Something is rotten in the House of Commons. A majority of its members uphold the demeaning pretence – or perhaps even believe – that to every problem afflicting their constituents the Prime Minister can, if he chooses, find the solution.
We see this each Wednesday at Prime Minister’s Questions, when most of the 15 MPs who have won the ballot for a place on the Order Paper squander the chance to ask the PM about the great questions of the day, and thereby to hold him to account.
They instead bow down to him as supplicants, lobbyists, seekers of merely local favours for their constituents.
At PMQs this Wednesday Burnham was asked to support an express bus service from Heywood to Manchester city centre.
He was also asked to give a defence contract to Newton Aycliffe, improve hospital provision in the city of Durham, hold a meeting with a Mid-Cambridgeshire man suffering from spinal muscular atrophy to discuss the unfairness of the social care capital limit, declare an immediate start to the rebuilding of Watford General Hospital, give an assurance that “we will finally get the tram in Bolton North East”, agree that Gosport is an unsuitable place to disembark small boats, visit Suffolks Primary School in Enfield to admire its inclusive approach to children with special educational needs, and last but not least, help Kate from Cockburnspath and 9,000 other households in the Scottish Borders who are afflicted by the doubling in the last year of the cost of heating oil.
One cannot forbid all such questions, it is natural enough for MPs to attempt from time to time to bolster their chances of re-election by stepping forward as champions of their constituents’ interests, and it is also true that local problems may illustrate wider difficulties.
But at this rate the hundreds of mostly new MPs with the mentality of local councillors will kill PMQs by making it indistinguishable from a local council meeting.
These newcomers acknowledge no obligation to amuse those of us who never have occasion to use the particular hospital or tram they are demanding.
Nor do they realise a joke is sometimes the best way to puncture an opponent.
They have bored their way into Parliament and now presume that boredom will enable them to dominate the place.
These prigs consider themselves entitled to employ their unflinching rectitude as a moral club with which to crush opponents. They campaign indefatigably for more spending on welfare and often refer to medical conditions which compel compassion.
How different the approach taken by Iain Macleod, who in a debate on 27th March 1952, two years after becoming a Conservative MP, said of the renowned founder of the NHS, Nye Bevan:
“to have a debate on the National Health Service without the right hon. Gentleman would be like putting on Hamlet with no one in the part of the First Gravedigger.”
The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who had been getting up to leave the Chamber, instead stayed and listened to Macleod, who evidently knew his stuff, and was soon trading blows with Bevan about dentistry.
Within a few weeks Macleod was made a junior health minister. He was on his way.
It suits Burnham to be treated as a benevolent monarch who hands out baubles to his loyal subjects. With royal condescension he speaks of giving us a breathing space, by which he means fobbing us off with various derisory measures.
In the Budget it was announced that a Household Energy Payment of £100 will be paid in January to households in England in Council Tax bands A-D.
On checking which Council Tax band I am in – D – I was reminded that in the present year I am paying £2,207 in Council Tax. By luck rather than judgement, I have no difficulty with my energy bills.
To send people in my position £100 in January is a criminal waste of money. Yet we are supposed to tug our forelocks and express our gratitude for a gift we are paying for in taxes, unless it is being funded by unsustainable borrowing.
Alexis de Tocqueville warns, at the end of Democracy in America, what sort of despotism democratic nations have to fear:
“the supreme power…covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannise, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
Burnham relishes the role of shepherd. He and Pat McFadden are about to receive some ingenious suggestions from Alan Milburn about how to revise the small complicated rules which keep a flock of about a million young people in helpless dependence on the state.
Kemi Badenoch has made great strides in working out how to ridicule Burnham at PMQs, but cannot be left to perform the task alone. Others drawn from the various parties on the Opposition benches must play their part, and so must whatever awkward squad can still be found in Labour’s ranks.
The great mass of the soft Left which dominates the Parliamentary Labour Party is even more statist in its assumptions than Burnham, McFadden and Milburn. How it yearns to convince itself the state can meet every need of the human race, the bureaucracy can be rendered adequately responsive and peace will reign in the flock of timid and industrious animals.
Better that objections to this wishful thinking are raised with wit and courage in the Chamber than on the streets. But does this emasculated House still know how to have the necessary argument?