At least a Tory power grab may save us from boring Commons debates

IN JUNE last year, with mere days to go before the EU referendum, David Cameron was growing desperate. And so, to Tories who had been unmoved by his warnings about the economy and trade and tariffs and job losses and geopolitical instability, he highlighted one more risk of voting Leave.

Boredom. To be precise: the boredom that would result from the years of non-stop bogged-down parliamentary squabbling about what form Brexit should take.

According to one senior reporter in Westminster, the following were the words Mr Cameron used, in private, to wavering Tories: “You don’t really want three years of euro-w---, do you?”

Unfortunately for Mr Cameron, however, it turns out that those wavering Tories either did want three years of that, or were at least prepared to endure them. Well, right now their resolve is being put fully to the test, because yesterday MPS trudged into the Commons for a second lengthy day of debate on the EU (Withdrawal) Bill: an arid, gruelling, repetitious, verbose, suffocatingly tedious festival of jargon.

Lord, the jargon. The purpose of the Bill is to convert existing EU law into British law. It is, in effect, legislation about legislation. And so what we heard was hour upon hour of droning about programme motions, delegated powers, statutory instruments, secondary legislation, scrutiny committees, negative procedures and triage systems.

If you’ve ever wondered why the Commons appears to contain so few normal human beings, there’s your clue. As a rule, normal human beings don’t much fancy putting themselves through the sleepless hell of an election campaign only to spend nine hours a day muttering about statutory instruments and triage systems. Most normal human beings, in fact, probably don’t know what they are. They sound like items you might find in a torture chamber. To be fair, when MPS are bickering about statutory instruments and triage systems, it does feel like torture, so it’s not such a bad guess.

At least Chris Bryant (Lab, Rhondda) gave the debate some welly: “This bill is utterly pernicious. It is dangerous. It is fundamentally un-british… It pretends to bring back power to this country, but it actually represents the biggest peacetime power grab by the Government over Parliament in 100 years… It allows the Government to drive through changes to any law, by the simple fiat of a minister… This is a dangerous spiral of autocracy… There are clauses that Erdogan, Maduro and Putin would be proud of…”

Tory Brexiteers waved such protests away. “False anger,” insisted Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough). “Professional outrage,” yawned Bernard Jenkin (Harwich & N Essex).

I’m not sure. It’s a tough one. Normally I’d be against executive power grabs and spirals of autocracy but if Mr Bryant is saying the Government will be able to do away with Commons debate, it does sound awfully tempting.