Old Lammy bawled like he was on Jeremy Kyle
DAVID Lammy: dim or dogged? Maybe both. The Labour MP for Tottenham yesterday flew into a bate – impressive in its volume and vehemence, at least – when he questioned Home Secretary Sajid Javid about delays to the Windrush compensation scheme.
Mr Lammy blew his top. He shouted. He waved his arms in the air. He blew the air in a long, hot stream from the bottom of his lower lip towards the Chamber’s ceiling.
If there had been a train’s whistle on the other end of that whooshing blast of crossness, it would have made a sound like the Flying Scotsman.
Such fury, such dissing agitation: dear old Lammy – once a cathedral choirboy – could have been one of those people bawling at one another on daytime television’s Jeremy Kyle Show.
But his prolonged, theatrical harrumph was weakened by his inability to master a basic rule of parliamentary debate, as I will seek to explain presently.
who has made much of the parliamentary Windrush was that controversy running on Windrush, last year when long-resident British had an urgent question to Mr Caribbeans were deported and Javid. He lowered his horn and detained in error. charged, Javid side-stepped, and
That was ten months ago and Mr Lammy as good as went charging the Government said it was going through the brick wall, out on to offer compensation to people to the riverbank and, splosh, whose lives had been made a misery landed in the Thames, so totally by bureaucratic bungling. did he overdo his rhetoric. Guess what: not a penny of compensation The convention in Parliament is has yet been paid. that one does not call another
This may come as not the most Member ‘you’. The vocative case enormous surprise to anyone who is to be used only when talking to has had dealings with the Whitehall the Speaker. When asking any machine. It takes officialdom minister a question, an MP should weeks even to lick a stamp. say, ‘Has the minister done this or
Politically, however, it is pretty that?’ rather than ‘Have you done stupid of the system to take so this or that?’ long, in part because some of the There is a good reason for this victims are old (some have died rule. It makes the House a less before their compensation was antsy place. It reduces the personal agreed), in part because this is aggro. Speaker Bercow used such a touchy area. Mr Lammy, to insist on it. recently, as his power over MPs has dwindled, he has stopped trying. Some MPs have taken advantage of this to attack ministers in the second person singular.
TorIeS Mark Francois and Peter Bone, the DUP’s Jim Shannon and the SNP’s Ian Blackford, among others, are serial offenders at this. Some of the thicker MPs find it a difficult discipline not to say ‘you’. others do it because it sounds sharper on the evening news bulletins.
Yesterday Mr Lammy kept saying ‘you, you, you’, pointing at Mr Javid and working himself into a lather. Administrative failures were, he said, ‘a shocking indictment of your Government’s pandering to far-right racism’. He repeated that racism line.
After the fourth or fifth ‘you’, Mr Bercow mildly asked Mr Lammy to use the third person. That worked for a few lines but then he was at it again, ‘Why are you deporting people?’ and so on. The House stopped taking Mr Lammy seriously.
For the record, Mr Javid said the only people he was deporting were foreign nationals, mainly convicts. And he was doing so under a law passed in 2007 by a Labour government. That just set off more sedentary expostulation from the Lammy corner. Total ants in his pants. He was almost punching his chest.
Meanwhile, further evidence of the high intellectualism of today’s Commons. Labour frontbencher Afzal Khan used the word ‘illegible’ where he meant to say ‘eligible’. And he’s a solicitor.