Inter-parliamentary relations in the United Kingdom: devolution’s undiscovered country?

Since 1997, the United Kingdom’s territorial constitution has undergone an immense process of change and has resulted in the establishment of separate legislatures and governments for the peoples of Scotland, Wales and, when Stormont is operational, Northern Ireland. These changes have spawned a whole series of relationships between the institutions of the devolved UK, at executive, legislature and civil service levels. However, while intergovernmental relations has been the subject of repeated debate, there has been little attempt to document and examine the way in which the UK’s four legislatures interact with one another, post-devolution. To the extent that these interactions, otherwise known as inter-parliamentary relations (IPR), have been the subject of scrutiny, it has been largely to bemoan their modest state and/or to suggest that stronger, albeit occasionally rather unelaborated, mechanisms be established. This article seeks to correct this deficit and provide a first step towards a clearer understanding of IPR in the UK, post-devolution. The article breaks the different levels of IPR down into three main strands: (1) parliament-parliament, (2) committee-committee and (3) official-official, and suggests that the main interactions that take place at each of these levels. Following this audit, the article concludes by highlighting the role that shared policy competence (a field that is set to grow with the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union) has played in driving IPR in the UK, post-devolution, and suggests some steps that may be taken to enhance IPR in the future.     

On the political consequences of privatisation: the case of Teléfonos de México

This article examines the political consequences of the most important single privatisation in Mexico, that of the national telecommunications company, Telmex. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, diverse observers of Mexico claimed that, as the government pursued a dramatic privatisation programme as part of a broader plan to liberalise the economy, democratic growth would be encouraged. This argument is challenged in the case of the Telmex privatisation. It is shown how privatisation generated new resources that were channelled to lubricate corporatist relations and that the so‐called new unionism emerging from the telephone workers’union did not represent a departure from, but a culmination of, traditional state‐labour relations in Mexico.