Do we have an effective parliamentary democracy?

Parliament's second function is to do with legislation. The House of Commons are the main body for the creation of new laws. They can also amend laws and pass legislation. At the moment, the executive has a parliamentary majority so the government can't be defeated unless a lot of their MP's don't tow their party's line which is unlikely unless the law is contraversional. The Parliamentary majority means there is no point in opposition, though they can argue against a proposition, they have very little power to stop the law being accepted. This makes the parliamentary government very ineffective and make the role of the opposition pointless and the system look everything but democratic. In the current situation, a parliament seems pointless.

However, if the party representation in the house of common was more equal, then the system would be more effective because debates would mean more because every vote would matter and the competition element would mean the law created would be of high standards because both parties would have something to agree on and therefore the both parties representation of the common people would be included.

The next function of the parliament is scrutiny which involves keeping the executive in check by asking them question about what the executive is doing.

Government are accountable to parliament and through parliament to the people. It is to the parliament that the government must explain and defend its actions. The major opurtunities for scrutinising and influencing the government through the procedures of the house of commons are parliamentary questions, general, adjournment and emergency debates, early day motions, select committees and correspondance with ministers.

Parliamentary questions involves backbenchers submutting oral or written questions to MPs, both questions and replies are recorded in Hansard. There is also prime minister. Even though the questions are there to scrutinize the executive, it seems to be very ineffective because the questions asked are chosen by the exective which means hard questions can be ignored and those that can be easily answered and make the executive look good are accepted and asked in the qustion time, futhermore, the Prime minister has quite a lot of time to think of answers to the questions.

Question Time could be more effective if the question were on the spot and the prime minister had to answer them without being able to think too much, but until that happens, scrutiny cannot be effective and is completely ineffective in holding the executive to account and because of this the executive cannot be critiszed of its action and normal people carry on thinking the executive is great and almost untouchable.

Debates can be used to scrutinize the executive too. Adjournament debates are usually used to raise general or constituncy issues where the opposition can argue with the exective over issues. There is the General on the Queen's Speech where motions are proposed by government and oppositon where the motions can conflict.

There are Early day motions where motions are proposed and signed and this gives the opposition of the executive a chnace to express their views and gain publicity.

The last way to scrutinize the executive is through 16 select comititees of Lords and MPs which are there to scrutinise the executive. They are able to scrutinize the executive away from the floor of the commons. Also the committees have power to send for 'Person, Paper and records' and can interrogate ministers.

The Final function of the House of commons is to be a forum for national debate. Parliament commands attention as the focus of national debate on all kinds of occasion, in a manner no institution can match. Such occasions include Prime Minister Question Time, the beginning and the end of major debates in normal circumstances, more heated moments such as the westland affair (1986) when a government's, a prime minister's or a leading cabinet minister's reputation is at stake and lastly historic moments such as when the house of commons sometimes appeared to rise above party conflict. More commonly, debates take the form of relativly fiercous gladiator combat between 2 rivals spurred on my small stage armies of supporters which ammounts to small episodes in the continual election campaign.

With all the parliament roles covered, we must also ask how representative the parliament is of the general public and whether representation is even important when an MP is doing his or her job and is taking into consideration, those they represent.

If representation is important in how parliament works then our parliamentary government in not effective because it is only taking into account the views of the MPs and they can't represent everyone in their constituency. So maybe it would be better if we had a more diverse parliament with equal numbers of men and women and more different MPs with different cultures and wealth and age so we get more different views and the MPs together can be more representative of Britain.

This could also be criticized as though it would be great to have a more diverse parliament, it is also important that the MPs have the right education and know what their doing and use their experience to their benefit. It is better to have a well educated man or woman who knows what their doing than a man or woman who represents an ethnic minority and even though they know what their people want, don't necessarily have the education to do their job as effectively as a more socially unrepresentative man or woman.

Because the more socially unrepresentative man or woman does their job more effectively than another, it can be said that parliamentary government is more effective the way it is in terms of representation but it can also be said that if politicians can't listen to the people, it can never be truly effective.

After going over the functions of parliament and how representative parliament is of the general public, I have decided that the parliamentary government is not effective at all because the government cant be scrutinized effectively, and the executive cant be checked too well when the executive has a majority and also a majority means legislation is passed too easily even if there is opposition inside or outside parliament and the same goes for proposals such as the Iraq War where millions of people in the UK didn't want to go to war and they were ignored which means they were completely unrepresented in the decision to go to war.

Furthermore, party discipline undermines democracy and when the executive has a majority like it did in the talk about the Iraq war, even though many defected from their party and voted against the Iraq War, Party Discipline and the use of whips meant it was still decided that Great Britain would go to war.

The Parliamentary system has too many flaws that make it very ineffective and it would be better if the executive could be held accountable by an independent council where the questions were random and the executive was put on the spot.

Right now we have a dictatorship rather than a democracy and no one is willing to hold the executive accountable and the members of the Labour party are unwilling to drop the party line because they can't afford to lose their career and therefore they are completely unrepresentative of the people.

The People of Britain can't be heard anymore, so the Parliamentary government can never be effective.

Nelesh Patel