Bercow on Parliament

Bercow's recent lecture is understandably getting a lot of press coverage because of his Brexit comments. While it's probably true that the man is a Remainer, I don't think recent accusations of partiality hold up. This isn't about Brexit, it's about a Prime Minister toying with the notion of breaking the law. And it should be the duty of any Speaker to stand up for the rule of law. Those opposed to the Speaker quote William Lenthall but entirely miss the point :

May it please your majesty, I have neither eyes to see, nor tongue to speak, in this place, but as the house is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here; and I humbly ask pardon that I cannot give any other answer to what your majesty is pleased to demand of me.

Which is the clearest possible example not of a Speaker doing what they're told, but standing up to the abuse of power by the executive and for the rights of the House, not the government. How much clearer an example can there be than a speaker refusing the demands of Charles I ?

But anyway, fun though it is to point out obvious bullshit, Bercow had more important and interesting things to say. He himself has played no small role in reinvigorating the sovereignty or Parliament, and it must be said that he is not unconscious of this. Its indecisiveness has become a perverse sort of strength as it struggles against a reckless buffoon. Perhaps in time, with further developments of cross-party cooperation, we'll see a system emerge that's more proactive and less reactive, more in command of the situation and able to make real choices rather than just avoid bad ones. Perhaps we're at an important moment when Parliament undergoes a major reform. Or perhaps it will all come to nothing.

Anyway, here's how Bercow thinks Parliament has rescued itself from irrelevance.


A decade or so ago, the House of Commons was not in a very good place. A series of governments with very large majorities, and governments manifestly of both political persuasions, right and left, had treated it with ever diminishing respect. It seemed to have lost its appetite to contest, to scrutinise, to hold to account ministers of the crown. It had damaged itself immensely, courtesy of the expenses scandal. It was not an entity in which the British people appeared to have much pride.

That transformation could not have been triggered by Brexit alone, nor indeed by the simple arithmetic that the 2017 general election did not produce a majority for any single party. At the
time of dissolution in April 2017 Theresa May had a working majority of 14 seats. As the withdrawal agreement that she negotiated with the EU has been defeated on three occasions, and by 230 votes, 149 votes, and 58 votes respectively, she would barely have been better off if she had not made the
fateful decision to seek her own mandate on June the 8th 2017. This is about far more than a minority status, so let me take you through would have been the decisive factors in my judgement.

The first element, and one in relation to which I hope that I have had a modest influence, is in the use of a quite old and another comparatively new institutional device to scrutinise ministers in real time. The principal machinery here has been the urgent question, or, as it is normally known in shorthand the UQ.

This is an instrument with a lot of history to it; it is provided for in our Standing Orders. it has been there for a considerable time. It allows any Member of Parliament to petition the speaker to present a
question to a minister on some matter which has arisen very recently, is of substantial significance, and would not otherwise be treated of by the House of Commons that day. At but a few hours notice a minister - if the application for the urgent question is granted - will have to respond to that question on the floor of the house. It isn't a single question and a single answer; it is ordinarily a series of exchanges, of a minimum of 20 minutes, but sometimes running to 3,0 40, 50 minutes or even an
hour.

Alas, in common with much else about Parliament, the UQ had rather withered away in the first
decade of this century. In the 12 months before I became speaker only two urgent questions had been heard in the chamber. As those 12 months included the largest global financial crisis since the 1930s, among other events, one might have thought that there was plenty of urgent material out there to discuss. Apparently not. I was determined when I was elected to - and indeed when I stood in competition for the chair - to reverse matters in that regard. As of this week there have been 658 urgent questions during my tenure. They are now an established part of parliamentary life, and I believe that most MPs would consider it very strange and thoroughly regrettable if they did not continue to be a regular supply of them.

The secondary element that I think worth mentioning to you has been a more flexible approach towards emergency debates, which are requested of the Speaker under standing order 24 - and what an individual MP can do with them. This has become the means of securing a substantial debate, of up to three hours, for which provision would not otherwise be made in government or even necessarily in official opposition time... in this instance to debate and to legislate for an act of Parliament in the course of a single day.

Very often, the issue in recent times has been that an application has been made for a debate which has included a request to suspend standing order 14 - which gives the government daily control of the order paper other than on those specified days when it does not enjoy such control. There is controversy about that. My proposition to you is that the standing orders are not the owned possessions of the executive branch. The standing orders are the property of the House, and they are
there for the benefit of the House, and to be used by the House. They are not inviolable, and they can from time to time be changed or indeed suspended if the House wills it.

A crucial aspect of this has been the transformation of the Select Committees of the House over the past decade. Until March the 4th 2010, when the House voted to change its rulebook
wholesale, there was a fundamental inconsistency - an irony which afflicted the Select Committee system. These were committees which were supposed to oversee the executive as it discharged departmental duties, but the chairs of the Select Committees and the membership of them were very largely under the command of the whips, who were themselves the agents of the executive or indeed, so far as the opposition were concerned, of the shadow or aspiring executive.

To put it mildly, ladies and gentlemen, this was not exactly a level playing field. Ministers rarely lived in fear of a Select Committee. To put it very simply, we had a peculiar situation in which those charged with chairing or serving on the committee's deputed to scrutinise the executive were hand-picked by members of that very executive. Now of course that was an arrangement which was entirely congenial to generations of whips of both major parties. People who have power don't rush to give it up. But the question is was that the right arrangement. or was it, as the House decided, time for the House frankly to get off its knees and to take control of its own core functions ?

I think today ministers would not be wise to be too relaxed about appearances before Select Committees. From 2010 the chairs of select committees have been elected by the whole house in secret ballots. Their membership is also determined by election within the various parliamentary parties, once again ordinarily by secret ballot. Candidates are unlikely to endear themselves to their electorates by stressing how little independence of thought they possess, and how enthusiastic they are, simply to help ministers out. These are highly prized places, as the contest to succeed Nicky Morgan as the Treasury Select Committee chair is currently demonstrating.

For many MPs, ladies and gentlemen, those Select Committee chairmanships - all memberships thereof - represent an alternative career path. In other words success in politics isn't just about securing and retaining ministerial office. There are other routes to fulfillment personally and to
effective performance professionally.

An additional factor has come with the creation of the Backbench Business Committee in 2010, what has come to be known by the shorthand BBCOM. This allows considerable influence over the schedule of the House, especially on Thursdays. This committee controls the business of the House, typically a day a week, and accuses for debate and vote matters which would not have been chosen by the government of the day for debate and vote, and which indeed might not be the priorities of Her Majesty's official opposition either, but which are of intense and continuing concern to large numbers of members and, importantly, very often to their constituents.

Indeed it is, if I may say so, probably my biggest single regret as Speaker that the Backbench Business Committee has not been supplemented (as it should have been, and was scheduled to be) by a separate House Business Committee, so that control over parliamentary prime time - that is to say, government time - was not exclusively in the hands of the executive.

I think it's important, ladies and gentlemen, to acknowledge how much has changed at Westminster over the last decade - because it's another reason to believe that the new assertiveness of
the House of Commons is not a passing fad, it is with us to stay. That cultural shift has a number of sources. The first is that the 2010 election produced a House in which 35 percent of members were new. This new blood was thus a clean break from the past. This new blood has not been ground down by the long period of decline that other MPs had endured. It was rather much more willing to ask questions about why the House operated as it did. I know that as early as 2011 (on the whole) pro Brexit side, quite a significant number of new Conservative Members of Parliament several dozen were rebelling against the whip, which was not a common phenomenon in earlier Parliaments. It
was absolutely horrifying as far as the government whips were concerned because they had rather assumed that these people would be good boys and good girls and "behave".

If you believe in a renewed and self-confident accession of Parliamentarism, however, I think that you might feel this is a healthy thing. That new body of colleagues was much more willing to ask questions about why the House operated as it did, as I've said. And in many cases these were questions which were long overdue and for which, put simply, change was the answer.

The blood was however not merely new but different. We've a long way to travel before we'll see a House of Commons which is truly representative of modern Britain, but only the most churlish would fail or refuse to recognise just how much progress has been made in this regard over the last decade, itself a very considerable tribute to the energy, vision and focus of the political parties. There are so many more female MPs, 208, many more who enjoy an ethnic minority heritage - 52 I think now or 8% - and many on both sides of the house who are not heterosexual. There's more variety in the past employment of those who sit on the green benches.

The houses also on the whole a younger place than it used to be, although I think it is extremely important that we do not deny ourselves the talents of those who want to continue as Members of Parliament well beyond the conventional retirement age. In their different ways, the likes of
Ken Clarke and Denis Skinner contribute much to our proceedings.

To conclude this section, then, I think that the Brexit episode and the restoration of parliamentary will should not be seen in isolation. That restoration is about something bigger and better - namely, the willingness of the House to be a much better check and balance on the executive, an ambition which I believe we should all vigorously applaud.