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.
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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