The Remotely Representative House: Institutional Resistance to Diversity Sensitive Pandemic Reform in the UK

Like legislatures around the world, the UK House of Commons had to make immediate changes to its ways of working in the face of the Covid-19 Pandemic. For a few weeks its response - not least remote voting – found it designated ‘world leading’. Almost at once however, these technically sound innovations were overturned by the Government intent on a return to the physical parliament. If photographs of queuing MPs snaking around the Palace of Westminster to vote in summer 2020 was perceived as amusing, the sight of a woman MP with breast cancer begging the Leader of the House to permit her to participate in a debate on breast cancer, was more sobering. It brought into full sight longstanding issues of exclusion hitherto largely hidden. Drawing on the Centenary Action Group’s Report, The Remotely Representative House (Smith 2021) which makes a series of recommendations supporting a continued hybrid parliament, we ask whether the exogenous shock of the pandemic constituted a feminizing or remasculinizing moment. Amongst competing representative claims this paper examines how the Conservative government was able to mostly resist calls to redress the exclusion and inequities caused by the prevention of MPs - whether for reasons of ill-health, caring responsibilities, home schooling or geography – to participate in the House proceedings.