As a new MP, people in my constituency often ask me ‘What’s it like?’. My usual answer: ‘Bonkers!’. I don’t just mean that the workload is huge and the learning curve vertical. I also mean the way parliament itself works: archaic, full of unwritten rules and eye-wateringly inefficient.
Of course, I’m still learning the ropes. And some might say – indeed some already have – that new MPs should sit down and shut up until we’ve got our feet under the table. But I respectfully disagree. If we newbies – who by definition are committed to parliament, having worked our socks off to get here – are quickly disillusioned by the place, it’s surely no surprise that so many of the general public say they’re fed up with Westminster. Indeed, I’ve lost count of how many constituents on doorsteps have bemoaned the state of British politics.
So when I observe all the ways that parliament fails to serve the people, and think to myself ‘this is no way to run a country’, I feel that new MPs have a responsibility to speak out and call for things to change.
There are so many ways in which our Westminster parliament is inefficient, opaque and undemocratic. You’d never get away with running a business or a charity in such an unproductive way. So why do we tolerate it in ‘the mother of all parliaments’?
One of the first speeches I made in the chamber, back in late July, was on the topic of modernisation of the House of Commons. I was blown away by the response – I didn’t even post it on social media myself, but others did, and it got over a million views within a day. In my speech, I spoke from the heart about some of my observations in the three short weeks that I’d been an MP, focusing on three key areas: sitting, speaking, and voting.
Let me start with voting. I knew MPs had to vote by walking through the lobbies. I knew it was time-consuming and inefficient. But it’s only when you’ve had to spend an hour walking round in very slow circles 4 times, with each vote taking 15 minutes, that it sinks in just what a total waste of everyone’s time this is. The opportunity cost is huge; MPs could spend that time much more productively. And the financial cost is huge too. An hour of 650 MPs’ time walking round in circles costs the taxpayer over £30,000. You could pay a nurse for a year with that money instead. If we assume that MPs do an average of 4 votes per week, that translates into half a day every month wasted walking round in circles, and a total cost of over £1.3 million per year.
Alternatively, MPs could vote electronically in a matter of seconds, then get on with serving their constituents.
What else could we achieve if we moved to electronic voting? A complete transformation of the chamber, for a start. Most people don’t realise that the voting lobbies have a larger physical footprint than the chamber itself. You could literally double the size of the chamber if you got rid of the lobbies. Just imagine: each MP could have a seat, a desk, a socket even (this is the 21st century after all…)
Remodelling the chamber into a hemicycle – like virtually every other parliament in the world – is a long overdue change. Churchill, who was the one who insisted on rebuilding it in its current form after WW2, said ‘we shape our buildings, and our buildings shape us’. It’s long past time to recognise that a chamber that actively divides MPs into two camps, whose dimensions are dictated by sword length, is a chamber that heightens polarisation and feeds the sort of oppositional, performative politics that ordinary people are fed up with. People hate argy-bargy. They are tired of polarisation.
The process for allocating speaking time is also anachronistic. Undoubtedly the speaker, deputy speakers, and their assistants do an extraordinary job in remembering everyone’s names, keeping an eye on the room, trying to get political balance, etc. But surely we can all agree that bobbing up and down every few minutes for sometimes hours on end is not an efficient or accessible way to form an orderly queue to speak? In the European Parliament, it was all done electronically in advance and there’d be a published list of who was speaking and in what order. What is stopping us from following suit?
It strikes me that there’s a real opportunity for change in parliament now. The majority of MPs are newly elected. We’re not yet institutionalised; we come from all sorts of backgrounds where we’ve seen and experienced other ways of doing things. I’m hopeful that this new energy can help shift Westminster out of some of its ruts. A Modernisation Committee has been established. And we’ll probably have to decant from the Palace of Westminster very soon to enable essential building works. What better time for an honest and open conversation about what works, what doesn’t, and what could be improved?
Taken together this feels like a chance for change. Let’s seize the moment to haul our clunking democracy into the 21st century!
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