• Parliamentary etiquette in the House of Commons chamber

• The role of whipped votes in opposition

• Why a Treasury Minister is a member of the Public Accounts Committee

• The history of the Private Members’ Bill ballot

• Why MPs read out the number, rather than the text of their question in the Commons Chamber

• A proposal for a new House of Lords Committee on scrutiny of Northern Ireland issues

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[00:00:00] Intro: You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production, supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/pm.

[00:00:17] Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

[00:00:23] Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark Darcy. And this is one of our special Urgent Question editions, where we deal with questions sent in by listeners to the main podcast. So Ruth, what have we got?

[00:00:33] Ruth Fox: Well, Mark, our first question is, it's anonymous, they haven't put their name to it, and I'm not sure it's really a question, perhaps more of a critique of our discussion recently about etiquette in the House of Commons chamber. So anonymous says, "listening to your podcast on chamber etiquette was pretty infuriating".

[00:00:53] I'm not sure whether he's - he or she - is infuriated by what we were saying or by the etiquette itself or both but he says, she says, "they all did normal jobs before becoming MPs. In no normal job would they sit five hours with no food, drink or break in order to make a three minute speech on something they are expert on, only to be cut off by the speaker at one minute past three.

[00:01:15] Who cares about looking smart and not using "you" in the chamber? But people should care about the insane waste of everybody's time, that's how debates work, and the snobbishness about doing other work on the phone while waiting their turn. Of course they have to do other work during those four hours and 57 minutes they've got to sit in the chamber."

00:01:32] He also makes the point, and I think on this he or she is right, "you're also out of date on the use of honourable and gallant. Labour MPs are conspicuously using it now to refer to the large number of new Labour MPs with military ties." I think he's probably right on that. Parliamentary etiquette rules say it's fallen out of favour but they have been using it a little bit more because Labour's got so many military related MPs.