6th September 1989: Prime Minister Thatcher addresses the IPU Centenary Conference in London. In her address she said the following: “People will not be persuaded to make the sacrifices necessary for economic reform to succeed unless they are given their political rights and the opportunity to take part in decisions…
May 1986: BGIPU delegation to the USSR led by The Rt Hon Viscount Whitelaw CH MC, including round table talks with Mikhail Gorbachev.
December 1984: BGIPU delegation from the USSR to Westminster, led by Politburo Member Mr Mikhail Gorbachev See here Prime Minister Thatcher’s letter thanking the BGIPU Chair for Mr Gorbachev’s historic visit.
April 1984: The British Delegation to the IPU Assembly in Geneva lunched with the Argentineans attending the Conference for the first time in many years and thereby established the first post-Falkland’s parliamentary bridge with that country.
4th September 1975: Her Majesty the Queen addresses the inaugural ceremony of the IPU Assembly in London: “The parliamentary approach to world affairs offered the best hope of winning that concord between nations which had been sought for so long. It enabled change without violence, because it’s essence was…
The Inter-Parliamentary Conference takes place in Brasilia during the Cuban missile crisis and adopted a resolution on the crisis, to which President John F Kennedy responds personally.
The London Conference opening ceremony is televised for the first time with Richard Dimbleby. Sir Winston Churchill sends a message to the Conference: ‘Our Parliament has survived because it made itself the spokesman not of government but of the people. In the fiercest clash of debate we have jealously…
1947 – 57: UK Peer Lord Stansgate (formerly the UK House of Commons Member and wartime Secretary of State for Air, William Wedgwood Benn MP) elected to the Presidency of the IPU in the crucial post-WWII period and ensures the organisation’s work continues and flourishes with the resumption of…
Just a few months after the cessation of hostilities, the IPU recommences its work with substantive meetings in 1945 and 1946 before covening its 36th Assembly in Cairo in 1947 to discuss the new challenges facing the world in the wake of WWII.
An IPU meeting in London establishes a European Sub-Committee. This Sub Committee is now known as the 12+ Group within which the BGIPU operates at Multilateral Assemblies.
