Members of parliament (MPs) should not be allowed to bring babies into the UK House of Commons chamber during debates, a cross-party review has recommended after mounting “confusion” about the rules.
The procedure committee report was ordered amid an outcry over Labour backbencher Stella Creasy being told she could no longer bring her newborn son while making statements or asking questions in parliament.
The group ruled that lawmakers should not bring babies into the chamber or nearby Westminster Hall if they wanted to “observe, initiate, speak or intervene in proceedings.”
Photo: AFP / PRU
However, they said there should be a “degree of de facto discretion” that “should be exercised sparingly.” Creasy said this was not enough and railed at the “antiquated” rule remaining in place.
However, the committee did back the extension of proxy voting for “serious long-term illness.”
The review into the rules was ordered by House of Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle in November last year after Creasy was told she could no longer bring her son Pip, then-three months old, with her into the chamber.
The mother of two hoped the review would allow “parenting and politics to mix.”
Creasy was shocked when the Commons authorities e-mailed her rules prohibiting bringing children to debates after she took Pip into Westminster Hall.
Lawmakers described the boy “as good as gold” during the debate.
However, the committee’s report said it was a “longstanding practice” underpinned by previous rulings that “babies should not be present” during debates and question times.
They said there had been “several occasions” when lawmakers had brought babies into debates “without disruption,” but this had “contributed to some confusion and a gap” between the practice and the rules.
Many lawmakers were supportive of Creasy, with British Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab saying he had “a lot of sympathy” for her and that he would not be distracted by a baby.
However, Conservative lawmaker Alicia Kearns said the chamber was “no place” for a baby.
Creasy said that she was “not surprised” by the recommendation, because the committee “didn’t speak to a single person outside parliament, despite many of us encouraging them to do so.”
“They don’t recognize who is put off parliament by its antiquated rules and approach to women who have children and the need to modernize,” she added.
“They are not alone in working like this — in the last year we’ve seen no progress on parliament having any form of adequate maternity or paternity policy in place, and no progress from IPSA [Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority] on providing proper maternity or paternity funding either,” she said.
“Change will only come when we start listening to those outside the status quo,” she said.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS