Tomorrow David Cameron will enter the commons for another session of prime minister’s questions. While he might be worried about what questions he is about to face, his real concern should be that he is about to be part of an anachronistic ritual, which is slowly killing off our entire political process.

That is, of course, if you believe those like the Hansard Society, who are campaigning to reform PMQs and in the process save our ailing politics.

The case for change, according to one of their recent reports, is clear. The public think PMQs is ‘too noisy and aggressive’, full of ‘party political point scoring’ and ‘puts me off politics’. The Week In Westminster also picked up the reform baton last Saturday, using the Hansard report as the basis for a spirited debate on our PMQs ‘crisis’.
However, a slightly different picture emerges when you drill down into the detail of the report. Only 16 per cent of those included in the Hansard Society survey had ever actually watched PMQs in full. The rest were either relying on clips (38 per cent), or had never seen it at all (46 per cent), hardly the most informed group of participants. Of those who had seen PMQs, 40 per cent thought it dealt with important issues affecting the country, while 36 per cent said it was informative, so it was not all bad news.
It is strange that one of the main reasons given by those who want to change PMQs is that the public do not like it. Even the most passing of glances would suggest that in fact they do.

The reality is that, unlike other departmental question times, which are shunned by the public, generally quieter and focused on policy detail (everything which PMQs must apparently become, according to reformers), tickets for PMQs sell out months in advance. In addition, around 150,000 people regularly watch PMQs on television. Not bad for midday on a weekday, and I would bet far more than ever watch the Commons the rest of the time.
It is also not true, as reformers claim, that MPs do not raise serious issues during PMQs. Major foreign policy crises, such as Syria or Iraq, are often debated and backbenchers regularly raise serious constituency matters. When these issues are raised they are invariably heard in respectful silence. There is a lot of knockabout in between these exchanges and there is no denying that the planted questions outweigh the principled ones, but it has always been thus.

In practice the Commons is able to be serious and rowdy in equal measure, depending on what is called for at any given time. And is that not how it should be? Do we not want to see our politicians getting angry about things?

Some people say no. What the public want, so their line of thought goes, is for everyone to work together. Great idea. Politicians do this all the time, though, thousands of regulations go through parliament uncontested all the time, in lines of primary and secondary legislation which are never pushed to a vote.
The problem comes, however, when the other side proposes something you do not agree with, like when this government puts forward a measure like the ‘bedroom tax’ which causes misery for thousands of people. What do we want then? For politicians to sit on their hands and say ‘Oh, I don’t really agree with what you’re doing, but I won’t make a fuss because we’re meant to work together’? Of course not. We want them to fight it every step of the way. And that is part of what PMQs is all about – the raw battle of ideas that is the life-blood of democracy.

It is not always the most dignified of spectacles, but we should be thankful that we are lucky enough to live in a country where we have the right of free speech and to decide who we want to govern us.
Not everything about PMQs is perfect and some things could be improved. Too often passionate debate turns into aggressive heckling of individual MPs, especially of female MPs, which is inexcusable and should have been stamped out by party leaders a long time ago. There is also merit in the suggestion that MPs should be allowed to ask follow-up questions, to prevent the prime minister from not answering properly, or in David Cameron’s case inaccurately. And on a less serious note the jokes are also generally terrible, although the odd (relatively) decent one does get in.
Some of these things are easier to fix than others, but they can all be fixed and without turning PMQs into a glorified version of transport questions. So let’s stop talking it down, let’s celebrate PMQs for what it is: democracy, in all its loud, complicated and, yes, sometimes undignified glory.

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Rich Durber is a member of Progress. He tweets @richdurber and blogs here.