Quantcast
Channel: Buildings and Architecture – The History of Parliament
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 44

The House of Commons Chamber and the Politics of Seating

$
0
0

Parliament will be officially opened this week and debates will begin once again in the House of Commons. But with the Labour party winning such a large majority in the 2024 General Election, some of their Members may be left wondering- where should I sit? Emeritus Director of the History of Parliament, Dr Paul Seaward, looks to the past to find out more about the protocol surrounding the seating arrangements in the Commons Chamber…

Both Britain’s electoral system and the arrangements for seating in the House of Commons seem to be based on the assumption of a two-party system. As first-past-the-post delivers disproportionate numbers of seats for dominant parties, so the opposing benches in the House dramatises the apparently binary nature of the result. So what happens when, as in 2024, the election delivers a much more confusing outcome?

The almost 300 new Members pose in the Commons Chamber, 10 July 2024.
(c) House of Commons

One question which has now been sorted out is which party should claim the mantle of the ‘official’ Opposition. When the 1918 general election returned a landslide for the Conservative/Liberal coalition, led by David Lloyd George, it left an Opposition composed of just 57 Labour Members, 36 Liberals, and 7 from the Irish Parliamentary Party. The largest Opposition party with 73 seats, Sinn Féin, did not come to London: they met independently in Dublin as the Dáil Éireann instead. The Labour party, disappointed at a poorer than expected showing, nevertheless moved to claim their status as the official Opposition, arranging a meeting with the Speaker before Parliament met. They put out an announcement in the Labour press that they would be occupying the front bench. The Rump of the Liberal party led in theory by Herbert Asquith (who had failed to secure a seat and would only come back later at a by-election) cried foul. The Speaker eventually negotiated a compromise, while pointing out that the position of official Opposition was essentially a matter of convention, rather than rules on which he could adjudicate. On the one point on which he was able to pronounce, the role of asking the business question every week, the outcome was that the leaders of the two parties would fulfil the function of the leader of the Opposition in alternate weeks. Presumably something similar was decided as for seating, though it’s not quite clear who sat where in the 1919-22 Parliament. The point was settled in 1937, when the Ministerial and Other Salaries Act authorised a salary for the leader of the largest Opposition party. One by-product was to give the Speaker a statutory power to determine which was the largest Opposition party in the case of any dispute.

The problem about who should sit where is complicated further by the fact that there are not enough seats for everyone anyway – there are only 364 marked places on the floor of the House, though if additional seating in the galleries is taken into account, there are said to be 437 seats available in all. The Government side obviously sits on the government benches to the Speaker’s right; the Opposition (once one has worked out who they are) sit on the other side, with the main Opposition party’s leading members sitting on the front bench. But if (as now) there are too many on the Government side to fit on the right hand side of the House, they will naturally spill over to the Opposition benches; and if the opposition consists of a number of different and competing parties they may jostle for some of the best seats. Added to that there are coveted seats in the House, which individual Members or groups are keen to plant a flag on. The front bench on the government side below the gangway which bisects the House, for example, was as early as 1857 regarded (as Gladstone wrote) as ‘traditionally the place of men who, having been out of office, may be either practically connected with, or wholly dissociated from the existing government’.

Black and white cartoon drawing of a man in a black suit sitting alone on an upholstered bench. He has a mutton chop beard. The image is captioned 'The Shadow Cabinet'. No one else is in the image.
Cartoon of George Lansbury, taken from The Daily Telegraph, 29 Oct 1931

On Thursday 29th October 1931, The Daily Telegraph carried a cartoon showing George Lansbury, the Leader of the Labour Party, sitting alone on the Opposition front bench, with the caption ‘The Shadow Cabinet’. The drawing illustrated a piece reflecting on several aspects of the just finalised election results. Ramsay Macdonald’s national government, a coalition of the dominant Conservatives and a much smaller number of formerly Liberal and Labour MPs who had accepted Macdonald’s explosive decision to form a coalition, had won a total of 552 seats. The opposition won only 56. Four of them were Independent Liberals – including Lloyd George, his son and his daughter. The remainder was the Rump of the Labour Party, which, as The Telegraph pointed out, could scarcely field enough Members to make up a Shadow Cabinet. The problem was made worse by the fact that its 52 MPs included the five remaining Independent Labour Party Members, a Labour party affiliate which, under the leadership of James Maxton, had become a belligerent thorn in the side of the party leadership. Its position within the Party had been rendered largely untenable after the pre-election Labour Party conference at which it had been made obligatory on candidates to ‘accept and act in harmony with the Standing Orders’, rather than pursue, as they had been doing, a virtually autonomous policy. After the election they did not receive the party whip and were not invited to party meetings. The Speaker, at Maxton’s request, recognised them as a separate party. But where were they going to sit? At the beginning of the new Parliament, the papers singled out the issue.

This time the Labour Party (perhaps remembering the precedent of 1919) was said to have left room for what The Graphic called ‘the Lloyd George Family Party, Papa, son and Megan’, though few of them spent much time in the chamber. But the ILP were determined to ensure possession of the front Opposition bench below the gangway – where the Liberals had sat in the previous parliament, and which they had claimed on the day when the House assembled for the election of the Speaker, though they had to share it with Conservatives. Reports described how, a week later, on the day of the state opening, at 8am, when the Chamber was opened, 80 members were already waiting at the doors to claim their seats by putting place cards in the holders fixed to the benches. ‘It was the largest seats contest seen in the House for many years’, wrote one newspaper, which described the rush for the favoured bench. The ILP secured their seats, though again they were mixed up with Conservative Members. A few days later Maxton was complaining that the right-wing Sir Henry Page-Croft ‘and his cohorts’ had attempted to ‘rush him and other Labour members out of their proper places in the House – because the landladies of Bournemouth won’t wait’ (Bournemouth was Page-Croft’s constituency, but the reference is obscure).

Four years later, after the 1935 election, an article in The Sphere noted how the new political complexion of the House of Commons was reflected in the seating arrangements. This time the contest had been between Maxton and the ILP and the official Labour party, a contest which ‘Mr Maxton won. There is no member with sufficient personality to oust him from a position which enables him not only to hurl diagonal shafts across the floor at the Treasury Bench, but also to make sudden flank attacks upon the official Opposition.’

PS

Read more from Dr Paul Seaward via his blog Reformation to Restoration, or follow him on Twitter/X @PSeaward1.


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 44

Trending Articles