‘Order! The prime minister is clearly not answering the questions put to him by this House of Commons. It is pointless continuing. The House will move to next business.” In a few words Mr Speaker Bercow could fundamentally change the relationship between the Commons and the government.
Britain used to pride itself on prime minister’s question time. Even now, viewers around the world gawp in amazement as our head of government is put through an apparently medieval ordeal of mockery and invective. Americans are prone to say, enviously, that no president could emerge intact from such a test.
We should not be taken in by such flattery. Yes, the prime minister is to some extent racked during his weekly visit to the chamber, but it is too easy for him to bluster. In no sense does he now report to the nation through the Commons. We learn nothing during question time and he is not held to account. Gordon Brown’s prevarication is symptomatic of the contempt that, since the days of Tony Blair, the prime minister has had for parliament.
When Michael Martin was Speaker he would often remark that the prime minister’s replies were “not a matter for the chair”. That exemplified the problem. He saw his role as merely to keep order, not to defend the House’s right to be taken seriously.
The only thing the government still needs from the Commons is its “business”, that is to say, legislation. The time for discussion may be shamefully truncated by guillotine motions, and the government’s majority and power to twist arms may guarantee it victory nearly always, but still it needs time on the floor of the House. The Speaker has some leeway over how the House’s time is used and if he pushed out the boundaries of his discretion he could make life difficult for the administration.
On taking office the new Speaker made clear that he did not want ministers to come to the House to give a statement that had already been announced to the media. He will need to enforce that. If he hears Ed Balls, to take a name at random, repeating what we have already heard on the BBC Today programme, Bercow needs to stop him in his tracks and call next business. The sting in moving rapidly to the next item on the parliamentary agenda is that the government would be unprepared and would probably lose a whole day of parliamentary time.
If Bercow acted in that way he would provoke a row, even a constitutional crisis. But the government is weak at present and the media would surely take the Speaker’s side. It would be difficult for the Tories to oppose him since they have long complained about how Brown fails to answer.
Bercow certainly needs to recover his personal position. He came to the post sadly unprepared. In the extraordinary circumstances of his election, during the scandal of MPs’ expenses, he had no manifesto for reform. In his first moments in the chair he had the opportunity to reshape his office and provide the House with leadership. Sadly, he blew it. Brown introduced legislation to reform the House on the day that Bercow was chosen, showing that the government sees no role for him beyond shouting “Order!”; and Bercow failed to claim his ground.
However, he is unlike previous Speakers because he had long wanted the job. It is his chosen career, not his swan-song. He is intelligent and genuinely wants to leave the world better than he found it. The government’s hastily concocted reforms on MPs’ conditions were rightly torn apart by the Commons (performing at its best), while the considered proposals from Sir Christopher Kelly have yet to be announced. There is therefore much for Bercow to play for at the fagend of this administration.
The hostility he faces from the Tories is absurd. He and David Cameron ought to have been soulmates in the cause of Tory modernisation. They have fallen out because each has a sharp tongue, but both can be charming, too. Bercow should seek an alliance. He needs to help Cameron demonstrate that as prime minister he would use power differently from Blair and Brown, respecting the House of Commons and ceding powers to it.
In Totnes last week the Tories pulled off a public-relations coup (one that apparently won the admiration of David Miliband) by allowing all constituents to vote in a postal primary ballot to select their candidate for the general election. In succession to Anthony Steen, the defiantly unrepentant claimant of many thousands of pounds for his constituency home, they have chosen Sarah Wollaston, a general practitioner with no political experience.
That is not necessarily a good thing. Many MPs now have no aspiration to be statesmen. They behave like local authority councillors, fussing about Mrs Jones’s housing benefit and other things that have nothing to do with parliament. If you are that sort of MP you need a home in the constituency and an allowance to fund it. Lord Hattersley has commented that when he was in the Commons he was one of 14 members for Birmingham, of whom only two had a home in their patch. In those days a visit to the constituency every other Friday with an overnight stay ina hotel was considered sufficient.
MPs have pandered to demands that they be, or appear to be, local. Their focus on narrow constituency interests contributes to letting the government off the hook. Early-day motions congratulating the town’s football team play well in the local press, but hardly set the cabinet trembling.
Whether Wollaston proves to be a “better” MP than those who sit in Westminster depends mainly on whether the Commons recovers a proper role. If it does not, she might as well pass her time lauding Totnes and Dartington FC and filling out expenses claims.
The corruption in the Commons that matters most is that almost the single route to preferment and higher pay is through the patronage of the prime minister. Ideally, we should separate the legislature and executive completely. Our prime ministers have become presidential and we would do better to elect them directly to the office. Candidates for the Commons would then seek election not in the hope of entering No 10 but to draw up laws and keep the government in check. Ministers would be drawn from outside parliament.
Brown has, admittedly, been moving us in that direction, but in a haphazard way that further exposes the impotence of the Commons. He appointed Shriti Vadera, Paul Myners, Mervyn Davies and Peter Mandelson to key ministerial positions without oversight from our elected representatives. In a properly functioning system their appointments would be subject to parliamentary confirmation hearings.
If we do not go so far as to separate the legislature from the executive, then at least the number of MPs should be slashed and the money and space saved should be used to make the committees more powerful, with well-paid chairmen and permanent staffs, so they can truly make the government quake.
When MPs’ expenses were being exposed daily in the press, there was an expectation that out of such destruction there might emerge a new politics. The election of Bercow (ascribed to cynical Labour MPs foisting him onto Tories who dislike him) apparently dashed those hopes. Now his name is being blackened - unfairly - because public money is being spent adapting the Speaker’s house to his children’s needs.
We need to lift our eyes above the expenses scandal, bad though it was. The Commons has ceased to perform its necessary role and our democracy no longer functions well. Bercow can make a difference and should be supported. If Cameron works with him, resurrecting parliament could prove the most significant and popular achievement of his premiership.
Martin Ivens is away
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