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Parliamentary Affairs Advance Access originally published online on September 14, 2006
Parliamentary Affairs 2006 59(4):703-708; doi:10.1093/pa/gsl040
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© Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Hansard Society for Parliamentary Government [2006]; all rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Accountable Only to God?

SIMON BURALL, BRENDAN DONNELLY and STUART WEIR (eds), Not in Our Name: Democracy and Foreign Policy in the UK, Politico’s Publishing, 2006, 242 pp., ISBN 1-84275-150-6, £12.99.

Steve Belzak

Lecturer at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, teaching across all Humanities courses in the School of Lifelong Learning.

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

This book arrived just before British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, appeared on ITV’s Parkinson Show to announce that God would judge him over his actions in respect of Iraq. The timing was providential, underlining the fact that this is the only effective form of scrutiny that Mr Blair and his administration is going to be subjected to in relation to its foreign and defence policies.

Not in Our Name is a timely book—a welcome addition to the literature on the British system of government with its inherent lack of oversight of what the authors refer to as ‘the overweening executive’. At the heart of the argument is that government makes use of the royal prerogative for the conduct of external relations. This power to make law without reference to Parliament is often seen as a hangover from pre-democratic days, but if it is a hangover, it is a particularly bad . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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