leadership Research Articles

Membership Participation in Policy-Making in the C.C.F.

The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (C.C.F.) claims to open all its policy-making agencies and channels to its dues-paying membership. This very claim runs counter to what is usually considered the proper operation of political parties. Most groups of active supporters, if they enrol in a party at all, do so primarily for the purpose of closer identification and to lend more substance to their support, but not in order to determine the party's affairs. Even in the case of the major U.S. parties where voters enrol as members with the purpose of helping to nominate candidates, and of those interest-based parties such as the British Labour party and the Mouvement Republicain Populaire, where the party consists of constituent organizations with dues-paying members, the claims of the members to participate in the direction of party affairs receive little support from party theorists. And even where the legitimacy of an assertion by members of a right to participate in policy-making receives consideration, we find at once an insistence that apathy toward public affairs on the part of most people renders widespread membership participation in policy-making nugatory, and that parties, engaged as they are in a struggle for political power, demand in their operations secrecy, flexibility, and unity, none of which permits the kind of open policy-making in which lay members can freely participate.Policy-making in the two major parties in Canada follows the traditional parliamentary pattern. The parliamentary leader is responsible for the initiation and execution of policy, which he discusses with advisers of his own choosing.

Oxford parliamentary leaders in the civil war

Oxford parliamentary leaders in the civil war

Some Account of Sir Audley Mervyn, his Majesty's Prime Sergeant and Speaker in the House of Commons in Ireland, from 1661 Till 1666

Sir Audley Mervyn, though of not a very lofty style of character, played no undistinguished part in Ireland in the great era of the war, or rebellion, of 1641.He was already well known as an able lawyer and an active member of the Irish Parliament at the time of the outbreak. He had been selected by the House of Commons, in the month of March, 1641, to conduct their impeachment of Sir Richard Bolton, Lord Chancellor; Bramhall, Bishop of Deny; Sir Gerrard Lowther, Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas; and Sir George Radcliff, Privy Councillor. These were friends and ministers of the Earl of Strafford, then under impeachment by the Commons of England. The proceedings in Ireland were only in aid of the measures of Pym and the other parliamentary leaders in England, and were abandoned after Strafford's fall. Audley Mervyn, then a representative in Parliament for the county of Tyrone, was selected for a kind of eloquence much admired in that day. It was full of farfetched similes, allusions to Scripture, and physical incidents, and stuffed with quotations taken alternately from the Roman poets and from the law-Latin of Coke upon Littleton.