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Legislation at Westminster: Parliamentary Actors and Influence in the Making of British Law. By Meg Russell and Daniel Gover. [ Oxford University Press, 2017. xii + 324 pp. Hardback £50.00. ISBN: 978-01-98753-82-7.]
We are taught that Parliament is central to law-making. Yet, at Westminster, the majority of Bills which become law are drafted by the Government. People often doubt Parliament's importance in the legislative process. Is Parliament really central if the Government's Bills nearly always succeed? Does Parliament really scrutinise government Bills? Is Parliament little more than a “talking shop”? The question of how central Parliament is to the legislative process is the subject of Meg Russell and Daniel Gover's book, which injects some much needed empirical analysis into debates about Parliament's influence on law-making. Through an analysis of parliamentary amendments to government Bills, the authors contend that Parliament exerts greater influence over the law-making process than is commonly supposed.
Amendments are proposals made by parliamentary actors to change the text of a Bill by adding to, removing or replacing some of its content. A parliamentary actor is an individual or a collective group who occupies an institutionally defined role within the Westminster law-making process. The amendment of Bills can involve a range of different parliamentary actors – government ministers, the opposition, government backbenchers, non-partisan parliamentarians within the House of Lords, select committees and cross-party working groups – who each may, at various stages of the law-making process, desire changes in a Bill's content. Russell and Gover's convincing analysis demonstrates that parliamentary influence is both visibly and obscurely exerted through amendments. They identify what they label as the multiple “faces of parliamentary power”, some visible and others less so. Parliament's visible “faces” include power to change Bills through the amendment process. Significantly, Russell and Gover adopt a broad understanding of how this power is exercised in practice. They view this power as being exercised in two ways: through the recognised approach of focusing on proposed non-governmental amendments which formally succeed, and through those amendments which formally fail, but which in substance are taken up later in the process through concessionary amendments offered by ministers. Including the latter was an astute choice, for a study of the former alone would exclude the possibility that non-government actors...