Parliamentary Tradition Quotes

It excites world wonder in the Parliamentary countries that we should build a Chamber, starting afresh, which can only seat two-thirds of its Members. It is difficult to explain this to those who do not know our ways. They cannot easily be made to understand why we consider that the intensity, passion, intimacy, informality and spontaneity of our Debates constitute the personality of the House of Commons and endow it at once with its focus and its strength.

I think the state opening of Parliament is an incredibly important occasion, and broadly speaking, the way in which it's done is an invaluable tradition.

The Anglo-Saxon genius for parliamentary government asserted itself; there was a great deal of talk and no decisive action.

We may be proud that England is the ancient country of Parliaments. With scarcely any intervening period, Parliaments have met constantly for 600 years, and there was something of a Parliament before the Conquest. England is the mother of Parliaments.

There is no other Parliament like the English. For the ordinary man, elected to any senate, from Perisa to Peru, they may be a certain satisfaction in being elected... but the man who steps into the English Parliament takes his place in a pageant that has ever been filing by since the birth of English history... York or Lancaster, Protestant or Catholic, Court or Country, Roundhead or Cavalier, Whig or Tory, Liberal or Conservative, Labour or Unionist, they all fit into that long pageant that no other country in the world can show.

We have a maxim in the House of Commons, and written on the walls of our house, that old ways are safest and surest ways.

Far from being aberrant and un-British, criticising a war in which our troops are actively engaged is a long-established parliamentary and political tradition.

One moment it's a cathedral, at another time there is no words to describe it when it ceases, for short periods of time, to have any regard for the proprieties that constitute not only Parliament, but its tradition. I've seen it in all its greatness. I have inwardly wept over it when it is degraded.