Parliament, British

Parliament, British, supreme legislature of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It consists, technically, of the Crown, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons, but when commonly referred to, it means the House of Commons and House of Lords. Today the main legislative chamber is the House of Commons; its members alone are called members of Parliament. Parliament is the legislative branch of government. No statute may become law or be altered or repealed, nor may taxes be levied, without its consent. Thus, all powers of local government derive from Parliamentary acts. Cabinet members, including the prime minister, are members of one house or the other and are collectively responsible to the House of Commons. The House of Lords is the highest court of appeal in Britain’s judicial system.

The House of Commons has 646 members, who are elected from the same number of constituencies by British subjects at least 18 years old. The maximum life of a Parliament is five years. Elections are set by the prime minister on the basis of political necessity or advantage. If the cabinet, formed by the leading party in Commons, loses a vote of confidence or fails to carry its legislation in Commons, it must resign or request a dissolution. An election can be held in as short a time as three weeks. Because of the strict party discipline, important decisions are often made not in Parliament, but beforehand in the less formal meetings of the cabinet and party caucus.

Members of the House of Lords are known as peers. The House of Lords is made up of the lords spiritual (senior bishops of the Church of England) and lords temporal (lay peers). Lords temporal include law lords (senior judges). There are two types of lords temporal: life peers and hereditary peers. The Peerage Act of 1963 made it possible for hereditary peers to resign their peerages and obtain the status and rights of commoners. The House of Lords Act of 1999 reduced the number of hereditary peers from more than 750 to about 90. Members of the House of Lords are not directly elected. They may retain their seats for life, with the exception of lords spiritual, who must resign from the House of Lords when they retire from their church positions. Life peers are appointed by the monarch.

The Lords’ power, once equal to that of the Commons, was limited by the Parliament Act of 1911, which ended the Lords’ right to reject legislation and instead gave it the power to delay legislation. The House of Lords can delay financial bills for only 30 days and all other bills for no more than one year. The Lords, with less formal procedures than Commons, can provide additional study and reflection and thus improve the quality of legislation through amendments. Bills may be introduced into either the House of Commons or the House of Lords, except for financial bills, which may be introduced only in the House of Commons. The House of Lords does not have the power to amend legislation on taxation, which is considered solely the responsibility of the House of Commons. When sitting as the highest court of appeal, the Lords’ deliberations are limited to those peers with judicial experience, including the law lords, who are life peers appointed (since 1876) to enhance the Lords’ judicial ability.

HISTORY

Parliament is one of the oldest and most honored parts of the British government. Its name, from the French word parler (“to talk”), was given to meetings of the English king’s council in the mid-13th century. Its immediate predecessor was the king’s feudal council, the Curia Regis, and before that the Anglo-Saxon witan or witenagemot. It was a device resorted to by the medieval kings to help them in running their governments and reflected the idea that the king should consult with his subjects.In the 13th century, several elements combined to influence the development of Parliament: the need, stated in the Magna Carta (1215), for taxes to have the consent of the taxed; the custom of summoning to the royal council not just barons but elected representatives of towns and counties; the convenience of dealing with petitions at enlarged meetings of the king’s council; and the genius of men such as King Edward I who saw how Parliament could be used to their advantage. At first, Parliament was not an institution but an event. During the quarrel between King Henry III and his barons, the Oxford Parliament (1258) forced Henry to accept rule by a baronial committee. The barons’ leader, Simon de Montfort, summoned representatives of towns to Parliament for the first time in 1265. The so-called Model Parliament of Edward I (1295) contained all the elements of a mature Parliament: bishops and abbots, peers, two knights from each shire, and two representatives from each town.

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 1070