Saturday, September 05, 2009

The delights of rooting around in vintage Hansards, by The Croydonian

I'm delighted to be able to welcome back to posting duties The Croydonian, one of the major bloggers of the Britsphere and his piece on the pleasures of Hansard. Those who know The Croydonian note his to-the-point and sometimes even quirky selection of vignettes from France in particular and of course, at home. He was the Britblogger who kept us up to date during the Segie-Sarko saga.

The Croydonian:




James shares my interest in parliamentary archives, and at his request here is my attempt to justify it.

Some years back I was introduced to the pleasures of raking around in the web edition of the previous day’s Hansard, and have found plenty of things to blog about from reading written answers and so forth.

Apart from a few set piece debates – Iraq, fox hunting etc even the serious newspapers dismiss an entire day's parliamentary proceedings with a parliamentary sketch. Some of those are very good, but it does mean that any sense of what is going on in Parliament, particularly away from PMQs, can only be derived by going to the source oneself.

Presumably this reflects an utter lack of interest in proceedings among the public. Sad nevertheless. Apart from the opportunity to make sarcastic comments in blog posts, I have developed a rather greater appreciation of quite how much activity there is involving the less glamorous aspects of parliament and how very assiduous some MPs are in wheedling out answers from a reluctant executive.

Anyway, the blighters are all in recess and are unlikely to re-appear until the middle of October, having broken up for their hols in July. Doubtless much constituency work will be going on, and I would not deny our parliamentarians a week or two of vacation. However, this had left me rather stumped for daily material, but fortunately some kind souls have digitised the entire run of Hansard going back to 1809, complete with a reasonably efficient search engine.

As such, I have been making hay, starting off with digging up the maiden speeches of sundry noted politicians (Mr Tony's is blogged here), before moving on from Class C to the hard stuff – debates, questions etc from the starting point dates of 1859 and 1909, the attraction of the symmetry being too great.

Here are some jewels dug up from 1909 and 1859 sessions, so as to give a flavour of what is out there:

An 1859 debate on divorce
- John Hennessey (Con) “but believing also that the Act thus to be rendered more powerful is the worst Act of Parliament which Her Majesty has ever sanctioned—believing it to be an Act which, on political, social, moral, and religious grounds, should never have been passed".

The generosity of the Daily Mail in 1909: "The "Daily Mail," working in conjunction with the Parliamentary Committee, have made the generous offer of a shed. The War Office has provided, with the assistance of the London County Council, a site at Wormwood Scrubbs, and the shed is in the course of rapid construction". Said shed was an airship hanger.

The same debate on aviation featured this sadly incorrect observation – “Mr Mond (Lib) I do not think that nations in the future are going to conduct their battles by scattering explosives over houses. That is very unlikely to take place. It would be the very reversal of the rules of war which have now existed for a long time".

Quite a quote from an 1859 debate:
The Member for Birmingham expressed fearlessly what he held consistently, and he had a perfect right to believe that there was not a Zouave in the French army who would not prefer a remission of the wine duties to the sack of London".

I am going to continue rooting around in the 1909 Hansard - they had no summer recess that year, by the look of things - although in 1859 they stopped dead in the middle of August and did not resume until 1860. If anyone else fancies regular Hansard trawling, perhaps we could start up a web ring or somesuch.

1 comment:

  1. I have often looked at recent Hansard debates, most notably when my local MPs have been speaking, but I had no idea that the earlier Hansard records were available.

    A very interesting post, Thank You.

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