Bercow’s Backbench Bill of Rights
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One of the great joys of politics teaching in outer London is the opportunity to take students to such a rich variety of events. We managed to secure places for several of our Year 12 students to head over to Portcullis House to hear the new Speaker, John Bercow, address the Hansard Society. Nice chance to look at the new bit of parliament that they don’t include on the standard tour, and to hear the Speaker outline his case for backbench reform.
It was a packed meeting, with many of us standing throughout Bercow’s tour de force and subsequent question and answer session. But who can doubt that being there was worthwhile, and an opportunity for students to hear current political issues being debated at the very heart of Westminster. Mr. Bercow seemed early on to be critical, at least in passing, of two recent developments in the life of MPs. One was the excessive whipping that now made them lobby fodder in the same way that the soldiers of the Somme were cannon fodder (an uneasy analogy for several reasons); the other was in the increasing localism that forced MPs to become essentially super-councillors, working on constituency casework rather than engaging in debates on national issues. I have to say that in neither of these criticisms would I differ from our new Speaker, although the fact that he was a maverick Tory backbencher himself may have made at least his first criticism easier to make.
But his firm focus was to outline no less than TEN proposals to strengthen the role of MPs as inquisitors and legislators. What he called a “Backbench Bill of Rights”. he focused half of his points on the need to improve MPs’ ability to scrutinise legislation - including greater support for Private Members’ Bills - and half on giving them better opportunities for inquisitorial holding of the government to account. These are clearly essential measures, and were welcome proposals from a man whose office puts him at the heart of any likely Commons reform. Indeed, Bercow’s service, as a Speaker loathed by his own party and no longer in hock to the governing party, has been to feel free enough to say what surely every MP is thinking (those, at any rate, who have been gifted with that ability). That if the Commons is to recover some respect in the public mind, it can no longer continue to be the limp plaything of governments, and must start to assert some level of independence and even aggression. It is worth pointing out here what Bercow himself acknowledged mind you, which is that the Commons does not always play down to its caricature of unthinking passers of government laws - as witness the research done by Nottingham University’s Philip Cowley.
The questions afterwards brought his belief that ministers in the Lords should be subject to direct questioning from MPs, and a further comment that he would like to see the long summer holiday that MPs enjoy reduced, but this latter was hardly the meat of his talk. All the more of a pity that it happens to be the BBC’s main story from the lecture, but perhaps that’s because the holiday question was asked by a BBC journalist?
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