the brilliantly leaping gazelle

The juvenile in me can’t resist stating the obvious that House of Commons, in having voted to progress the assisted dying bill onto its next parliamentary stage really put the black into Black Friday. You know, because black is the colour most people associate with death, wear when mourning and at funerals. No other reason. I just felt the need to point that out, because of times we live in. I’m not sure what’s worse; either feeling that you have to explain it in case deliberately people misconstrue it for reasons of their own, or going ahead and doing it anyway, just to be on the safe side.

Anyway, the theme of this post isn’t to discuss the merits or otherwise of yesterdays vote, as long overdue as the outcome was welcome was. Its to make the rather obvious point that rather than showing parliament at its best, which seems to the prevailing opinion, pronounced upon by MP’s themselves and slavishly reported on and amplified by the media, it showed it at its worst, and as MP’s as the self-aggrandising blowhards I’ve always suspected most of them are.

Consider this. Yesterday the chamber was packed. There was barely enough standing room. The debate lasted hours. MP’s on both sides of the argument made impassioned, intelligent speeches. Lots of them admitted they had changed their minds after speaking to their constituents. Some even shared those stories. The mood was of calm solemnity, befitting the occasion. 

Now try and think back of the last time you can think of that happening. Difficult isn’t it? Those seemingly never ending Brexit votes don’t count. They were to calm and reason what death is to life. No, its only when a decision to go to war is being debated that the chamber is like it was yesterday. The one that sticks out in my mind was the debate on the eve of the Iraq war and that was in 2003!  Possibly there been a few more since, but only a handful, and a newborn baby’s hand at that.

Normally the chamber is hardly ever close to being full. Only for Prime Ministers Questions (PMQ’s) is it full and that’s only because MP’s hope that they’ll get the chance to ask the Prime Minister a question, which’ll hopefully get them on national or regional TV news and remind their constituents who they are. They can then put a clip of it on their website. PMQ’s lasts for half an hour once a week and as soon as it’s over MP’s vanish as fast as a virgin on prom night. So far from yesterdays debate showing Parliament at its best, it in fact showed what it could be, but very rarely is, the exception that proves the rule..

That’s my first problem with all this. The second concerns what happens next. Because if you only based your conclusions on TV news footage from outside Parliament as the result of the vote filtered out, you’d be forgiven for thinking that by the end of next week there’d be disabled people in wheelchairs screaming as they were being propelled by unscrupulous relatives to death centres and it would all be perfectly legal. 

The problem with a properly functioning democracy is one of its inherent flaws; that unless the electorate knows how it functions – at least have a have a basic understanding of how it all works – it isn’t a properly functioning one. Not in my book anyway.

Whilst the bill passed the second reading in Parliament yesterday, there are still loads more stages for it to go through if it is ever to become law. Many MP’s appeared on TV stressing their unease about the bill as it is currently drafted, but were at pains to point out that they’d only voted for it to progress through its many Parliamentary stages precisely because they wanted the time to scrutinise it, to suggest amendments and have more debates. The haggle scene in ‘Life Of Brian’ is the clearest example of what all this means in practice; the earliest it’ll become a law that people can make use of is early 2026 at best.

And having a right to do something doesn’t mean you’ll actually ever do it, but that if you wanted to, you could. As far as I’m concerned, the sort of people who are wilfully misinterpreting what happened yesterday in parliament are not too dissimilar to anyone who detects an ‘ist’ at the start of this post.