Commons chaos: These partisan halfwits have shamed us all

We deserve a better class of MP than this.

What a godawful spectacle. What a grotesque mortifying charade. The Commons should hang its head today. There's no other sensible response to the babbling hysteria we saw last night. 

Anyone who watched what happened should affirm to themselves their utter commitment to change. We should commit to stop thinking about constitutional reform as if it were some kind of abstract bourgeois indulgence and recognise it for what it is: the creation of a political system which is capable of acting with the seriousness demanded of it.

There is a war in the Middle East and there are acute tensions over it in the UK. We need MPs who can show gravitas. MPs who can recognise when they should put party politics to one side, who are capable of searching for consensus. But that is not what we got yesterday evening. They acted to worsen division, to find animosity when consensus was staring them right in the face, when consensus was in fact really hard to talk your way out of. They saw the angry crowds, the vitriol online, the chanting tribalists. And instead of trying to calm it down, they sought to harness its dark energy against their opponents. The people involved in yesterday's debacle are an embarrassment to parliamentary democracy. They are a mockery of it.

The basics of it are tiresome and archaic. The SNP put down an opposition day motion which was designed to hurt Labour, by forcing the party's MPs to rebel against the leadership or face the vitriol of pro-Palestinian activists. Labour came up with a compromise amendment which might have kept its MPs on side. The Conservatives introduced another amendment, which they thought would prevent the Speaker selecting the Labour amendment. They didn't do this because they had anything interesting to say. They did it because they shared with the SNP the aim of hurting Labour. They’re incapable of looking outward at the world. They can only look inward, at their tawdry party rivalries.

For what it's worth, Keir Starmer's position on Gaza has been tortured, contorted and legalistic. But honestly, so what? In what world is that the most pressing matter of the moment? Benjamin Netanyahu will do what he likes regardless of what the Labour party is doing. Anger at it is just displacement activity for a moral fury about events in Gaza which no-one can stop. 

The Speaker took the unusual step of allowing the Labour amendment despite the presence of the government one. That really is vanishingly rare. Usually only the government amendment is selected in such a vote. As the clerk of the House wrote, selecting both amendments "represents a departure from the long-established convention for dealing with such amendments on opposition days". 

The clerks are very fine people. When I interviewed several of them last year I found them to be thoughtful, knowledgable and deeply concerned with the functioning of parliament. They cared about that place so much more than the blowhards like Jacob Rees Mogg, who pontificate about its beauty and then eagerly support a prime minister when he unlawfully prorogues it. The letter the clerk of the House sent was cogent, logical and generous. He stated his objections and then listed, in a way that demonstrated his intellectual and moral stature, the reasons the Speaker might be right. And those reasons were substantial. 

The Speaker can basically do whatever he pleases. There are four sources of Commons rules: Acts of parliament, standing orders, rulings from the Chair and practice. Acts of parliament can't be unilaterally changed. But standing orders - rules the Commons passed about its own conduct - are open to the interpretation of the Speaker. Rulings from the Chair are simply rulings by the Speaker. And practice refers to things that we do because we've always done them.

Commons rules are not like criminal law. They are changeable. And the main person who can change them is the Speaker. After all: that's what precedent is. That's where it comes from. A Speaker making a decision.

More importantly, the Speaker made the right decision. He acted in the modern tradition of trying to give the House a say where it wants one. Why should we limit the number of options MPs can select, especially when it comes down to contentious and highly volatile issues? Why should we deprive them of things to vote for? And why should we do it when we can see that there are dangers to MPs from doing so? Activists have targeted individual politicians, they’ve protested outside their offices, daubed them with red paint to show they have "blood on their hands", targeted their homes, showered them with abuse online and in person. Some are under police protection. In that context, why wouldn't we want more options for MPs to vote on, if they want to?

I've always found Lindsey Hoyle overly cautious and rather too conservative. He's not one of the great reforming Speakers. But he is a decent man. He is scrupulously impartial. I've spoken with several hardline Conservatives in the past who have celebrated his total lack of bias in the chair. There's no pattern of support for Labour discernible in his judgments. He made a decision which people did not like but which could be readily justified and indeed was highly justifiable. 

This has been discussed like we have a Speaker riding roughshod over institutions and due process. That is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Commons system works. It is mercurial and changeable. It is open to interpretation and alteration in nearly everything it does. 

The correct way to view innovations by the Speaker is this: Does it assist or restrict the House's ability to make its voice heard? Does it help the party leaderships or the backbenchers? Does it increase or decrease the range of choices available to MPs? Does it enhance or diminish the House's ability to hold the government to account? 

In 2013, Speaker John Bercow went against Standing Order No.33 to allow a third amendment to the Queen's Speech, in this case to allow Brexiters to have a voice. That was the correct call. In 2019 he allowed a vote on an amendment to a government business motion to give MPs a say on Theresa May's Brexit deal. That was the correct call. In both cases, there were howls of tribal outrage, just as they were last night, because MPs are evidently incapable of seeing the world outside of their tiny-minded partisan prism. Those who can only see the world in black and white will swear that shades do not exist.

The reaction of MPs to the Speaker’s announcement was utterly shameful. Take a look at it. This is not about Gaza. It doesn't enter their minds. It's not of the remotest pertinence to what is happening. If they really cared about it - if they gave the remotest, loneliest fuck - they would be seeking ways for the House to speak with one voice on the issue, on the off-chance that it might an outside effect on the Israeli government. And that would not have been difficult, given that all the parties are ultimately calling for a ceasefire, in different formulations of sophistry and semantic nit-picking. Indeed, they have had to ingeniously construct motions and amendments to eradicate the very obvious consensus for a ceasefire that exists between them. 

These events don't come from nowhere. They are just the surface evidence of a corruption deep within the body. They are the result of a series of incentives which we have built into our political culture. Why are these individual MPs there? Because the members of local political parties - oddball hyper-partisans - are given free rein to select them without any participation from the wider community. Why are MPs so susceptible to tubthumping vitriolic speeches rather than forensic assessments? Because the government majority provided under first-past-the-post prevents them from having any meaningful say in the legislative process, thereby creating an incentive for them to shout their mouth off rather than provide practical improvements. Why do they favour game-playing cynical bullshit over consensus? Because the structure of the Commons is designed for everything to be a fight, even when there is a consensus sitting right in front of you.

This system delivers us bad governments, who pass bad laws, with the assistance of bad MPs. But after last night we surely have to take stock. We have to say that enough is enough. Is there a single person in the country - no matter how they vote, no matter what their views on Gaza - that can honestly say this was a tolerable way for the legislature to behave? Who can truly state that this is how parliamentarians should be acting in the shadow of a war? They shamed their status as MPs, they shamed parliament, and they shamed the country. If we can't see the pressing need for reform now, we never will.