Archive for Parliament
What they said about the Speaker
“An incompetent and unknown man forced into the Chair by a petty majority in the face of an election defeat known to be impending.”
Oh, perhaps I should add that this was Lord Salisbury 1895 about Speaker William Court Gully.
No, Christopher Wren and Isaac Newton were not great MPs
Matthew Engel in today’s Financial Times has a pop at our current MPs, saying:
The House of Commons used to be filled with men of renown. Sir Christopher Wren was an MP. So was Sir Isaac Newton – and John Stuart Mill.
It’s an easy jibe to make - ‘MPs aren’t as good as they used to [...]
Dawn Butler under fire for not turning up to Parliamentary committee meetings
The Times today carries an interesting piece about the very low attendance rate at select committee meetings from some MPs. Select committees, and their reports, can be very influential, and particularly for those MPs who are not ministers or in the top media starts of other parties, select committee work is often the most effective [...]
Viewing MPs’ travel expenses on a map
There’s a nifty little Google Map at http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/maps/mpTravelExpensesMap.html which is a great example of how you can use maps to make statistics clearer. In this case, the big issue is that MPs do have genuinely different legitimate travel needs depending on where they live. It’s only reasonable for an MP from Scotland to have much [...]
