TheyWorkForYou back to 1935

Hansards Parliamentary Debates by hugovk (cc)

Hansard's Parliamentary Debates by hugovk (cc)

The House of Commons debate coverage on TheyWorkForYou has recently extended back from the 2001 general election to the 1935 general election, and our knowledge of MPs now extends back to the start of the 19th century. This means TheyWorkForYou now includes things such as Anthony Eden on the Suez Canal in 1956, saying “there was not foreknowledge that Israel would attack Egypt“; the debate the day after Bloody Sunday in 1972; Geoffrey Howe’s resignation statement in 1990; Neville Chamberlain on the eve and start of the second World War in 1939; and Winston Churchill‘s speeches to the House, such as We shall fight on the beaches and This was their finest hour in 1940. This and much, much more are available and searchable using our new improved advanced search, which allows you to filter by e.g. date range or person. We hope people enjoy researching this huge wealth of information (I certainly do), and add useful annotations to the text to help other people.

This would not have been possible without the original project by Parliament to digitise historical copies of Hansard and make them available, nor the internal Parliamentary project to clean up the data, match up speaker names, and so on. The project was kindly funded by the Ministry of Justice’s Innovation Fund, which also supported the creation of FixMyStreet and GroupsNearYou.

7 Comments

  1. Not impressed. Looked for my father in law, Sidney Schofield, who was a labour MP in early 1950s – nothing. Yet we have a copy of hansard in which he speaks!

  2. I consider that MPs are saying things that are not correct, an Example of this is my own MP who insists he has my address and now has through his office said he that they will not answer any questions I ask until I give them my Address. This I find offensive I do not give my address to anyone in an Email. So please will someone tell me what is going on. I have written to David Cameron but he has not replied to me, so I take it that he will not censor any of his MPs, if he does not do this now what use will he be as a Prime Minister of this country. I say he is a weak person and that is not what we want as Prime Minister, his MPs can do anything they want as in Expenses he has not followed other parties and bye those in his party by taking the Conservative whip away from them.

  3. Laurie: If you won’t provide your address to anyone by email, have you tried ringing up your MP and providing your address to them over the phone?