The “Zoom Parliament”: is it progress?
“There have been some strange days in this job,” said
Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph – “but never did I expect to find myself in an almost deserted House of Commons, being berated by a row of enormous Peter Bones”. The Tory MP’s face was glaring out from an “Orwellian” bank of TV screens, erected in the chamber to allow MPs to address the Commons remotely, from the safety of their homes, during the pandemic. To watch this surreal experiment in democracy via video link last Wednesday was “peculiar”, and “often disorienting”: one minute we in the gallery were “confronted, in startling close-up, by the scowling face of a backbench MP”; the next, we were “peering down at the chamber”, where Dominic Raab was deputising for a recovering Boris Johnson at Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs).
It may have been “decidedly untraditional” – but this “Zoom Parliament” made for a much improved PMQs, said Richard Power Sayeed in The Guardian. For the first time in centuries, there was no pointless ceremony, “no facile insults”, “no baying mob of former public school boys”. Instead, just 30 MPs – including Keir Starmer in his first PMQs as Labour leader – were spaced six feet apart on the green leather benches, while 120 more joined by video link. With those online on mute until their turn to speak, the effect was “sensible and pleasingly boring”. For once, our legislature started to look “like the epicentre of a grown-up democracy”.
Actually, “I miss the atmosphere” of the old Commons, said the Green MP Caroline Lucas in the I newspaper. When MPs come together in a crowd, they can push ministers for answers – that’s harder to do “when you’re on hold in a Zoom waiting room”. But the new technology offers huge opportunities for the long term, said Helen Pankhurst on Politics Home. It could make Westminster more reflective of society: the ability to represent their constituents from home could encourage more people with disabilities, and women with children, to become MPs. This Zoom Parliament could have “benefits well beyond the crisis” for which it was created. Who knows? It could even make our politics “fit for the 21st century”.