Why not open the commons to all parliament groups?

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By Alex RossYouth Parliament in the Lords

On the 16th March MPs voted to allow the UK Youth Parliament to hold their annual 2009 debate in the House of Commons as a sign of respect for the work they do, and to try to encourage them to pursue their interest in politics.

All sides of the house except for a small group of 22 MPs, nearly all Conservative, supported it.

Reading the debate in Hansard you can see it is dominated by out-of-touch Conservative MPs obsessed with protecting the supposed traditions of Parliament, desperate for some of the reflected glory of the great Parliamentarians who have sat there before them. The difference is that those great people were obsessed with bringing about change to this country for the better, these MPs were just obsessed with inwards looking debates on how to keep their club exclusive to themselves and patting themselves on the back for being there in the first place.

What really struck me was how many of them were against the notion of allowing the UKYP to sit in a recessed commons because it would open the doors to other parliaments to sit there. My own MP, Philip Davies, claimed that it would mean a Learning Disability Parliament might want to sit there in the future. To which my instinctive reply was, ‘Great, the more the merrier!’

It comes to something when Bob Spink provides the voice of sanity, pointing out that when the House is not in session, when the Mace is not present (John McDonnell probably stole it in a pre-planned ‘protest’), the House of Commons is just a place. So what harm is there, honestly, in allowing the UKYP to sit and hold a debate there?

This was not surprisingly a red rag to a bull and Philip Davies jumped up to declare that his constituents wanted him to preserve the traditions of Parliament and when they visited they didn’t view the Commons as ‘just a bunch of green benches’. Maybe not in the groups he’s led, but in the group I was in I just know that an elderly lady wanted to sit down for a couple of minutes and wasn’t allowed because only MPs are allowed to sit on the green benches.

Of course I cannot speak for Davies, but I’m pretty confident that the vast majority of his constituents, myself included, either don’t care either way or would disagree with his objection to having the UKYP having one debate there. In fact I think the only constituents he will have met who care are the ones he meets at Conservative Party meetings.

Personally I’d go much further than the proposal suggested. If the House of Commons is in recess, then it should hold ‘open debate’ days where any Parliament, Youth or Learning Disability or other, can book it for a debate there, televised and broadcast on the internet live. It would provide a spotlight to shine on government policies by the very people directly affected by them.

An amusing irony of seeing so many elitist and out of touch MPs trying to defend their concept of the institution of Parliament, claiming that the traditions would be tainted by allowing UKYP to sit there, is that it became clear they were trying to talk the proposal out, where the debate takes so long there is no time for a vote, and therefore it cannot be passed.

For a bunch of MPs to complain about a proposal not being given a proper debate and how damaging it is to democracy, to then use said debate to try get it scrapped without a single vote being cast sums up the hypocrisy and inconsistency of the position the MPs have taken. And they wonder why people get turned off politics.

The point of Parliament is for it to serve the people. Allowing other Parliament groups to debate there when it would otherwise not be in use is just a new way of doing this.

Open the House of Commons when in recess, the world won’t end, our traditions won’t be lost, and it might just help widen the debate on some important issues, involving those affected most by them, be they young, old or disabled.

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