History
In 1836, due to the obvious conflict of interest, the Clerks of the House were debarred from carrying out what had been a lucrative line of agency work. Parliamentary Agents expanded into the space left by the clerk and formed the Society of Parliamentary Agents in 1840.
The high point for Parliamentary Agency work was during the mid 19th century during the rise of the Railway industry, as these companies often needed Parliamentary powers in building and running their operations. This was a source of political controversy, since Railway directors were becoming seen to be overly powerful, leading the Prime Minister at the time, William Ewart Gladstone, to identify Parliamentary Agents as ‘the deeper power in opposition’.
Read more about this topic: Parliamentary Agents
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.”
—Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887–1971)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)