Parliament is little more than a bizarre theme park

Nick Clegg has an op-ed piece in today’s Independent:

Politics is in deep trouble. The vast power of the Government has reduced Parliament to little more than a bizarre theme park – and voters have lost faith with a system that doesn’t represent them. Reflecting on his first five months as Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg reckons it’s time for change.

This is the Alice in Wonderland world of Westminster. A place where MPs cannot address each other by name, but instead refer to each other by the names of their constituencies. A place where all MPs, even when they are at each other’s throats, call each other “honourable”, “right honourable” or “learned” – words that haven’t been heard around the family dinner table or over a pint in 100 years.

It’s a place where the House of Lords is called “the other place”, which sounds like a line from a cheap horror movie. A place where we’re not allowed to refer to the Queen except on ceremonial occasions. A place policed by magnificently dressed figures in white stockings with great black rosettes between their shoulders.

A place where MPs vote on their own pay and expenses. Where backbenchers can wait on the green benches for up to six hours, just to make a three-minute speech. Woe betide anyone who ventures to the loo: they’re liable to lose the chance of speaking at all. There are different coloured carpets to tell you what part of the building you’re in. Different people with different coloured badges are allowed on different parts of the river terrace according to what time of year it is. A place, in short, from another age.

Does this matter? Some say the rituals, the eccentricities, give our Parliament a special aura that is crucial in its asserting its primacy at the heart of our democracy. Surely pomp and ceremony is good, harmless fun? And it helps to pay the bills as tourists flock towards the “mother of all parliaments”, merrily spending money at the Commons gift shop on Christmas decorations and Toby jugs in the shape of Margaret Thatcher.

If only. The reality is altogether more disconcerting. The amusing, if unfathomable peculiarities of our Parliament hide a crisis in the way we are governed. A crisis in which the public feel ever more alienated from, and angry towards, the political class. And a crisis in which Parliament itself is neutered by the all encompassing power of the centralised Whitehall state. No amount of whooping and yelling in the Commons can obscure Westminster’s guilty secret: the rules of the game are totally stacked in favour of the Government, rendering Parliament largely impotent to hold ministers to account.

MPs can debate and holler all they like, but Downing Street will always get its way. In 11 years, there have been only three defeats for the Government in votes by MPs – a feat unknown across the rest of the democratic world. Ludicrously, one of those defeats was a gesture vote on whether we should all go home early.

You can read the full piece – including Nick Clegg’s solutions for fixing Parliament – on The Independent‘s website.