What is the point of Parliament?
January 16, 2014
On Monday, something happened in the House of Commons that should cause electors to wonder what parliament is for. The motion before the house was that “a commission of inquiry be established to investigate the impact of the government’s welfare reforms on the incidence of poverty”. At the vote the government was defeated by 125 votes to two. The result: nothing at all – it wasn’t reported and the government is ignoring it.
So what is parliament’s role meant to be? The textbooks will say it is to hold the government of the day to account, particularly on any legislation brought forward. But the chances of influencing that legislation are negligible because the government commands a whipped majority at every stage of a bill’s passage through the commons. Certainly, parliament can make its voice heard, but it can hardly change anything that the government has decided to do. The only rare exception is when there is a revolt on the government benches which is backed by the opposition, and even then when the government lost a vote on that basis last year on the EU budget, it still ostentatiously dismissed the vote as merely ‘advisory’.
“the most effective way of making progress is greater awareness among the electorate of how Parliament actually performs, or fails to perform. If the public understood more transparently how the corrupting influence of patronage actually works, how the power system turns everything to its own advantage, and how the genuine objectives of democratic elections are so readily thwarted, a lot of these unedifying practices would have to be curbed.”
http://www.michaelmeacher.info/weblo...of-parliament/