On party financing
A debate is looming in the United Kingdom concerning the issue of funding for political parties. There have been attempts in the past to address this issue, most recently in 2007, but those negotiations failed because the parties were unable to agree a cap. Current situation There is currently no limit to the amount an [...]
On party membership
I read a very interesting piece on declining membership in political parties in the United Kingdom. The numbers are rather astounding. According to the author, Brian Wheeler, just over 1% of the UK population are card-carrying members of a political party, which Wheeler indicates is low by European standards, but alas, fails to provide any [...]
Speaker Bercow and accusations of bias
British House of Commons Speaker John Bercow annoys many MPs. There have been a rash of articles over the course of the past year hinting at behind-the-scenes plots to get rid of him. Having regularly livestreamed proceedings from the UK House of Commons, I find it difficult to assess why there is such animosity towards [...]
On Members’ attire
Robert Flello (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Lab): I pay tribute to all the public sector workers we rely on time and time again, and in particular those in Staffordshire. Over many months, I have had letters from serving police officers concerned about the Winsor report and the knock-on effect on morale, and about A19 and losing senior [...]
Reactions to e-petitions
The reaction to the UK Government’s introduction of a new e-petitions initiative has been quite interesting. You can read my original post about the e-petitions initiative here. Government House Leader Sir George Young wrote in this piece in the Daily Mail that: The site has been widely welcomed as a realistic way to revitalise public [...]
HM Government E-Petitions go live – sort of
(Note to readers: This site is not in any way affiliated with the UK Government or its e-petitions website. If the e-petitions website is experiencing technical problems, please do not email this blog as there is nothing the blog administrator can do about that. If you wish to complain to someone about problems with the [...]
Some interesting links
1. Time to salute the post-2010 election Parliament BBC parliamentary correspondent Mark D’Arcy has a good column providing an interesting overview of the current UK Parliament and an assessment of some of the many reforms introduced in the dying days of the previous Parliament and at the outset of this one: “So I’m afraid, as [...]
Is the grass really greener, Part 2
In an earlier post, I discussed Question Time, the Australian House of Representatives oral question period, which a British blogger had described as “unbelievable behaviour” and attributed much of the problems to the Speaker himself. After listening to a few archived Question Times on the House of Representatives website, I ended up agreeing with that [...]
HM Government e-petitions
(Note to readers: This site is not in any way affiliated with the UK Government or its e-petitions website. If the e-petitions website is experiencing technical problems, please do not email this blog as there is nothing the blog administrator can do about that. If you wish to complain to someone about problems with the [...]
PMQs – The Game
For political geeks, summer is tedious. The Canadian House of Commons adjourned for the summer recess back in June, and they won’t be back until 19 September. Luckily, we still had the UK House of Commons sitting into July, but alas, they too adjourned on 20 July. UK MPs will be taking a shorter break [...]
« go back — keep looking »Admin
Copyright
On procedure and politics by Radical Centrist is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
