On Friday I met two officials of Uzbekistan’s parliament who were about to set off to London to spend a week there learning about Britain’s parliament and how it is run. They will meet the clerks who keep the work of Parliament running smoothly and support the work of its committees as they examine legislation and investigate issues on which they believe Government should be taking action. They will also have a chance to attend parliamentary debates, and to watch Prime Minister’s Questions, when Members of Parliament may ask the Prime Minister about any aspect of Government policy. It’s famously combative, as it is a moment when opposition MPs can match themselves against the Prime Minister, and it serves an important role in holding the Government to account.
As civil servants, Ambassadors and other diplomats are responsible to Ministers. Ministers in turn are answerable to Parliament, including in the most literal way: each Government Department has a regular session, on the same lines as Prime Minister’s Questions, at which its Ministers must respond to questions – often critical – from Members of Parliament; and any new legislation will be fully debated, sometimes with every sentence argued over. Any Member of Parliament may also write to a Minister raising issues of concern, and the Minister is obliged to send a personal reply within a fixed time. It’s a good discipline for everyone involved: the civil servants who draft the Minister’s reply know they have to satisfy a Minister who will want to reply helpfully and persuasively to the points raised by the MP, and the Minister in turn will often be thinking about an issue that they don’t normally consider in detail. So if a member of the public wants to makes sure that an issue they care about is looked at by a Minister the best way is to write to their MP and ask him or her to write to the Minister about it.
Lord Waverley, who is the chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Uzbekistan (a group of Members of both Houses of Parliament who take an interest in relations between Britain and Uzbekistan), visited Tashkent last November, partly to launch a series of films and a website explaining some of the processes and traditions of the British Parliament. It’s available at http://parliamentrevealed.org . It’s a useful resource for anyone who would like to know more about how Parliament works, how its members are appointed, how both MPs and Ministers are held to account for their actions and decisions, and how it is changing. Lord Waverley presented some of the films at the Academy of State and Social Construction, where they provoked some lively discussion. I recommend them.