Calm down dears! Government calls normal break for Party conference season
It is quite normal for government to put forward a recess in late September and early October for the party conference season and to prepare for a new session of parliament including a Queen's Speech.
Today the government announced that they have asked HM the Queen to proporgue parliament so that it will not sit during approximately the period when it would normally be in recess, e.g. from the second sitting week in September until Monday 14th October.
This is not significantly different from what happened in previous years. Last year parliament did not sit between 13th September and 9th October. In 2017 parliament did not sit between 14th September and 9th October. I'm grateful to Stephen Pollard for tweeting this list of recent parliamentary breaks:
I don't recall anyone accusing the government of staging a coup when they arranged for a similar parliamentary recess last year or the year before, but British politics has entered a strange through-the-looking-glass world where everyone searches the actions of their political opponents for reasons to be outraged and all too often finds them whether they are really there or not.
As I understand it the Commons will lose all of three sitting days - the 8th, 9th and 10th of October - on this timetable compared with what had previously been accepted.
As Iain Dale has pointed out,
"If the Government were committing as The Speaker has just said 'a constitutional outrage', they would be proroguing Parliament until November 1. If that happened there really would be grounds for complaint. It isn't, so there really aren't."
Douglas Carswell put it even more crisply
"Parliament? Prorogued? At this time of year?
They'll be having Christmas in December next."
Unfortunately, and particularly after the discussion about the possibility of shutting down parliament during the Conservative leadership election, the announcement of the conference break has been interpreted through a prism of catastrophist expectations and too many people who ought to have known better have gone completely overboard.
As Iain wrote in the article linked to above, if the government had proposed a dramatically longer break than normal rather than an extra three days, e.g. that parliament would not sit until after the beginning of November so that the UK would leave the EU while parliament was not sitting and with no opportunity to agree any deal, then the sort of hyperbole we are getting today might have been more justified.
They're not. it isn't.
Calm down dears!
The amount of hysteria about this announcement would be extremely funny were I not concerned that the level of inflammatory comments on just about all sides is in danger of doing further damage to trust in politics and encouraging people to take ever-more-extreme positions - as if we didn't have enough of that already.,
Today the government announced that they have asked HM the Queen to proporgue parliament so that it will not sit during approximately the period when it would normally be in recess, e.g. from the second sitting week in September until Monday 14th October.
This is not significantly different from what happened in previous years. Last year parliament did not sit between 13th September and 9th October. In 2017 parliament did not sit between 14th September and 9th October. I'm grateful to Stephen Pollard for tweeting this list of recent parliamentary breaks:
I don't recall anyone accusing the government of staging a coup when they arranged for a similar parliamentary recess last year or the year before, but British politics has entered a strange through-the-looking-glass world where everyone searches the actions of their political opponents for reasons to be outraged and all too often finds them whether they are really there or not.
As I understand it the Commons will lose all of three sitting days - the 8th, 9th and 10th of October - on this timetable compared with what had previously been accepted.
As Iain Dale has pointed out,
"If the Government were committing as The Speaker has just said 'a constitutional outrage', they would be proroguing Parliament until November 1. If that happened there really would be grounds for complaint. It isn't, so there really aren't."
Douglas Carswell put it even more crisply
"Parliament? Prorogued? At this time of year?
They'll be having Christmas in December next."
Unfortunately, and particularly after the discussion about the possibility of shutting down parliament during the Conservative leadership election, the announcement of the conference break has been interpreted through a prism of catastrophist expectations and too many people who ought to have known better have gone completely overboard.
As Iain wrote in the article linked to above, if the government had proposed a dramatically longer break than normal rather than an extra three days, e.g. that parliament would not sit until after the beginning of November so that the UK would leave the EU while parliament was not sitting and with no opportunity to agree any deal, then the sort of hyperbole we are getting today might have been more justified.
They're not. it isn't.
Calm down dears!
The amount of hysteria about this announcement would be extremely funny were I not concerned that the level of inflammatory comments on just about all sides is in danger of doing further damage to trust in politics and encouraging people to take ever-more-extreme positions - as if we didn't have enough of that already.,
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