I saw tonight that a reporter managed to sneak fake explosives into Pariament (I assume the building where they meet) and this sparked a discussion among some of my friends (unfortunately my friend in Wales isn’t home this week, she is on vacation and so is unable to answer…and my friend in Scotland doesn’t have any idea, he claims its an ENGLISH problem whatever that means)…what would happen if someone REALLY managed to sneak in a bomb when the full session of Parliament was meeting (House of Lords, Commons and the Prime Minister)? Couldn’t this potentially wipe out the entire upper government of the UK? If it did, how would the succession go? Would they call a special election, or would a coalition government be formed…or would the Queen take over? Inquiring minds want to know here in the US how our cousins across the big pond would respond to such an event.
The Queen would not have to take over – she already is in charge (at least formally). She would appoint a new government, and require it to hold a general election as soon as possible. If the Queen, Prince Charles, etc., also died, there’s a lot of people in the line of succession to the throne, who could accede to the throne and do the same thing.
It would be something of a constitutional crisis, but the UK constitution is probably flexible enough to deal with it.
The Queen sends for somebody and invites them to become prime minister. Since the emergence of the office, the constitutional convention and practical political reality has been that she must send for somebody who can command the confidence of the House of Commons, and in modern conditions this has always meant sending for the leader of the largest party in the House of Commons.
Plainly, if everyone in the House of Commons is dead, then
(a) the immediate need is for a caretaker government which can run the administration until a new House of Commons can be elected, and
(b) for that caretaker government, the need to be able to command the confidence of the House is irrelevant. What is needed is somebody who can command the confidence of the nation in what will presumably be a traumatic national crisis.
This would be an occasion where the queen would have real power, because she would have to make the decision. She would presumably consult with (surviving) privy councillors, including former prime ministers, the leaders of the Scottish and Welsh governments, national politicians who were not in parliament and so survived the explosion, and so forth. A retired prime minister or senior politician might be sent for, or a former senior public servant. As soon as a new house was elected, the caretaker prime minister would presumably resign, and advise the Queen to send for the leader of the largest party in the new House. The caretaker government would rely very, very heavily on the permanent civil service to keep things ticking over, and would probably try to avoid any major policy initiatives for which, obviously, it would have no electoral mandate.
The Queen appoints someone else to do whatever the American President tells him to do, and life goes on.
Seriously, though, a number of constituencies require that candidates for that seat name a stand-in prior to their own election, who serves in his or her place until a by-election can be held.
I think the other posters have basically got it right…here’s my take on it to the best of my knowledge. Supposing the bomb was set off in the State Opening of Parliament, the only time the Queen is present, and supposing it killed her and every MP and member of the Lords there.
Ministers, including the PM, do not have to be members of parliament, it’s only convention that says they should be. The PM is whoever the monarch requests to be PM. So yes, as **UDS[/b[ suggests, there’d probably be a small government formed (by King Charles) from the sources suggested (to which I’d add MEPs, senior judges and London Assembly members as possible sources of capable people). Everyday life could continue, though - the police would be unaffected, for instance.
Are you sure about that? They certainly name a stand-in in case they die before* the election, but AFAIK the death of an MP always results in a by-election (unless a general election is approaching anyway).
He’s just being naievly nationalistic. Tell him to grow up, and argue the politics of independence in a meaningful way
The chances of EVERY MP being killed are very slim.It’s HIGHLY unusual to have them all in the chamber at once.Some would be in their constituencies.In that case,I suppose they’d gather the remaining MPs,declare a state of emergency and form a cross-party coalition government to just keep the country going until a general election could be held.
This week,we’ve had foxhunting fanatics running amok,someone smuggling in a fake bomb.Not too impressive is it?
As for it being an English question-yes the Scottish MPs meet in Scotland at Holyrood,except when they travel down to Westminster to vote in debates-a very thorny subject as English MPs can’t vote in Scottish affairs.Got especially heated when Blair used the Scottish MPs to vote for him and managed to win on tuition fees.It didn’t matter to them one way or the other as the system would not apply to their constituencies.
Pretty much every MP, other than the seriously ill, would be present at the State Opening. Although as I think about it, the chances are still zero - the Sinn Fein MPs wouldn’t be in attendance.
That’s not true. Scotland elects Westminster MPs and MPs for the Scottish Parliament (MSPs). They’re not the same at all. (Although that doesn’t affect the issue of Scottish MPs voting in the Commons on English issues.)
Further on the Sinn Fein aspect of the bombing of the State Opening: their usual objection to taking up their seats, the obligation of the oath of allegiance, would be inapplicable, as nobody would have taken it.
(On the other hand, I’ll retract my earlier suggestion that they would not be anywhere near the explosion, as they would almost certainly be stood talking to reporters outside…)
It might be pointed out that the Prime Ministers from 1957-64, well into QE2’s reign, were her personal choices – not that they were not acceptable to the Tories – that was one major element in her selection process – but that she, not the party rank and file, decided that Macmillan and Home would be the proper PM. That is perhaps the last great use of the Royal Prerogative ever, since the party leader selection process has since been amended.
But in a case like this, she would have the privilege and duty of identifying who might function well as a national leader in a time of crisis, name him as P.M. of a caretaker government as described above, and then call for elections to name a new House of Commons (and, I presume, to select new representative Lords).
As a practical nitpick about whether you could wipe out every MP and the Queen, she’s never in the same room with remotely all the Commons, even during the State Opening. While the Commons are summoned to the Lords and all the MPs present troop across, there’s only room at the back of the Lords’ chamber for about the first dozen to stand and actually hear the Queen’s Speech. Most of the MPs remain queued up outside. To wipe out them all, you’re into scenarios which have to lay waste to most of the Palace of Westminster.
Whether there are any survivors amongst the Commons might make a difference to the course of action. If they’re all dead, interim issues about who’s appointed as temporary PM aside, the monarch would presumably just call a General Election. But if there were survivors the more appropriate action would be to simply hold a swath of by-elections in those constituences that lost members, so that there’s (possibly largely symbolic) continuity through the crisis.
Yep – but not a web link. Details on what was done – which was at the Queen’s instigation, though the Marquess of Salisbury was instrumental in guiding her choices – are spelled out in a book called Majesty, a quasi-political biography of Queen Elizabeth II that came out about 20 years back. I’ve misplaced my paperback copy of it, or I’d give a couple of quotes and a more detailed cite.
In the immediate aftermath, the monarch would almost certainly rely on the Privy Council, not least because orders-in-Council are the easiest way to implement the various emergency powers that would doubtless be required in such circumstances. And, as UDS points out, senior surviving privy councillors would anyway be the obvious group to consult. Remember that the Cabinet is just a sub-committee of the Privy Council. There would thus be no legal complications in appointing a group of privy councillors to act as an interim Cabinet.
There would however be a number of practical problems about holding immediate elections to fill the vacancies in the Commons. All the main parties would have to select candidates for each seat. There would then be the question of whether they should contest seats previously held by their opponents. Until recently, there was an unofficial convention that other parties did not contest seats where a vacancy had occured as a result of terrorism or war. This no longer applies, but in such extreme circumstances there would be an argument for reviving it. In any case, whichever cross-party group of senior figures had emerged to form the interim government would no doubt face calls for them to fight the election as a cross-party alliance. If they decided to do so, allocating the seats between them as before would be an obvious move. But even if each seat was uncontested, the parties would still have to find hundreds of candidates.
Whether they would decide to waive the usual selection proceedures would depend on each party and their own particular rules. But that would be complicated by the fact that much of the upper levels of each party’s hierarchy would have been wiped out. Who should/would decide who their candidates should be? Then there would be the issue of who the party leaders should be. All the parties now have rules for leadership elections of varying complexities and those elections usually take several months. Exceptional circumstances might well justify exceptional arrangements, but deciding what the appropriate exceptional arrangements should be would itself not be an easy process.
But what there would not be would be any legal requirement for immediate elections. The death of an MP does not require an immediate by-election, nor need a dissolution be followed by an immediate general election. It would be possible for any interim administration to delay the new elections until such time as allowed the main parties to regroup. It would be realistic to think in terms of months rather than weeks before any elections were held. The trick would be for the interim government to justify such a delay, while simultaneously upholding their own rather shaky democratic credentials at a time when it would be all the more important to be seen to preserve the principle of parliamentary government. It would all rather depend on how long the post-crisis goodwill lasted.
I can’t find useful information easily online, but certainly I don’t see a great difficulty for the Labour party, at least - only one small part of the National Executive Committee would have been lost.
There are a series of Standing Order that deal with the decapitation of the Governement and allocation of powers at all levels.
It would rather depend on who did the decapitating too.
If it was an accident (plane crashes on Westminster, gas main blows etc) then the civil procedures would be followed.
If it was a 9/11 type terrorist attack then a state of emergency would most likely be declared which hands over certain powers to the military or the police.
If another nation state did it we would be at war and the arrangements would be slightly different.
In reality what would most likely happen is that the monarch (who ever is highest in line to the throne who survives) would call together the remaining members of the Privvy Council (or in the absence of any live ones, former members eg John Major, Margagret Thatcher etc who weren’t at St Jame’s Palace)to form an interim administration and would dissolve parliament and call a general election.
What standing orders are you referring to, owlstretchingtime? Do you have a cite for them?
As APB noted, the Cabinet is just a sub-committee of the Privy Council. All former members, such as Major and Thatcher, are members of the Privy Council. Given the size of the Privy Council (all current and former members of Cabinet), it’s virtually impossible to wipe out the entire Privy Council in one explosion.
For obvious reasons, they aren’t published, but they most certainly exist. They are called “Queens Standing orders” or something very similar, and were developed durig the cold war when the possibility of wiping out the governement was taken very seriously. (from memory there is a film which explains all this - it might be “the war game” or maybe “threads”)
At a small level each borough and region have an emergency plan (these are often publicly available) to deal with large scale emergencies which do address the issue of who is in charge (usually senior policemen and local authority staff).
