The Commons: a club where members set the rules

All my working life, the Commons has been a daunting and intimidating place – a place where I had no place.

I have never been a “lobby correspondent”, although I have a journalist’s pass. Yet even with that, and even as an assiduous voter, the Commons has never felt a place that I had any justified connection to.

It has always struck me as remote, antediluvian, mysterious and closed.

I am beginning at last to understand why. It is the most exclusive and “Masonic” of clubs. A club that elects its own boss, sets its own rules and pays its own expenses.

There’s only one tender thread that sustains it and that is us: “we, the people” and our cash. Yet unlike the US Congress, we are not the people. We are the subjects.

It has been obvious all my working life that the Commons could not sustain the technological, personal, global revolution through which we as humans are all passing. Today it seems to be obvious to many more people.

It’s a sentiment handsomely reflected on this blogsite by many strongly felt, articulate comments. Yesterday many believe the speaker, Michael Martin, spectacularly fail to understand what is happening to his place, his role, and his future as “Capo di capi” of the House of Commons.

This crisis over expenses is about the fundamental democratic settlement that we have with those we elected to look after our state and our society. We have worried about its capacity to make judgements over war, we have worried about its capacity to cope with the global meltdown.

And now we not only worry, but more than understand its incapacity to look after itself. Does the democratic settlement requires rebuilding from the bottom up?