ABSTRACT
The government had a hard struggle to get its business through amid the flood of private members’ legislation, and conscientious rapporteurs and committees, who spent much time on bills which never reached the statute book or even the floor of the house, sometimes had too little left to consider adequately those that finally passed. The domain of regulations is wide, since it embraces everything else, but it covers the less important aspects of public life. Nothing prevents the government using the conference machinery in conjunction with its most drastic weapon of all, the vote of confidence procedure. The fact remains that Parliament has lost its old right of legislative self-determination. The National Assembly can be confronted with a vote of confidence—in which the rules make it harder to defeat the government, whose power of dissolution makes the deputies less disposed to do so.
