Template talk:UK legislatures

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the UK legislatures template.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

The status of the Legislative Grand Committees

Devolution refers to the passing of power(s) from one level of government (usually higher) to another (usually lower). It does not exclusively refer to the style of sub-national parliaments present in the countries of the UK, nor exclusively to either executive or legislative functions. It can be said that the UK parliament has devolved legislative power to the Legislative Grand Committees for England; England and Wales; and England, Wales and Northern Ireland. This is, after all, their intended function as Legislative Grand Committees. The inclusion of the word "legislative" exists to differentiate them from other similar Grand Committees which do not have a legislative function of their own.

This is the sense in which the Legislative Grand Committees are entities with devolution; the UK parliament as a whole has devolved some degree of legislative competence to a subsection of itself; and, even if you see this devolution as "only a veto", which it strictly is not (i.e. most of the stages for, say, an "England-only bill" are in turn England-only and all require the consent of a majority of English MPs), that veto is a devolved power.

Currently, the page for devolution in the United Kingdom has a subsection for English votes for English laws, and does not say anywhere that "EVEL is not proper devolution", which is, itself, a controversial, subjective statement, whereas I would argue that "EVEL as currently implemented is the devolution of at least a veto to English MPs for English laws" is an uncontroversial, objective statement.

All this being said, I'm not entirely opposed to the moving of the LGCs from the "devolved" subsection to maybe its own subsection under "United Kingdom". But I feel that they should be included for completeness as a de facto legislature in their own right (since they have a different set of members (albeit a subset) from that of the UK parliament as a whole). So "miscellaneous" seems like entirely the wrong place to put them since that section is for articles relevant to legislatures that are not in any sense legislatures themselves.--DrewMek (talk) 19:09, 5 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Another way to put this might be: although the Legislative Grand Committees do not form a devolved parliament in the common parlance British sense of the term, they nonetheless form a group of MPs with the exclusive competence, devolved to them by the sovereign British parliament which previously exercised said competence, to pass legislation pertaining exclusively to their respective region, i.e. a legislature, which is what this template is about.--DrewMek (talk) 19:18, 5 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

For now, I've changed the section name from "devolved" to "subnational". However, the link is unchanged as I feel this is still the most relevant link.--DrewMek (talk) 19:29, 5 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]