Politics: April 2003 Archives

Ah, so naughty old George Galloway was allegedly in the pay of Saddam Hussein. Well this got me wondering about the practicalities of resigning as a Member of Parliament.

You may be suprised to learn that it is not technically possible for an MP to resign their position as a Member of Parliament.

Under a resolution of the House of Commons of 2 March 1623 (yes that really is 1623, not a typo), which is still in force today, 380 years later, members cannot directly resign their seat.

The reason for this being that in the past, serving in Parliament was often regarded as an obligation to be accepted only reluctantly, not an honour eagerly to be sought. (oh how times have changed!). Therefore, it was necessary to discourage resignation.

The way a Member of Parliament could legally resign was to accept a paid office of the Crown. The reasoning behind this is that a Member of Parliament receiving a salary from the Crown could not be expected to scrutinise the actions of the Crown or the Crown's government. In practical terms today, this applies to Judges for example.

Anyway, what paid offices of the crown exist today to facilitate the resignation of a Member of Parliament? Well there are two, the Crown Steward and Baliff of the three Children Hundreds of Stoke, Desborough and Burnham, the other choice being the Manor of Northstead. (For sheer pomposity of the title, I would go for the Chilten Hundreds every time!)

Rather than resign, the MP applies to the Chancellor of the Exchequer (equivalent of the Treasury Secretary for you US Folks) for one of the above positions. After applying for the position, the Chancellor of the Exchequer issues a warrant of appointment notifying the (ex) MP of his new office.

After the warrant of appointment is issued, a writ for a by-election can be issued, allowing for a new MP to be voted in for the constituency vacated by the ex-MP.

The two positions tend to be granted alternately, and the ex-MP holds the position until the Chancellor of the Exchequer appoints another applicant.

and that concludes todays history lesson.

[More info than you could ever possibly want about this can be found on the UK Parliament website via this PDF factsheet. ]

I spent much of the weekend doing absolutely nothing except relaxing and getting fresh air.

For the 6 hour train journey today though, I bought a handful of newspapers and spent the day catching up on recent events.

[ I've torn out articles of interest, but have singularly failed to make a note of which newspaper they are from. One can assume the article would have been from one of The Daily Telegraph, The Times, or The Guardian ]

It would seem that John Paul Getty, the "well known and exceedingly generous billionare philanthropist" died at the weekend.

How generous? Well he only gave away £140 million over his lifetime, small change for a billionaire.

I suppose in some ways we should be grateful that there are philanthropists willing to donate any amount of money. It seems to me that these days there are many many millionaires, who have made their fortune from the dot.com era (usually through dodgy share scams, rather than any honestly earned money), or fatcat directors taking home multimillion pound pay and bonuses despite driving their companies into the ground, that singularly fail to donate any money to worthy causes, and instead feel the need to horde as much as they can, to fund their opulent lifestyles. Still these weasels we will leave for a later article.

Back to the infeasibly rich philanthropists such as John Paul Getty: As pointed out in one of todays newspapers (possibly the guardian?), Nice man though Getty may have been, let us recall at this Easter time the parable of the widow's mite. This widow was the one who put a copper coin in the temple collection box, and was laughed at by assorted convenient bystanders until Jesus pointed out that by giving your all, however small, was more estimable than giving a fraction of what you could afford.

The article wraps up by saying:

Adrian Wootton of the British Film Institute said this week that the institute owed Getty "a huge debt of gratitude", adding, "And I am sure we will be arranging some type of memorial for him." But why, Adrian? Getty had a ton of money that he hadn't laboured for or earned, and he gave a lot of it to you. Good. It was, as Bill Gates has pointed out, the least a fabulously rich man could have done.

.. aren't there already enough Getty Institutes, galleries, museums and rooms to be getting on with? Erect a memorial instead to the longest-serving or hardest-working member of the BFI. Someone who really has given everything, even if it wasn't very much.