In British politics, the wash-up (usually "the wash-up", or "the wash-up period") is the short stretch of days between the moment an election is announced and the moment Parliament actually closes down. Everyone knows they are about to run out of time, so the government and the opposition parties quietly agree on which unfinished bills can still be pushed through. The price of that speed is that the parties have to bargain: some bills are dropped completely, others are stripped of their controversial parts, and what survives passes with very little debate. That is why journalists and campaigners are often uneasy about it — real laws get made in a hurry, behind closed doors, with no one watching closely. This is a specialist word from news and politics; ordinary British people also use "wash-up" for the everyday job of washing the dishes after a meal, and in business English a "wash-up meeting" is a short meeting after a project finishes to talk about how it went. Same spelling, quite different worlds.