Lethargic Man (anag.)

My friend Hayley and I went to the Houses of Parliament yesterday. Apparently there's queues of an hour or two getting in in mid-afternoon, but at six o'clock in the evening there was no queue at all. There weren't very many parliamentarians there either, but that's not so surprising. The only person there I recognised was David Blunkett, but there were a few names present I might have vaguely recognised. We didn't go on tour of the place, or up the clock tower - these are only available in the daytime, and require booking in advance through your MP (!) - but went and sat in the public galleries in both houses to listen to the government - and opposition - in action.

I'd kind of expected it to be a bit boring - interminable discussions about the minutiae of running the country - but was pleasantly surprised to find this was not the case. Listening to the discussions got me worked up about the issues myself, leaving me with a desire to follow up what happened, and lobby my MP, and so forth (which I squashed, because I realised Parliament would be like this all the time).

In the House of Commons they were discussing the second reading of the government's Drugs Bill, and there was a fairly impassioned debate as to the pros and cons of various attitudes towards the drugs problem. Stephen Pound, MP, talked about the problems of khat in the Somali community, and how the "British Method" of treating drug use as an illness, for which substitute drugs were prescribed, apparently succeeded in the 1960s, but has since been displaced by the attitude of a war on drugs, which can never succeed.

Mrs Gillan, MP, alleged the bill had been put together in haste, that the Home Office admitted no external consultation had taken place, and that the government did not care what happened to the bill, as this close to a general election, it was unlikely to get through the system, and had been submitted more that the government should be seen to be tackling the matter of drugs.

Following which, Caroline Flint MP, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department responded, and suddenly we were no longer getting hard facts lobbed by opposition parties, but the typical weasel-words of the party in power. Most telling.

Towards the end of this debate, people began drifting into the House; this was for a series of votes without debate which followed. All votes were all "aye"s, no "nay"s, so were wholly oral.

Finally (this now being seven o'clock) Mr. A. J. Beith, MP, took the opportunity to harrangue the government over the appalling state of affairs of out-of-hours medical care in the more isolated parts of Northumberland (Alnwick and Berwick). I felt that was an important issue to be tackled, too, but all the MPs who had come in for the earlier votes now left; at times there were no more than three MPs visible in the chamber (though only two thirds of the chamber was visible from "Strangers Gallery".

The session was adjourned at half past seven -- this is quite early for the Westminster Parliament, I gather, and is why the Scottish Parliament was set up to work from the word go to sensible hours. At the end of the session everyone rose as the mace was removed and carried from the room; it gave me a feeling of actually being part of what was going on, as Hayley and I rose at exactly the same moment as the remaining MPs down below.

Following this, Hayley and I then paid a visit to the House of Lords. The first thing noticeable about the House of Lords is just how much more sumptuously decorated it is than the House of Commons. There's a lot of gold on and behind the throne at the front; and paintings on the walls and so forth. The predominant colour in the House of Commons is green, as best known in the leather of the chairs; in the House of Lords it's red. There's also some sumptuous decorations in the halls on the way in -- remember to look up, if you're visiting. And the staff in both Houses are dressed in morning coats, with, in many cases big gold seals around their neck, in which Hayley recognised the symbology of Mercury.

The next most noticeable thing is the lack of a security screen. Last year there was an infamous incident in which a condom full of purple flour was hurled at the Prime Minister from people who had managed to get in front of the security screen in the public gallery. In the House of Lords there is no such screen at all. Evidently no one cares if somebody chooses to throw a condom full of anthrax at the Lords. We had been through a security search, of course, on our way in, and had everything down to books removed from us, but the contents of my pockets were not, however, searched.

When we entered, Baroness Cox was addressing the House of Lords on the subject of the United Nations: what has gone wrong with it (including, notably, anti-Israel bias), and what should be done about it. The debate that followed was as interesting as that in the Commons. Lord Pearson of Rannoch cited really quite terrible evidence about the UN twiddling its thumbs in the wake of the tsunami disaster, and the United States and Australia taking on the lions share of the humanitarian aid - in contradistinction to how this was reported by "the BBC, that bastion of political correctitude." He also, to my surprise, cited from a blog (thanks to Theo for the link), and amused me by pausing at the phrase "24/7" to explicate: "that is, 24 hours a day, in case your Lordships are not familiar with the expression."

Also most amusingly, the House of Commons was referred to the Lords, several times, as "another place" or "the other place" - the exact same way Oxford and Cambridge also refer to each other.

The Lords did not wrap up for the day at the end of that debate, but we decided we'd had enough - it was quarter to nine by now, and we had not eaten - and left. The visit was a most interesting experience, a chance to see the workings of government in action, and one to bear in mind if you've got an evening in central London to kill.