200 years of speeches made in the U.K.’s Houses of Parliament have been made available to download by Glasgow University. If you’re interested in the mocking, backstabbing, occasionally-exulted language of British statesmen and women, you’ll be there a while, as it amounts to 7.6 million speeches and 1.6 billion words.
Parliamentary speeches have advanced political careers over the centuries, but more often than not destroyed them. Those key moments when politicians speak their minds and history is made, usually leading to the downfall of those whom their words were directed.
Political speeches and chamber quips always make for entertaining reading, and researchers at the University of Glasgow have made them even easier to source. It includes all the greats: Sir Winston Churchill’s many wartime addresses to Parliament; Geoffrey Howe’s resignation speech attacking Margaret Thatcher; and Dennis Healey’s famous riposte to Geoffrey Howe’s verbal assault, likening it to “being savaged by a dead sheep”.
Mercifully, there is a search engine and a preliminary set of automated subject tags.
Others will likely be linking to famous put-downs and betrayals. I, however, have found the earliest mention of the English vice. It comes surprisingly late, in 1958, yet is exemplary.
…if I may I will say one thing in opening: The vice Anglais is not buggery but hum-buggery: This is said also on the Continent: It is one of the things we ought to make a very great effort to avoid: I think that both sides in this controversy should make an effort to avoid it: I believe that the sort of propaganda which has been circulated round the House during the last week or two, and through the post, has done much more harm than good to the cause it tries to serve: On the subject of homosexuality, I go no further
Homosexual sex was legalized several years later, a blink of an eye in parliamentary time.
Someone get one of these newfangled neural nets trained on this lot, eh?