Stamping out integrity from the outset

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As pantomimes go, there is little to match the traditional monarch’s speech to mark the opening of a new parliamentary session. One MP from the government benches is surrendered as a hostage to Buckingham Palace as a guarantee that duplicitous parliamentarians won’t simply take advantage of the monarch’s visit to capture and behead the king or queen, and is not released until the monarch is safely back in the palace. One of the few concessions, whether to modernity in general or the belief that the monarchy is suffering from extreme poverty, in the whole ceremony is the fact that the hostage now has to make his or her own way to the palace, rather than being escorted in chains by strangely-titled royal officials. The crowns and regalia get to ride to parliament in their very own special carriage, pulled by its own team of horses. After all, what self-respecting hat would want to travel in the same golden carriage as a mere monarch? It’s all part of the richness of a constitution which prioritises form over content.

The thing which all the glitter and gold attempt to conceal is the utter pointlessness and irrelevance of the whole event. It’s not really even the king’s speech at all; it’s written by the PM, the monarch has no control over the content, and there is nothing in either the rules or custom and practice which obliges the government either to do what is in the speech or not to do what isn’t in it. In practice, a government which can command a majority can introduce any legislation it wishes, whether or not it said it was going to at the opening of parliament – and it can also drop anything which is in the speech on a whim. The goat, on whose skin the speech was so carefully inscribed, ultimately died for nothing. It again epitomises the English parliamentary constitution – all about show and tradition, and completely divorced from reality.

In that context, the amendment proposed by the SNP, and which cost seven Labour MPs the right to be told how to vote for daring not to vote as they were told to vote, was irrelevant. Its failure to pass, obviously, makes no difference to the programme for government but, equally, had it passed, it would have made no difference to the programme for government either. The symbolic vote would have been just that – symbolic, but devoid of any meaning or effect. It highlights two other characteristics of that English parliamentary constitution: a number of parliamentary votes are of null practical effect, but the fuss made over a vote varies in inverse ratio to the effect of that vote in practice. It also makes it a strange place to draw a line, and an even stranger place for Labour MPs who only a few weeks ago were railing against the iniquity of a rule which keeps an estimated 300,000 (and increasing) children in poverty to sacrifice their integrity and credibility on the altar of Tory-set rules about financial rigidity.

Maybe – probably, even – the Chancellor will pull a now past-its-sell-by-date rabbit from her hat (perhaps one of the collapsible top hats which used to be kept under the Speaker’s chair for raising points of order during a vote, but which are no longer required for their original purpose) in her upcoming budget and announce that the government are going to do precisely what they’ve just instructed Labour MPs to vote against them doing, and abolish the two child limit. Telling MPs to vote against something one week and for it the next is yet another of those less-than-endearing aspects of the UK’s approach to ‘governing’. Apparently pointless, but with one important effect: getting government MPs to understand, within just a few weeks of being elected, that their integrity is entirely at the disposal of government whips. Once they’ve been made to stand on their heads once, it becomes so much easier to compel them to do it repeatedly in the future. Integrity, once lost, doesn’t simply grow back again before the next meaningless vote.