What is DisMember?
DisMember is a search and research tool built on the official record of the UK House of Commons — Hansard. It gives journalists, researchers, and politically-minded readers a fast, intelligent way to find what MPs have actually said, scored by how revealing, combative, or memorable the contribution is.
What's in It
Not everything said in Parliament is worth your time. Most of it — procedural formalities, written answers, ministerial boilerplate — isn't. DisMember covers a curated selection of spoken Commons contributions from 2010 onwards: the moments that had something behind them. Each one has been read, evaluated, and scored across five dimensions before it makes it into the index.
Smart Search
Smart Search understands what you mean, not just what you typed. Search for "political chaos" and you'll surface contributions about instability, crisis, and collapse — including ones that never use those exact words.
Search for "Blackadder" and you'll find MPs reaching for Baldrick's cunning plan as a metaphor for government policy — not just bare mentions of the show.
Try it with concepts: "moments MPs lost their temper", "MPs defending the indefensible", "promises that aged badly".
Exact Search
When you need to know whether something specific was actually said — a name, a phrase, a reference — switch to Exact Search. It searches the full text of every contribution for your precise words.
"Fawlty Towers" finds every MP who invoked it. "weapons of mass destruction" finds every time those words appeared in the chamber. No interpretation, no approximation.
Filtering & Browsing
Search by contributor to pull everything we have on a specific MP — from their most combative moments to their strangest tangents. Browse mode shows their full record, sorted by spice.
Filter by party to compare how different sides of the house handled the same issue. The party breakdown in the sidebar updates live as you search.
Filter by date to pin things to a specific parliament, a specific crisis, or a specific week.
Filter by tone using the emoji buttons. Combine them: Aggressive + Ironic gives you the most cutting attacks. Eccentric alone finds the chamber's true outliers.
Filter by constituency or region to find what MPs from a specific area have been saying — useful for local journalism and constituency research.
The timeline chart in the panel on the right shows when contributions cluster. Drill into a year, then a month, to see what was happening and when.
Reading a Result
Each result card shows the MP, their party, their role at the time, and the date. The headline is a characterisation of the contribution — read it critically, it's there to help you find what you're looking for, not to be taken as a direct quote.
The quote in each card is taken directly from Hansard. Click Hansard ↗ on any card to go to the original source and read the full contribution in context.
Always verify
DisMember is a research and discovery tool. Quoted material is drawn from the official parliamentary record, but context matters — always read the original before publishing. Every result links directly to Hansard.
Coverage
DisMember covers spoken contributions in the House of Commons from 2010 onwards. The index focuses on substantive contributions — the ones with something in them worth finding. Procedural formalities, written answers, and purely administrative exchanges are excluded by design.
Coverage is not uniform across the full period. More recent parliaments are more fully indexed. The data comes from Hansard via the official parliamentary API.