MOTHER OF PARLIAMENTS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 451, 13 February 1948, Page 12

MOTHER OF PARLIAMENTS

WHAT PARLIAMENT IS AND DOES. By Lord Hemingford. Cambridge University Press. ‘THis short and lucid account of the workings of the Parliament at Westminster shows how the machinery of legislation functions and defines the scope and powers of the two Houses in a simple, businesslike fashion which should ‘particularly commend it to schools, but which may well appeal simultaneously to a wider public. Lord Hemingford, himself a former chairman of committees and deputy-Speaker of the Commons, is so successfully neutral, one almost entirely forgets, reading this calm summary, that Parliament is the scene of vigorously fought-out and constantly-re-newed party scrimmages. The only shadow of a personal judgment is his reeret that Labour Party candidates

should have so far broken with tradition as to oppose the Speaker at the last two elections. This little book successfully avoids entanglement with petty facts, but gives everything essential. It explains both Private Members’ Bills and Private Bills, the remaining functions, of the Privy Council, and the use of petitions, questions, and raising matters on motions for the adjournment to redress grievances (or embarrass the Government). It also outlines the procedures, still evolving, for hastening the transaction of all forms of parliamentary business. It recalls that temporal peers are debarred from taking their hereditary seats only by being "minors, women, or lunatics’ and explains the limited rights of Scottish and Irish peers. Few will read it without learning something: personally I was surprised to find that the clergy of certain denominations are ineligible to sit in the British Parliament, while those of other denominations do not cuffer thie

disability.

David

Hall