British politics is suffocated by pointlessly traditional ceremonies. Get rid of them.
By J.C.
THE most-discussed aspect of the Queen’s Speech in Parliament yesterday was the fainting of an over-dressed 12-year-old viscount. Treat that as indicative. Of all the moth-eaten bits of pseudo-constitutional nonsense that pass for landmarks of the parliamentary calendar, the monarch’s address at the start of a new legislative session is the biggest waste of time.
Every year (or almost every year; the 2010 session mercifully lasted for two) the Queen travels from Buckingham Palace to Westminster in a spectacularly naff golden coach. Helicopters whirr above Whitehall, irritating journalists in the nearby Economist offices but affording television viewers the obligatory (albeit shaky and not terribly informative) 30-second shot of the roof of the prime ministerial car. The Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod, a ceremonial parliamentary clerk, marches from the House of Lords to the House of Commons, thrice knocks on the door before summoning MPs. By only slightly younger tradition, he is heckled by Dennis Skinner, a gnarled republican and Labour MP. Led by party leaders, who awkwardly feign polite conversation with one another, they duly process into the upper house.
The Queen then reads out a spin-doctored account of what her government plans to achieve in the coming session. The contents have usually been leaked to the morning newspapers, so everyone knows what they will be before she begins to speak. Then MPs troop back into the Commons for a vigorous bout of pre-scripted point scoring.
This year’s display was even more vacuous than usual. The coalition parties have implemented much of their 2010 programme. The other bits have been kicked into the long grass for lack of agreement. Other governments would have called an election by now, but the Conservatives and Lib Dems tied their own hands by fixing the parliamentary term at five years. The outcome, as we noted in April, is lethargy and a long election campaign. So the monarch’s comments were unusually light on prospective legislative detail. Indeed, had it not been for the unfortunate page-boy's collapse in the middle of a passage about relations with Iran (queenly eyes barely flickering from the page), the event would have been entirely overshadowed by the ongoing briefing war between Theresa May and Michael Gove, two ambitious cabinet ministers, and today's by-election in Newark, where the UK Independence Party is expected to give the Tories a run for their money.
The pointlessly traditional artifice, the gaudy distractions, the lack of substance—why do Britons put up with it all? Why, for that matter, should they be surprised if foreigners see the country as a quaintly Downton Abbey-fied backwater rather than the dynamic, modern society that it would prefer to be treated as? Not only is the Queen's Speech an international embarrassment, it is not even useful to the government of the day: it forces ministers to come up with things to announce regardless of whether they want or need to do so (a much-heralded new regulation on plastic bags in yesterday's speech indicates the depths that must be plumbed). It is a total waste of time and resources, grumbles one senior adviser.
The Queen's Speech may be especially silly, but it is not uniquely so. Sessions of Prime Minister's Questions are another example. These weekly half-hour bouts embody everything that puts voters off politics: obsequious platitudes from the ambitious, brayed slogans and juvenile attempts to wrong-foot opponents from others. None has a right of reply to the prime minister (apart from the leader of the opposition, and he only gets six questions).
The twice-yearly financial statements—the Budget speech in spring and the Autumn Statement—are further cases in point. There is no good reason why the government's big tax, spending and regulatory announcements should all be bundled into a single package. Here, too, the result is policy made for the sake of policy, not necessity. A penny off this, a freeze to that, a new quango for the other thing—far from unifying economic policy, the spectre of Budget Day forces the Treasury to think in terms of bullet points in a speech (and on the next day's front pages) at the expense of a holistic, steadily developing policy strategy reflecting the long-term picture. As chancellor from 1997 to 2007 Gordon Brown issued budget after budget that added up to less than the sum of their parts; annual tsunamis of micro-announcements drawn from a spreadsheet of ideas curated by Eds Balls and Miliband. The rest (debatably) was credit-crunch-tastic history.
Any sane political system would require its main finance minister only to announce policies according to a pragmatic, flexible timetable. It would enable legislators to scrutinise them one-by-one, rather than in a big lump at pre-ordained times of year. It would also grant MPs several questions at PMQs, and thus the chance properly to debate a matter with the prime minister. It would enable him to refer them to his cabinet colleagues, ditching the fusty pretence of prime ministerial omniscience. And it would unveil the government's overall programme for a new legislative session in an accessible fashion, perhaps with a national road-show giving voters the chance to question members of the government, or an American-style State of the Nation speech followed by a televised debate.
Yet there are few signs of any of this happening. The cold, dead hand of tradition smothers new ways of running Westminster, making them unthinkable. "The alternatives would only be worse," caution many, unthinkingly. And people wonder why trust in politics is so low.
So here is a proposal for the manifesto-writers. Whichever party wins next year's elections should use the first paragraph of the 2015 Queen's Speech to commit to a debate, involving the public, on how to make the opening of parliament, PMQs, budget speeches and other such tradition-bound boondoggles more modern and open. Preferably, this should include the option of getting rid of (or at least, fundamentally reforming) the whole darn lot.
