Westminster Commentary
The Parliament of Plots
By PETER KIRK, MP (TAPER is on holiday) IN his delightful reminiscences, Claud Cockburn recalls the occasion when he fled from the employment of The Times into the more congenial arms of the Daily Worker, pursued by letters from Geoffrey Dawson; in the course of which that enigmatic editor was driven to remark, presumably as an in- ducement to Cockburn to stay, 'I have always regarded The Times as a journal of the Left,' adding, with characteristic caution, 'though not, I think, of the extreme Left.' I cannot help wondering what Dawson would have made of the furore which his old newspaper has caused —a furore of which a journal of the Left might well have been the begetter, but which has come oddly from the pillar of the Establishment which Delane's Thunderer has long since become.
It is typical of the strange state of politics in this country at the moment that no Member of Parliament has accepted the obvious explanation of the whole affair—namely, that the paper was short of a lead story, and overdressed a bit of speculation by its Political Correspondent. In any other paper, yes—but not in The Times. There- fore, the argument runs, there must have been a deep-laid plot somewhere. If this Parliament ever gets a nickname, it should surely be called the Parliament of Plots. The Bank Rate Plot, the Sticky Labels Plot, Mr. Hurry's Plot, Sir William Haley's Plot, and now Mr. Clore's devastating Plot against the workers' beer—it is on these matters, rather than on others of rather more moment, that Her Majesty's Opposition have con- centrated their fire. Those of us who sit silent on the Government back benches sometimes wonder whether Parliament has always been so deter- mined in the pursuit of the trivial.
For this is no new development, so far as this Parliament is concerned. With the exception of Suez—and that did not last long in parliamentary terms—and the Rent Act, where the Labour Party was virtually forced by instinctive reaction into opposition, the major clashes in this Parlia- ment between the parties have been over things which frankly did not matter tuppence. Mr. Harold Wilson and Colonel Lipton, for instance, seem to think that the Watney's takeover bid is going to stir the people of this country to a frenzy of rage against the capitalist system; maybe it should, but I very much doubt if the average man cares at all whether he drinks his pint in a pub owned by Mr. Clore or one owned by Mr. Combs. (Though he would, I think, be a little distressed to find himself drinking it in one managed by Sir Brian Robertson, which seems to be the alternative which some Members of the Oppo- sition have in mind.) Indeed, the whole thing is regarded as something in the nature of a sporting event, coupled with a feeling of envy of those who were holding Watncy's shares at the right moment.
All this makes me a bit sceptical when I hear people, like Leslie Hale last week, telling me that this Parliament is dead. One would expect a certain malaise at this stage in a Parliament's life, but in fact the present malaise seems to me to be no worse than at any other stage in the last four years, especially at this time of year, when the Derby is being run and Old Etonians are celebrating George III's birth or death or some- thing else connected with that batty old monarch. and the weather is fine and the business of the House is intolerably dull, as it always is towards the end of a session, when we are all clearing up. No: the question is not whether this Parliament is dead, but whether it ever was alive.
It seemed to come to life at the time of Suez, but that was only a brief flicker. Before and since, it pursued its even course through four years, getting through a surprising amount of good work and the inevitable amount of bad. And, for the most part, this work has gone vir- tually unnoticed in the country outside.
Parliament, in fact, has changed. We are all technicians now, and that may be no bad thing in a technological age. But people are not in- terested in other people's technicalities, and so they are not interested in the minutiae of politics. We are put there to get on with that sort of thing and, so long as what we are doing does not. impinge in any strictly personal fashion on their lives or habits, they would not wish to interfere. They know that they can get in touch with us at any time to try to get their pension increased or to speed up the provision of a council house; they see us about the place, attending dinners and opening fates. For the rest, we are doing a technical job in a technical way, just like the man who mends the electric light.
This is very galling for us, of course. We are no longer the great public figures we used 01 be, and the irritations of the job—which David Price so well expounded a fortnight ago —have little of the glamour left which used to compen- sate for them. As people do not want to be bothered with the major issues, and as, in fact, the differences between the parties tend to become more and more part of the technicalities of the job, we are driven to make major issues out of minor ones in order to show that we are still on the job and to convince our sup- porters that the other side are villains of the deepest die in order to keep their interest., up. Parliament, in fact, has not adjusted itself to its new role, and the Report of the Select Com- mittee on Procedure does not take us very much farther in that direction.
One of the cries is 'More general debates.' But general debates in themselves are not very much use if the electorate is not interested in the sub- ject of them. New means are needed. One of the fundamental problems of the present time is the relationship of the nationalised industries, not so much to Parliament—although that is important —but to the people.. The train service to my con- stituency is a source of constant irritation to my constituents. It is a major issue to them—and yet it is the one major issue on which I am de- barred from raising Questions in the House. And this, too, because of a technicality which people simply do not understand. A lot of the irritation people have with Parliament, and the apathy of Members themselves, arises from the apparent inefficiency of the machine rather than any hostility to Parliament itself. The management of the nationalised industries is a matter of far greater interest to the electorate than Watney's beer or Haley's Comet; yet we never discuss the former and we pursue with tremendous zeal hares started by the latter. No wonder people become indifferent to Parliament and to its Members.
And yet the relationship between the indi- vidual Member and his constituents has probably never been closer. The potentialities for a revival of interest in parliamentary government in this country are all there. But it will take more than the Report of the Select Committee on Procedure to bring this revival about. Parliament is not dead, but sleepeth. Something pretty drastic is needed to wake it up.
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