Stuart Weir (London, Democratic Audit): A delicious irony, between the elaborate pantomime of the Commons’ tradition of independence enacted once again for the royal opening and the abject reality of the House’s current weakness, another aspect of this cruelly made evident by the Speaker’s pitiful performance.
However his inadequacies have already been clearly signalled in previous episodes of doubt and confusion. What hasn’t been discussed is the foolish and partisan way in which the House now chooses the Speaker, whose charade of refusal fails to mask the attraction of the office for MPs who are past it (or have never been with it) for a prestigious perk. It is a national version of the yearly processions of mayors being crowned in town and county halls around the world, and operates broadly on the same principle of buggin’s turn. It hardly seems to matter at local level, though it is often an unnecessarily costly and pompous affair, and frequently unedifying. I still remember a drunk mayor in Hackney tumbling into a swimming pool on the occasion of a show house opening.
It is of course a truism that “Parliament” doesn’t exist as a body, nor even the Commons, except when MPs’ salaries and conditions are being discussed. It is a truism that parliamentary sovereignty represents executive sovereignty in action, even in such matters as Parliament’s legislative programme and rules. The governing principle is, “the government must get its business through”.
Even so, you would at least hope that MPs, when going through the ponderous act of electing a Speaker would cast their votes on the basis of merit and a proper sense of the significance of the idea that the Speaker should be in the front line to defend and improve Parliament. I have worked in several sub-Saharan African parliaments where this is how Speakers interpret their role, relying on the Westminster tradition and the 1688 Bill of Rights. Indeed, Cyril Ndebele, the Speaker in the Zimbabwe Parliament until 2001, defied Robert Mugabe by invoked the Bill of Rights to defend an MP who had called for the President “to go” in the parliamentary chamber.
