There is nothing new about the existence of a political class, nor about the electorate's distaste for paid politicians. In the middle ages, voters made clear their preference for representatives who were prepared to serve without payment; in the eighteenth century, the increase in the number of MPs paid by the state, whether in salaried posts or as sinecurists, was seen as a corrupt and pernicious extension to the influence of the crown; in the nineteenth and early twentieth century the payment of MPs by the taxpayer was widely regarded as an improper and offensive idea. The current furore over MPs' pay and expenses is another example of the intense suspicion with which MPs who have received money from the state have been regarded from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.

This chapter examines the history of the House of Commons in Great Britain, discussing the nineteenth- and twentieth-century legacy of the House of Commons. It reveals that, by the end of the twentieth century, the prestige and pre-eminence which Parliament possessed at its beginning was clearly no more. The first signs of a retreat from the principle of parliamentary sovereignty was the passage of the European Communities Act and the Factortame case.

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Although parliamentary debates have frequently been referred to in political history, the evolution of the British parliament has rarely been analysed from a linguistic point of view. In this chapter, we trace shifts in the use and application of key political concepts relating to Parliament and its role and operation during a period of major transformations. By reviewing the use of the terms 'sovereignty', 'parliament', 'representation', 'deliberation', 'responsibility' and 'publicity' in the surviving records of parliamentary debates from 1640 to 1800 (see Chapter 9 for early modern parliamentary rhetoric and Chapter 14 for procedural issues in the nineteenth century), we aim to evaluate changes in their meanings over time and to chart some trends in the formation of the English/British notion of parliament. Rather than attempting to reveal some linear development in a Whiggish sense, we want to analyse the changing and often ambiguous nature of discursive constructions of parliament through time. One problem with this is that before 1771 both Houses of Parliament tried to suppress public accounts of their debates, and therefore they are much less fully reported than later ones. However, some accounts of debates from before 1771, made informally and usually by members themselves, do exist. Moreover, the above-mentioned concepts were also discussed in other contexts, and these discussions and accounts have provided alternative sources for this study. Despite apparent institutional continuity, Parliament adapted itself to constitutional upheavals and to the rise of critical publicity. As a result, key terms relating to Parliament 65 Knights, M. 2009. 'Participation and Representation before Democracy: Petitions and Addresses in Pre-modern Britain', in I. Shapiro et al. (eds), Political Representation.