Power Struggles and the Pandemic Parliament: Institutional Resistance to Diversity Sensitive 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 adopting a ‘hybrid’ approach of both physical and virtual proceedings. Commissioned by The Centenary Action Group, a civil society umbrella organisation advocating women’s political equality and other rights, I authored The Remotely Representative House in 2021. Working within the traditions of Parliament, the report made 21 recommendations for a 21st Century Parliament. It advocated that the House of Commons continue on a hybrid basis post-pandemic bringing benefits to the institution as both a place of democracy and a place of work. This paper explores the fortunes of the report and its recommendations against a backdrop of an antipathetic Conservative government, mapping the forms and extent of institutional resistance. Framed by Celis and Lovenduski’s (2018) concept of power struggles I examine the ‘omnipresent, embodied and exercised’ resistance. Analysing new interview data with MPs and parliamentary officials alongside parliamentary debates and reports on hybridity I identify the actors, acts and strategies which constitute the power struggles over gender sensitive parliamentary reform. In particular, through the lens of feminist knowledge and the legitimacy and authority of women’s lived experience, I explore (i) the Conservative Government (and others’) opposition to feminist claims about the values of the physical versus hybrid House, notably, constructions of the ‘good’ MP as the physically present politician, and (ii) document Government interventions which succeeded against feminist calls to redress the ongoing gendered exclusion and inequities characteristic of the Westminster Parliament.