{"id":22876,"date":"2018-04-18T08:00:38","date_gmt":"2018-04-18T07:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=22876"},"modified":"2018-04-18T08:00:38","modified_gmt":"2018-04-18T07:00:38","slug":"british-political-institutions-2-the-legislature-and-how-berwick-might-be-at-war-with-russia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=22876","title":{"rendered":"British political institutions (2): the legislature (and how Berwick might be at war with Russia)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I like to attend short courses at the City Literary Institute in central London and I&#8217;m now doing a six-week course on <em>&#8220;British Political Institutions&#8221;.<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0The second session of the course was delivered by the City Lit&#8217;s Director Mark Malcolmson and covered the legislature, that is the House of Commons, the House of Lords and the residual role of the monarch.<\/p>\n<p>I have myself written a guide to the British political system and you can read about the legislature or parliament <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/Britishpoliticalsystem.html#Parliament\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>In the course of the lecture, we talked about the odd history of what is now the United Kingdom and reference was made to an issue that was new to me: the idea that Berwick-upon-Tweed might still be a war with Russia.<\/p>\n<p>It seems that, thanks to a bureaucratic mistake, all 12,000 residents of Berwick were excluded from the 1856 peace treaty between Russia and England that Queen Victoria announced at the end of the Crimean War.<\/p>\n<p>This omission was made possible by a 1502 treaty between England and Scotland that succeeded in ending hundreds of years of land arguments over the tiny border town which had already switched sides 13 times.<\/p>\n<p>You can read more about this fascinating vignette <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/berwick-upon-tweed-the-british-town-at-war-with-russia\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I like to attend short courses at the City Literary Institute in central London and I&#8217;m now doing a six-week course on &#8220;British Political Institutions&#8221;.\u00a0\u00a0The second session of the course was delivered by the City Lit&#8217;s Director Mark Malcolmson and covered the legislature, that is the House of Commons, the House of Lords and the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-british-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22876"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22881,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22876\/revisions\/22881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}