Parliament
Elected law-making body; 2026 exposed how often formal power fails to become real influence.
On 26 March the European Parliament voted 101 to 9 to delay the AI Act's high-risk employment rules, and in the same vote stripped a binding worker-disclosure duty that later negotiations reduced to a non-binding 'encourage' clause by 29 June, a case study in formal votes losing force between institutions.
Last refreshed: 4 August 2026 · Appears in 2 active topics
Why do 2026's parliaments, from Tehran to Westminster, keep losing power to executives?
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Is Britain Actually Broke?Background
A Parliament is a state's principal elected law-making body: sometimes bicameral, with an upper and lower house, sometimes unicameral, and drawing its members through election, appointment, or a mix of both. Its core function is turning policy into binding law, distinguishing it from an executive that merely administers, though the boundary between the two blurs in practice more often than constitutional theory suggests.
A Parliament can hold every procedural power on paper, votes, committees, the ability to withhold funds, and still see decisions made elsewhere: by an executive acting first and seeking approval later, by a court, or simply by an institution's own absence or inaction shaping the outcome by default.
That gap matters most in moments of stress: wartime footing, rapid technological change, or contested elections, when the temptation for executives to act and explain afterwards is strongest. Reading any story about a specific national legislature well means asking first whether the vote in question was binding or merely expressive.
Parliament traded AI rights for time
On 26 March the European Parliament voted 101 to 9 to delay the AI Act's high-risk employment rules from August 2026 to December 2027, and in the same vote quietly stripped a provision that would have obliged employers to ensure staff understood the AI systems used against them. The move mattered because the Act had contained Europe's only binding framework requiring that disclosure.
The literacy question then bounced between institutions for weeks. A 7 May Council-Parliament deal in the Digital Omnibus negotiations dropped the binding employer duty entirely, replacing it with a non-binding instruction for member states to 'encourage' AI literacy, and the Council gave the package final approval on 29 June. What began as parliamentary protection for workers ended as a request with no enforcement mechanism attached.
Parliament went unconsulted on base access
Westminster's uncodified war-powers convention, hardened after the 2003 Iraq vote, is supposed to mean the government seeks parliamentary cover before committing British forces to a conflict. On 23 March Prime Minister Starmer formally rejected calls for a Commons vote on UK involvement in the Iran war, framing US access to RAF Fairford and Diego Garcia as serving 'specific and limited defensive purposes'; his own Attorney General had reportedly assessed the operation did not accord with international law.
Jeremy Corbyn's bill demanding a vote before base use attracted only 11 co-sponsors in the 650-seat chamber, and YouGov found 58 per cent of Britons opposed US use of UK bases, a wider margin than recorded before the 2003 invasion. Starmer proceeded without putting the question to a vote at all.
Parliament doubled as a war negotiator
Iran's Parliament spent March blurring the line between legislating and negotiating. Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf travelled to Islamabad as one of Tehran's two principal negotiators in the first US-Iran talks since 1979, while the same institution moved to codify a Strait of Hormuz toll into domestic law. Ghalibaf also threatened, separately from any negotiating position, that Gulf energy and oil infrastructure would be 'irreversibly destroyed' if the US struck Iranian power plants.
The arrangement created a structural weakness: Ghalibaf is a legislative figure, and the Revolutionary Guard answers to the Supreme Leader's office, not to Parliament, so any deal he reached still needed separate military sign-off. Congress, in the same month, refused both to authorise the war and to fund it, leaving legislatures on both sides constraining a conflict neither could stop.
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