Friday 30 August 2024

Choosing the decor

 

Sacrosanctity born of tradition is a status which plagues the entire English constitution, under which Wales and Scotland are also obliged to labour - for the time being at least. It’s a status which means that some things (such as the whole of 10 Downing Street) which are “ludicrously inappropriate for running a modern state” are essentially unchallengeable. No-one in their right mind (although that caveat might explain a great deal) would think it reasonable or sensible to run a government from a converted house which now contains a labyrinthine rabbit warren of rooms, which layout gives rise to perennial battles over who gets to sit where and in what degree of proximity to the PM of the day.

No-one in their right mind would believe that a parliamentary chamber with an inadequate number of seats for its membership, where the distance between the two sides is defined by the length of two swords, is really an optimal arrangement for the twenty-first century. No-one in their right mind would devise a system of voting which requires the members to stand up and queue to go through a specified door, sometimes repeating the process for hours on end as the chamber despatches a series of amendments to bills. No-one in their right mind would believe that a second chamber largely made up of appointees, with a sprinkling of others who owe their presence to some favour which an ancient and long-dead relative performed for the monarch of the day, along with a handful of senior clerics from one denomination of one minority religion which only operates in one of the constituent parts of the state, has any sensible place in the modern world. And there are plenty of other examples before we even start on the arcane rituals concerning the head of state. Whilst there is at least some debate about the continued existence and role of the House of Lords, there is not even any serious discussion about the rest of the nonsense.

On the scale of things, deciding what pictures should hang where is a pretty pathetic irrelevance, yet that is where one of this week’s controversies centres. What it was that possessed Gordon Brown to commission a portrait of one of the most divisive figures in modern UK history is one of life’s unexplained mysteries. But the fact that he did, and that the picture was then hung in a prominent position in one of the rooms in Downing Street, has developed – for some – its very own sense of sacrosanctity. The act of having it removed – to where has not yet been revealed – is interpreted by some of the worshippers of the former PM as having “no respect for our history and previous prime ministers”. Still, we should probably congratulate the Tory MP for doing something which few others are currently managing: identifying a difference between Labour and Tory. It might only be about the décor in a “ludicrously inappropriate” building, but we have to start somewhere.

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