At a recent lunch, discussion turned to the question of who
had been the country’s worst ever prime minister. The usual suspects were
rolled out: Lord North, t...
Marilyn Stathern, in
her famous article on the ‘Tyranny of transparency’, asked: ‘what does visibility conceal’? While openness can shed light on some ar...
For most of this last quarter‐century, the Nolan Report has provided the underlying ethical
basis for public life in the United Kingdom. The recommendations of...
Orientation and training for new MPs is of vital importance in helping them to make the transition from electoral candidates to elected members. Consider that ...
We are most certainly living in difficult democratic times, with populism on the up. Any lingering complacency over the health of liberal, representative democ...
There is widespread concern about a crisis of trust in society, government, and the world. The UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, summed up the mood in a ...
Yet Labour's strategy in the House of Lords has not been adapted to this new context. The 2015–17 Parliament was the first time in history that the Conservativ...
We should expect democratic systems to meet some relatively modest claims: they should be able to provide for the equal treatment of men and women as individua...
Watching the Conservative leadership campaign would be an
entertaining spectator sport, were it not that the winner will be prime
minister, even if briefly. Th...
Democracy is
a system of majority rule, but that raises the question of what majority rule
actually means.
In the last
decade, we have had three elections ...
Last year was the centenary of the 1918 Act which introduced universal suffrage for all male citizens over twenty‐one and all female citizens over thirty. Wome...
