The Houses of Parliament - Workshop – 2nd May 2008 by Henry Scott aged 9 (italics added by ‘Mum’)
A lady called Catherine held a workshop for us so we could learn about the Houses of Parliament before we did a tour.
The Palace of Westminster is made up of three parts. These are the House of Lords, the House of Commons and the Monarchy. In the monarchy area, you will see the colour gold, in the House of Lords you will see the colour red and in the House of Commons you will see the colour green. The three parts will meet up once a year for the State Opening of Parliament in November.
In the House of Commons, 646 MPs are chosen every 4 to 5 years in a general election where people aged 18 and over vote for who will represent their area. Each area is known as a constituency. Some constituencies cover large areas, but this is because each constituency is based on the population size rather than the area size.
The House of Lords is made up of nearly 700 MPs (Member of Parliament) and 92 of them have had the title through birth. The rest have been chosen by the Prime Minister and appointed by the Queen based on expertise in a certain matter. A man would be called a lord and a woman would be called a baroness. Together they are called Peers.
The Government is made up of 100 MPs from the House of Commons and the House of Lords chosen by the Prime Minister. They are called Ministers. The Government runs the county and the parliament checks they are doing their job properly.
A suggestion for a new law is called a bill. Both of the Houses of Parliament vote on it and if agreed the Queen signs it and it becomes an Act of Parliament and therefore a law.
There are three main political parties. They are called Labour, Liberal Democrats and Conservative. The one in power now is Labour. Gordon Brown is the leader of the Labour party and is the Prime Minister. Gordon Brown lives at 10 Downing Street and the Chancellor of the Exchequer lives next door at number 11. He looks after the money. His name is Alistair Darling. There are about 13 other political parties in the House of Commons (out of the 109 registered ones that stood in the last general election), but those are the main three.
The room that we were in had special screens. One was green and the other one was red. The lady told as that they were called annunciators. They show you what’s happening in the House of Lords and the House of Commons, but we didn’t see anything on them.
Catherine told us about the Youth Parliament. It is for children aged 11 to 18 to let them have a say in politics.
Catherine split us into 5 political parties. Mine was called the H.K.R party and the others were called Kids Rights, Pony Party, Me party and South East Party. We each wrote a manifesto. A manifesto is what you would do if you were in power. We took a secret vote in a real, black, election box and we weren’t allowed to vote for our own parties. My party wanted safer streets, cheaper food, a choice of being home educated at age 7 and local clubs for children. The Kids Rights party won over us by one point. They wanted lower fuel prices, free GCSE exams for home-educated children, more choice for children, more respect for kids, all DVDs to be PG and less testing on animals.
I thought the day was great!
The Houses of Parliament - Tour – 2nd May 2008 by Meg Claridge aged 11 (italics added by ‘Mum’)
We went to see the Houses of Parliament, which is in Westminster Palace. Inside the palace, everything is like a mini village. There are hairdressers, a shop and post offices. The post offices receive up to 6000 letters a day for the House of Commons alone!
Our tour started in the Royal Apartments, which is now used yearly at the State Opening of Parliament. Westminster Palace was once used all the time, as it was the official palace until Henry VIII and Katharine of Aragon stayed and Katharine’s bedroom caught fire. Henry then handed the palace to the Government and left it. Later in 1834, Westminster Palace was burned to the ground, and now the Palace only dates back to the 1840’s, with the exception of one part (Westminster Hall). In the Norman porch the tour guide told us that the French (Norman) verb for ‘to speak’ is ‘parler’, and that is where the word Parliament comes from.
We walked along to the Queens Robing Room where she is robed before she opens Parliament, and puts on her Imperial State Crown and her robes. During the 1800’s, people used to tip their raw sewage in the Thames and the smell got so bad that people had to abandon Parliament in the summer. The palace was rebuilt by Charles Barry whose symbol was a portcullis and a crown, hence the symbol we associate with Parliament today. Charles employed a man called Augustus Pugin who was 22 to carry out internal designs. They both worked too hard and died whilst in their 40’s. Queen Victoria was the first monarch to open Parliament in the building we see today.
We all saw a model of the original palace in the Royal Gallery, including St Stephen’s chapel where Henry VIII would have prayed. In the Gallery, we saw two large paintings that had been created on wet plaster. They were of different battle - one was of the Battle of Trafalgar, and the other was of the Battle of Waterloo. When President De Gaulle came in the 1960’s, he refused to enter the palace, so now there is a curtain above that can cover them. When president Sarkozy visited from France recently, he said it didn’t need to be covered.
Next we saw the Princes Chamber room, which was above where Guy Fawkes tried to blow the palace up by hiding 36 barrels of gunpowder at the State Opening of Parliament by James I. Now, every year at State Opening, the yeoman guard goes down and checks the security. If you look around the room, there are paintings all over the walls. They are of the Tudors and the Stuarts, but Lady Jane Grey had been muddled up with Catharine Parr. They thought it was a horror that very few people realised and led to the National Portrait Gallery being started. The room is used now by the House of Lords to collect their messages.
The next room we went into was the House of Lords Chamber. There is a throne for the Queen in there made of real gold. The House of Lords Chamber isn’t just a debating room, it’s the Highest Court of Appeal in the Country and 26 judges meet there twice a week. After 2008 it won’t be a Court because there is a new Supreme Court being set up. You are not allowed to sit down in there if you’re touring. (Sitting in there is reserved as a privilege. You can not sit on the benches in the House of Commons either.) There are some red clocks up above, that time how long the person who is speaking has been speaking for. If the person has speaking for longer then ten minutes then the speaker stops them. The seats in there face each other, two swords lengths apart.
Next we went into the Central Lobby. That is where you (can) talk to your Member of Parliament. Each Member of Parliament spends half of his or her time in Westminster Palace, and the other half in their constituency. In the Members Lobby, there are statues of old Prime Ministers (Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, Margaret Thatcher – who was apparently a bit miffed that her statue wasn’t made of iron - and David Lloyd George). One shoe of each statue had been rubbed. MPs rub the shoes of the statues for good luck. One of the statues was of Winston Churchill. His shoe had been rubbed so much that it caved in and had been replaced. In 1941, a German bomb hit the House of Commons and destroyed it completely. An arch at the end of the Lobby was destroyed, and was rebuilt out of rubble. The arch is now known as Victory Arch or Churchill’s Arch.
Either side of the House of Commons, there are two voting Lobby’s. One of them means you agree with the subject you discuss (proposed bill), and one of them means you disagree. A vote is known as a division. If there is a vote, a bell rings (all over Parliament and in the surrounding pubs) and MPs have 8 minutes to vote. It is considered bad to miss voting. Members of Parliament tell their name to the person at the door of the Chamber and the votes are counted and read out in the Commons Chamber. There are lots of Hansard books in the Lobby’s, red for the House of Lords, and green for the House of Commons. Hansard reporters write ever word spoken in the Chambers and words that people say cannot be taken back. The Hansard reporters also have to write 120 words a minute so they only write for 10 minutes each. (Hansard is named after the family who were the first official publishers to the House of Commons.)
In the 17th century Charles I didn’t call Parliament together much, because he thought God put him in charge. Charles I (fearing a conspiracy when he found out Parliament was meeting without him) burst into a meeting with 200 soldiers to arrest 5 Members of Parliament. He asked a man called William Lenthall (who was the Speaker) to fetch them for him, but he bravely refused to. He was clever to do so because the 5 Members of Parliament were already rowing down the Thames to escape. What Charles 1 did, started a civil war. Monarchs are not allowed in the House of Commons anymore, therefore when the Queen opens Parliament, she sends the ‘Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod’ (the rod is made of ebony) down to ask the House of Commons to come to the House of Lords to hear the Queens speech. He goes from the middle of the Central Lobby and taps on the door 3 times. Someone on the other side of the door opens a window in the door and shuts it again in his face. We saw the dent that the rod had made on the door.
The next room we went into was the House of Commons Chamber where the debates go on. It was made to hold 400 people, but all 646 MPs sit in it at the State Opening of Parliament, and sometimes at Prime Ministers Question Time (on Wednesdays at noon). In debates, you must catch the Speaker’s eye before you may speak (as you have to have the Speaker’s permission). Behind the Speaker’s Chair there is a petition bag that holds the things to debate in. They cannot swear, because they will be kicked out. Only for a day if they are lucky, sometimes it’s a week. They pray before a debate, and they use prayer cards to reserve seats. Opposite where the political party in power sits, which is Labour under Gordon Brown, are seats for Her Majesty’s Official Opposition, which is the largest opposition party (currently Conservative under David Cameron). After the public is gone, twice daily King Charles Spaniels search the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and then they’re sealed.
St Stephen’s Hall replaced St Stephen’s Chapel after the fire. The layout of the original Chapel was used for the layout for the House of Commons and the House of Lords. (The benches either side were facing each other.) It was the chapel that Charles I came marching into, American Independence was granted and the Abolition and of Slavery was debated in. In 1812, Spencer Perceval was shot in here. He is the only British Prime Minister to have been assassinated. As the Houses of Parliament is a palace, technically, he’d be entitled to a State funeral if he died in it and therefore he was dragged outside before he was declared dead.
St Stephen’s Hall leads onto Westminster Hall, and is the only part off the building to survive the fire. It was built during the time of William Rufus, (William the Conqueror’s son) in 1097, but he claimed it was smaller then he wanted it. It was used as a law court and held the trials of Charles I, and those involved in the gunpowder plot. It’s now used for ‘Lying in State’ (where a monarch’s dead body is available for viewing). As you looked up to the ceiling, you could see a where an opening used to be to let the smoke out from the fire below. A couple of years ago, people were repairing leaks in the ceiling, and they found a ball made of animal skin and stuffed with hair. It was said to be possible that it was one of the balls that Henry VIII would have used to play tennis, but no-one’s sure.
We then had a talk about Big Ben. We did not see the inside of the Clock Tower at the Houses of Parliament. Big Ben is the name of the bell and not the Clock Tower. It plays note was ‘E’, and you hear it before the news and on New Year’s Eve when it strikes midnight. It was made in the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, and the bell itself is not very good. It even has a crack down the side and had to be rotated so that it doesn’t shatter. There is a prison cell half way up the Clock Tower that used to be used.
I really enjoyed this trip and I hope we go again.
For further information go to: www.explore.parliament.uk