A “call list” system would be a gift to lazy MPs

As much as the secret of good comedy is timing, the secret of good debate is spontaneity. That is not to say that in the battle of ideas, soaring oratory, acerbic wit, killer heckles and the telling intervention do not play their part, but if there is no spark there is no interest. And if the participants are not all in the same place at the same time waiting to see who will get the chance to pick up and run with the issue, then debate, in its proper sense, is dead. To make the sporting analogy, it would be like trying the play an FA cup tie with the two goal keepers and a couple of defenders alone on the pitch, each at their respective ends with a big patch of emptiness in the middle. That will be the state of the House of Commons if a “call list” system, long demanded by the lazy and long resisted by purists, is introduced to its daily procedure.

Some will say the level of debate in the Commons has been in decline for years, and that is probably true. There are a host of reasons for this. The types of candidates that parties now identify, recruit and train, to ensure that only the most SI (Superficial Intelligence) emerge from their Stepford selection processes is one major factor. The experience and confidence of these modern parliamentarians to make eloquent, powerful and entirely extemporaneous speeches is another. Time limiting contributions, the result of the Blair guillotine reforms, also limits the opportunity for speakers to develop their remarks. That lack of ability and confidence, together with the time limits, often leads to a refusal to take interventions, or to address previous speakers’ points. The power of the Whips’ Office over ambitious back benchers — and now nearly every back bencher expects to become a minister regardless of capability — is another factor. When I was a whip I would regularly write 700 word speeches, maybe half a dozen, each day to be handed out to keen colleagues anxious to please the Chief Whip. Most MPs will happily read a handout. The current Deputy Speaker was one of several shining examples who gladly if glibly delivered my clever prose like they were reading an advertisement for garden furniture. These are all reasons why the standard of debate in the House of Commons has declined. But they are not reasons why the Commons authorities should now double down to make those standards worse.

Others will point to the House of Lords, which operates a call list system, and say “well, it works there”. But that is fundamentally to misunderstand the differences between the two Houses. The House of Lords is not populated with ambitious wannabes like the House of Commons, at least not to the same extent. And where it is populated by ambitious has beens (the product of years of overstuffing with former whips from the Commons), it might be argued that the level of debate in the Lords has suffered in consequence. But putting aside the wannabees/never beens for a moment, the Lords still has a very significant number of field experts and wise old hands, particularly on its cross benches, which are almost entirely lacking in the House of Commons. And because none of these peers, independent or partisan, are troubled by the bothersome of business of getting themselves re-elected, they have the time to spend in their Chamber listening to and making argument. Their relative maturity compared to the junior House probably also contributes to their relative immobility once in their places.

The same rules do not apply in the Commons where MPs are less expert and thus less likely to want to listen to an entire debate, more busy in the sense that the democratic demands on their diaries make them chary of spending lots of time in their Chamber, and definitely more ambitious which means they are much more likely to do as their Party managers tell them rather than listen to debate and decide for themselves. Finally, a further and little considered point is that it is possible that a call list system will make the standards of behaviour in the Commons even worse, not better. One of the many little levers of control that the Speaker and his deputies have over the Chamber is the power to choose when a particular Member will speak. If a Member becomes particularly boorish or recalcitrant, the Chair can push him or her down the list, or of it — or threaten to do so. A call list would remove that little lever from the Speaker’s arsenal, allowing the BBC to pontificate ever more loftily on the similarities between the House of Commons and what we once called Highbury.

The Call List will become the Commons’s very own Right To Die procedure

Taken together it is difficult not to conclude that a system that allows MPs to book a timeslot for their speeches, whilst good for them, will be disastrous for what remains of the standards of parliamentary debate. The same speech will be made over and over and over again, because no MP will bother to sit in the Chamber to listen to the speeches of their colleagues that go before them. Fewer interventions will be made because fewer MPs will be in the Chamber to make them. The speeches themselves, deprived of any incentive to weave in or reject arguments made earlier, and lacking the creative disruption of interventions, will become even more flaccid and monotonous than the present batch of platitudes and banalities that disfigure the pages of Hansard.

And debate ought to matter. The people whom we send to Westminster legislate in our name. They make the rules by which we agree to live our lives or to be punished for not doing so. What they hear in the Chamber of the House of Commons ought to inform the decisions they make, or at the very least make it uncomfortable for them when they make the wrong or unpopular choices. The Call List will become the Commons’s very own Right To Die procedure — its own form of institutionalised euthanasia. If the Government is backing it then MPs should be doubly beware. If a whip comes along waving this particular hypodermic, Members might as well send for the undertaker. Starmer & Sons can then embalm what is left of the life in them.