For reasons I won’t trouble you with, I missed the events of Wednesday afternoon and evening in the House of Commons. Normally, that would be a cause for anxiety in a person as committed to service journalism/category 5 drama as myself. Like many in the immediate wake of the political upheavals of 2016, I found myself sinking into the dopamine-assisted rhythms of the new normal, where, on both sides of the Atlantic, you sometimes felt you’d missed an entire news cycle if you left a screen to make a cup of tea.
In 2022, I did a book tour that involved nightly stage events discussing the political turmoil of the past few years/minutes. Because this coincided with the prime ministership of one Liz Truss, there came a point every evening where I worried my information may not be entirely au courant, and had to ask the audience (who had their phones) whether or not she was still prime minister. And, as you’ll recall, one day she wasn’t.
Anyway, the point of all this is that on the matter of Wednesday Night in Westminster, I’ve come to feel it was a benefit not to have spent the day following every minute of the chaos/grimness/arcane procedure/political skulduggery/open tearfulness as it unfolded, during a debate that was supposed to be about the utterly horrific situation in Gaza, but ended up looking like it was using that as some political plot device.
As I say, I think missing this latest chaos actually helped me see the wood for the trees. It wasn’t that I’d seen it all before – although like many politics-watchers in the UK, I had seen a lot of it before. It wasn’t the subject of Gaza – I’m afraid I’ve previously seen the Commons debate issues over which it has minuscule or no influence at all, and doubtless will again. Rather, it was that being semi-detached helped me to identify more easily for myself the bit I hadn’t seen before. This was the bit where the Speaker of the House of Commons suggested he’d binned off parliamentary procedure and precedent out of concern for MPs’ safety from violence. That bit – that bit was new.
Lots of people keep saying that Sir Lindsay Hoyle’s actions came from “a good place”, which surely doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the price of rice in this instance. Altering long-established parliamentary procedure out of fear of violence certainly doesn’t feel like “a good place” for democracy. In fact, to use parliamentary language, it feels like the central WTF of what happened on Wednesday.
However distasteful many observers will have found the whole episode, surely the details of what happened need to be established for the public record, instead of via partisan briefing and counter-briefing. Unlike the death of that Spinal Tap drummer, you have to think that suggestions our democracy is making compromises with threats are not “best left unsolved”. A full and open inquest should occur.
Leaving aside Hoyle’s actions, though, his concerns are justified. The UK holds an extremely undesirable position among western democracies, having had two MPs murdered in the past eight years, as well as a police officer whose job was protecting parliament. Two of those murders involved Islamist attackers, and one a far-right attacker. (In this respect they were somewhat representative of terrorism in Great Britain, where the threat is predominantly Islamist but with a significant percentage – roughly a quarter – of attacks since 2018 coming from the far right.)
And, of course, other attempts on the lives of MPs have been thwarted. More money than ever is spent on MPs’ security – a staggering 25 times what was spent in 2015. But it is still not enough to prevent multiple incidents every week of vandalism, death threats, rape threats and more. MPs frequently stand down because they find the strain and security burden on themselves, their families and their staff simply too much to take. Anyone who can’t see why displays an embarrassing lack of imagination.
And so to Just Stop Oil’s announcement that it is now going to take their protests to the homes of Labour MPs and their families – an announcement made in the Guardian, also on Wednesday, in a column by co-founder Sarah Lunnon, which ended with the words: “We are the only people telling the truth, the only people calling out those who are harming us, the only people with a plan to change the system.”
Hmm. Like many people who have read The Ladybird Guide to History, and understood at least parts of it, I do instinctively recoil from anyone declaring: “We are the only people telling the truth.” But having heard her on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, I can see Ms Lunnon thinks that the only context for anything anyone says or does, ever, is that we are about to become extinct, and that trumps absolutely everything.
Real life is more complicated than that, as is real politics – still the best hope for getting the things she wants done. Furthermore, there doesn’t seem a whole lot of point in saving humanity if you can’t exhibit any. Protests outside MPs’ family homes should not happen in this security climate or any other. It was wrong when protesters gathered outside Jacob Rees-Mogg’s home, wrong when they did it to Dominic Cummings, and it would be wrong with anyone else across the spectrum. In similar vein, it was wrong when John Bercow fiddled parliamentary procedure during the Brexit battles, and wrong when the Conservatives prorogued parliament (unlawfully, as it turned out). The wrong things are wrong whichever side does them, and anyone who didn’t care to admit that this week was only making things worse.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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