Abstract
In the UK Parliament, the State Opening and accompanying Queen’s Speech enable governments to set out their legislative plans and delineate their policy choices at the start of each parliamentary session. This article explores the procedural politics of the Queen’s Speech debates, and analyses atypical cases to demonstrate the institutional, constitutional and political utility of the process. It examines the defeated King’s Speech of 1924; the backbench dissent of the 1946 King’s Speech; the volatile Labour Queen’s Speeches of the 1970s; and finally the free vote on a government backbench amendment to the 2013 Queen’s Speech. In demonstrating the political use of parliamentary procedure, it maps a number of different modes of procedural utility for Queen’s Speech debates: to facilitate government; to frame policy debates; to contest policy choices; and to articulate both inter- and intra-party dissent. The article argues that, as a consequence of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act 2011, Queen’s Speech debate procedures may become an increasingly important mechanism through which normally marginalised actors pursue their political goals.
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Notes
The only other example of a confidence amendment being moved during the Debate on the Address followed the 1964 general election that returned a Labour government with a majority of five seats. Whereas, the 1924 amendment explicitly stated that the government ‘have not the confidence of this House’, the 1964 amendment cast the confidence statement in policy terms, declaring there to be ‘no confidence that Your Majesty’s Ministers can implement their proposals without damaging the programmes of modernisation already in train and thus imperilling the future well-being of Your People’ (HC Debs., 10 November 1964, Col. 969). It was therefore a censure motion, rather than a no confidence motion, and was defeated 294–315 (HC Debs., 10 November 1964, Col. 969–974). Neither the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, nor the Leader of the Opposition, Alec Douglas-Home, took part on the final day of debate when the motion was moved (House of Commons, 2010b), which underlined its essentially ‘second-order’ nature.
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Kelso, A. The politics of parliamentary procedure: An analysis of Queen’s Speech debates in the House of Commons. Br Polit 12, 267–288 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2015.49
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2015.49