The Palace of Westminster is practically falling down. It’s riddled with leaks and infested with vermin. Whole toxic sections urgently need to be removed for everyone’s good. After decades of poor planning and quick, botched fixes, it’s badly decayed and it’s going to cost a fortune to put things right.
I expect your leaden-analogy alarm has already gone off. Lots of people are absolutely thrilled with the old palace’s decrepitude as a metaphor for “our broken politics”. Do you know what I think is a really good metaphor for the state of Britain today? It’s people enjoying that metaphor. It’s the tedious satisfaction they derive from likening one building’s need of repair to the decline in public trust suffered by the political system for which it houses key functions; the inwardly delighted wry shake of the head at that slow-news-week-political-cartoon quantity of wit and insight. Honestly, it makes me want to join Isis.
The fact remains, however, that coincident with this phase of widespread disappointment with our government and legislators, the structure in which their business is transacted has started to crumble. The stonework has badly eroded, the heating and plumbing keep breaking down and apparently not a single one of the 3,800 windows closes properly – which, in terms of sheer consistency, is analogous to absolutely nothing else in our political culture.
The obvious solution to this problem – just letting the building gradually fall in on them all – has been rejected on the basis that it would “reward poor parliamentary attendance”. So a consensus has emerged that the palace needs to be restored. Of course that’s not to say there’s a consensus that it should continue to house parliament – some argue that its Victorian public school/gentlemen’s club vibe is so inappropriate to a modern democracy that it should be turned into a museum. But I suspect even those people think it should be a structurally sound museum.
So it’s going to be repaired, and it’s almost certainly not going to be turned into a museum – partly because that would necessitate building a whole other giant palace for the Houses of Parliament, with all the ill-fitting windows, enormous digital clock towers and statues of Tony Blair that that would entail; and partly because saying “The Palace of Westminster should be turned into a museum!” is such a big part of the identity and cocktail-party-opening-gambit technique of the idea’s adherents that actually turning the place into a museum would leave a gaping hole in their lives, which social services would then struggle to fill.
But doing the place up, I’m afraid to say, is going to be expensive – a report last June estimated it would cost £5.7bn, and that figure is set to double when it turns out they were just guessing. Alternatively, and this is where it gets interesting (nearly halfway through, this week – I swear I’m getting worse), it could be slashed to a piffling £3.5bn if the parliamentarians agree to fully vacate the place for six years. Basically, it’s a lot cheaper to renovate without loads of politicians obstructing proceedings. The politicians just get in the way of people trying to do their jobs and make things better. Has that alarm gone off again?
So where would they move to? George Ferguson, who’s the mayor of Bristol, has a proposal: Bristol. There’s a derelict Royal Mail sorting office round the back of the station that he says would be perfect. Architectural firm Studio Egret West proposes to transform it into a sort of hill which members of the public could climb and then stare down at the politicians having their rows like angry hobbits in a special arguing burrow. Except they won’t be having rows because “the debating chamber, inspired by the idea of a clearing in the woods, encourages a less combative approach to government business with opportunities for better cross-party cooperation”. Much more like elves then. Lovely.
I’m slightly sceptical of the view that sitting our MPs in a different arrangement will make their deliberations more constructive. It’s usually put forward by those who dismiss the shouty House of Commons as medieval and pantomimic. It has definitely become a bit of a parody of its former self, which is a shame, but I’m not sure that having our politicians yell and hurl abuse at each other in public isn’t, for a repressed nation such as ours, rather a healthy convention. It’s the vestigial remains of something honest and, as such, is one of the few elements of contemporary politics that I’d say was worth preserving.
It’s not as if an assembly of hundreds of people can ever have particularly detailed discussions anyway. It’s got to be fairly binary: do we agree with Thing A or not. So I don’t see that the shouting of “Hear hear!” or “Shame!” is any less effective than those beige semicircles of desks and microphones that other countries seem to favour. And it’s definitely more interesting.
My reservations about the woodland clearing approach to parliamentary debate aside, these plans look quite fun. There are some nice dynamic drawings online, promising restaurants and cafes as well as committee rooms and a library. There’s even a “tranquil space”, right by the railway line – which suggests that, for all the blue-sky thinking, they’re not holding out much hope that the train service is going to improve.
But the sad thing about this idea is that, charming though that derelict sorting office covered in turf might be, getting to hang out in the Palace of Westminster is MPs’ last remaining perk. Once high-status pillars of the community, the nation’s representatives have seldom been held in lower regard – and the internet is there to bring all that negativity relentlessly to bear. But they still have their massive neogothic palace to run around in, drinking cheap booze and shouting at each other on television. It’s like a wonderful cross between Hogwarts and the Big Brother house.
So can you imagine what a slap in the face from history it would feel like if, as a newly elected MP in 2020, you realised you weren’t even going to get that? You were going to get all the abuse and disdain, the endless scrutiny of personal financial details and property arrangements, the daily grind of trying to court the lobbyist’s dime while persuading international corporations to close their factories in other people’s constituencies first, but without messing around in a magical castle. It would be like working for Disneyland, but in the complaints department.
