Abstract
Murphy examines the different parliamentary means through which a public inquiry may be sought and discusses their relative success rates, from asking written questions to staging emergency debates. He shows that once a campaign for an inquiry has been successful, work is done by the government to legitimise the composition of the panel tasked with carrying out the inquiry and its Terms of Reference, and how important this is if the inquiry’s findings are to be accepted. Murphy shows that an inquiry is never explicitly tasked with assigning blame to core participants. He explores how linguistic presupposition within some Terms of Reference may make it possible for blame to emerge from some inquiries.
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Notes
- 1.
I shall use the term chair in place of chairman which is used invariably in the Official Report of House of Commons business (Hansard).
- 2.
This kind of information giving is nominally prohibited in oral questions, too; the Erskine May rules mentioned above apply to both written and oral questions. However, whilst written questions can be vetted in advance, the same is more difficult to do with oral questions and the Speaker and his deputies do not (tend to) deem such questions to be disorderly.
- 3.
- 4.
The number in square brackets gives an indication of how many words have been omitted from the extract.
- 5.
Contrast this with, for instance, the first swearing-in of Barack Obama as US President in 2009 in which Obama deviated from the constitutionally prescribed wording of the oath of office. To prevent this misfire being used to challenge the authority of the President, the oath was re-taken at a later point.
- 6.
See Charteris-Black (2014) for more on the use of ethos-building by politicians.
- 7.
A still more recent example of this is the chair of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, Sir Martin Moore-Bick. This inquiry was established to investigate the circumstances surrounding the Grenfell Tower fire on 14 June 2017 in which at least 70 people lost their lives. Moore-Bick, a former appeal court judge, came under a great deal of scrutiny from the press and those affected by the fire with many questioning whether a member of the establishment such as Moore-Bick could really understand the concerns of the community affected by the fire. I cannot say whether this sort of scrutiny of the inquiry’s chairing is becoming more common, but I would tentatively suggest that this frustration at the appointment of inquiry panels comes from families feeling a sense of exclusion from the process of establishing the inquiry.
- 8.
Though an inquiry panel can seek permission from the Minister to amend the Terms of Reference so that the time allowed is extended. However, that this extension is in the gift of the Minister and not the inquiry reinforces my argument that the independence of the inquiry can be called into question.
- 9.
https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/uk-amnesty-launches-appeal-calling-judges-boycott-sham-inquiries. Accessed: 12 October 2016.
- 10.
Note here that I am not asserting that these are the only constructions which these verbs enter into, or for that matter that some of the verbs cannot enter into particular constructions. For instance, it is perfectly possible that examine could take an argument of whether X, however it is not found in the Terms of Reference under discussion in this chapter. Note also that the points that I will make regarding presuppositions and implicatures hold regardless of the verb used—it is the argument structure which is of most salience.
- 11.
The Redfern Inquiry was set up to investigate the removal of organs from deceased (former) nuclear power station workers without the knowledge of their families.
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Murphy, J. (2019). Openings: Terms, Conditions and Getting Started. In: The Discursive Construction of Blame. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50722-8_2
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