You can’t die in the Houses of Parliament. The Queen doesn’t allow it. If an unfortunate member does risk offending Her Majesty by shuffling off this mortal coil within the environs of the Palace of Westminster, they are officially deemed to have died in the ambulance on the way to St Thomas’ Hospital across the Thames. This bizarre convention might be considered quaint if it did not reveal the reality that our ‘democratic’ parliament is squatting in a royal palace. Far from being a bastion of democracy, the Houses of Parliament are a reminder that we are still living in a United Kingdom.
There is no greater symbol that British democracy is no mature adult but a spotty adolescent than the Queen’s Speech. Each November, the uneasy contradiction between the forces of parliamentary democracy and the vestiges of feudalism, patronage and privilege are played out in a ghastly fancy dress party.
It’s insulting. The Queen sits on the throne. The Lords, dressed in ermine, take their seats. The speech is handed to Her Majesty by a fawning Lord Chancellor. Having been summoned with the words ‘It is Her Majesty’s pleasure they attend Her immediately in this House’ the 650-odd members of parliament who we have elected are not even allowed to sit down.
The speech begins ‘My Lords and members of the House of Commons, my government’s main priorities are…’ and so she goes on, telling us what ‘her’ government will do. Any school girl or boy (at least one who has attended Labour’s citizenship lessons in the national curriculum) can tell you that she does not write the speech. The government does that. All she does is read it. This matters not a jot. It’s not what she says, but the way she says it; the way the Lords sit at her feet; the way the crown glints in the autumn sunshine; and the way it reminds us that we do not live in a proper democracy as long as unelected folk interfere in our law-making.
Like much else in our messy constitution, Labour in government has not sought to modernise the state opening of parliament. In 1964, Richard Crossman remarked to his diary that the occasion was ‘more what a real Ruritania would look like – far more comic, more untidy, more homely, less grand’ but the Wilson governments did not seek to change it. In 1977 Neil Kinnock and Dennis Skinner, two rising stars of the party’s left wing, famously snubbed the Queen’s Speech by remaining ostentatiously in the Commons. Luckily, a passing press photographer was on hand to take a snap for the morning papers.
So if Labour was to think seriously about reform, what would we replace it with? The state opening of parliament should be a celebration of democracy, and the protangonists should be those engaged in democracy – electors and elected. We should sweep aside the peers in a flurry of ermine, and fill the seats with schoolchildren, students, nurses, IT consultants, toilet attendants and anyone else who won the lottery to attend.
The speech should be read out by the speaker of the House. Instead of a list of bills for the new session, which governments always try to make politically appealing regardless of genuine priorities, the speech should be a ‘state of the nation’ style address. It should also remind us about the civil war and the reform acts and the Chartists and Suffragettes. There should be lounge suits aplenty, but not a tiara in sight.
The state opening of parliament should be an open, festive, democratic affair, which celebrates our freedoms and rights. It could be marked by a public holiday – one sure way to make people take notice. If we want democracy in Britain to flourish amid free-falling turnouts and media cynicism, we need to invent some new traditions that remind us of what democracy means. I’m sure the Queen wouldn’t mind having the day off.