Today the Unit published Monitor 89, providing an analysis of constitutional events over the last four months. This post by Alan Renwick and Meg Russell, which also serves as the issue’s lead article, highlights welcome action by the government on devolution, commitment to the rule of law and the removal of hereditary peers from the House of Lords, but calls for stronger action on wider Lords reform, progress on the promised Ethics and Integrity Commission, and action on the pre-election pledge to strengthen parliamentary scrutiny of legislation. It warns that the governments of the UK must strive to maintain healthy checks and balances, avoid polarisation, and foster open political discourse at a time when events in the US are showing the dangers of not doing so.

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Conor J. Kelly and Etain Tannam discuss the new Irish coalition’s programme for government and what it means for UK-Irish relations. They conclude that while the disagreements between London and Dublin that characterised the Brexit period are dissipating and political relationships have noticeably improved in recent years, several challenges remain which will require strict adherence to the structures of the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. 

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Yesterday, Calixte Bloquet and Ruxandra Serban published a post explaining why the French National Assembly decided to trial a weekly session of Prime Minister’s Questions. Here they explain how the experiment fared and why it failed.

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In 2024 the French National Assembly initiated a trial period during which the country’s prime minister would answer questions in parliament alone, rather than together with their ministers, in a format similar to Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) in the House of Commons. In this post, Calixte Bloquet and Ruxandra Serban explain why French politicians decided to go ahead with the experiment, and how the format of the French version of PMQs compares to similar procedures in other parliaments. A second post will then discuss how the trial went, and what can be learned from it.

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On 6 January, the Governor General of Canada granted a request for a two-month prorogation of parliament. A legal challenge was soon launched to have it declared unlawful. Steven Chaplin argues that the prorogation is perfectly proper, that it is highly unlikely that a Canadian court will rule it to be unlawful, and that comparisons with the Boris Johnson prorogation request in 2019 and the subsequent ‘Miller 2’ case do not hold up. 

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