Talk:House of Commons of the United Kingdom

Co-ops, and Reform UK

We should add the Co-ops to the list under labour and the TUV to reform as they share a whip AbledAtol (talk) 18:25, 5 July 2024 (UTC)

Regarding Reform, I think we need a clear source about them sharing a whip and if so depict them as "Reform UK/TUV" with the breakdown of 5 Reform and 1 TUV then given in an indent immediately beneath in the list, similar to how pages for other legislatures reflect alliances of parties. Without definitive proof that they do share a whip and are behaving as a joint party, they should be shown separately. Maswimelleu (talk) 11:13, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

New Independents.

Labour have suspended 7 MPs taking their number from 411 to 404 and Independents from 6 to 13. GandalfXLD (talk) 19:05, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Presence of SDLP MPs on the Government Bench

Whilst the SDLP are not directly subject to the Labour whip, they have seated themselves on the government bench due to being Labour's sister party in Northern Ireland. I appreciate twitter is not a sufficient source in its own right but should their presence on that bench be reflected in the illustration of Parliament and would it still be accurate to call them "opposition" when they are overtly supporting the government? Maswimelleu (talk) 11:09, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

References

Independent Alliance

Jeremy Corbyn has announced that he's forming a new group in Parliament called the Independent Alliance, consisting of himself and four other pro-Gaza independent MPs. But this will only be a parliamentary grouping and not a party as such, so should we list them as a separate group, or just continue to lump them in with the other independents? Mark and inwardly digest (talk) 13:20, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

I think list them separately on this article, as they're different from other independent MPs. However, on pages such as Next United Kingdom general election they should remain listed as independents, as for election purposes they are still independent DimensionalFusion (talk) 15:45, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

@Mark and inwardly digest and DimensionalFusion: Resurrecting this discussion to say that I don't think we should list Independent Alliance MPs separately in this infobox and other articles. I contacted the House of Commons enquiry service about the group earlier this month, and received the following reply:

So far as we are aware, the Independent Alliance has not registered as an official, separate political party, and instead has the status of a ‘group’ in the House of Commons – similar to other groups set up in the past by MPs who share a common outlook on some issues?

A recent example of a group that was formed in the Commons would be, for instance, the Northern Research Group . Such groups may decide to pool some research resources or to coordinate in order to maximise their chances of being called in debates.

Therefore, as you have observed, the group does not have official recognition on our website, nor do its MPs appear as anything other than ‘Independent’ in Hansard or on other procedural documentation.

Any decision to grant additional speaking opportunities to a particular party or grouping, during proceedings in the Commons, is of course a matter for the Speaker.

I think this indicates that the Independent Alliance is not sufficiently established as a separate Commons grouping to warrant us identifying them separately from other independent MPs – just as we don't list other groups that are not formal political parties or do not receive official Commons recognition (unlike for example Change UK, which was officially a party; see e.g. [1]). We can still note the existence of the Independent Alliance through a footnote. — RAVENPVFF · talk · 14:50, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

That all makes sense - thanks for taking the trouble to research this. Mark and inwardly digest (talk) 17:21, 29 October 2024 (UTC)