That Her Majesty’s Ministers are Unworthy of the Confidence of the Country: Rhetoric and Agenda-Setting in the Nineteenth-Century British Parliamentary Culture of Debate

In this paper I propose to look at how parliamentary practice was conceptualised in the nineteenth-century British debating culture, more specifically in the way debate topics were formulated in the Cambridge and Oxford Union Societies. The paper draws from a PhD study (Haapala 2012) that sought to find out to what extent the Unions followed parliamentary practices and procedure. It was argued that the Union Societies and the House of Commons formed a parliamentary culture of debate. In the issues debated in Unions from the 1830s until the 1870s it is possible to find four rhetorical topoi in use: vote of confidence, principle, character, expediency. It is claimed that these topoi represent the way members of the Union Societies understood parliamentary politics. In the paper I intend to follow up on this claim and pursue towards a more detailed theory of parliamentary rhetoric of agenda. First, I shall provide an interpretation of the British nineteenth-century parliamentary culture of debate by looking at the rhetorical commonplaces in use in the debate topics put forward in the Union Societies. Second, I ask what the findings indicate in terms of the practice and study of parliamentarism in general.