The modernising new Speaker John Bercow has a lot going for him. He has successfully overseen his first Prime Ministers’ Questions, earning plaudits for his timely interventions and brisk business-like manner.But in his short post-PMQs statement he repeated one pronouncement that suggests a parliament not yet in the modern world and not yet in tune with the wider public.
Bercow plans to enforce the convention that ministers should make their announcements strictly to Parliament and not on the Today programme. This means that ordinary people with a job won’t hear it – and may not even hear about it, as its news prominence could be lost. It also leaves ministers and their morning interviewers in an unsatisfactory tussle that can only damage politics further.
Surely, it is more important for the good of politics that the six million listeners to the Today programme and the several million viewers of breakfast TV hear about matters that affect them ahead of 650 MPs and the few hundred thousand viewers of the Daily Politics?
Allowing ministers to control the timetable is not the most effective way to hold them to account. The reality is that, as things stand, selected information on policy changes is supplied at short notice to media who have little time to properly dissect the detail before they go on air or to press. Sometimes control of the timetable allows the executive to ‘bury’ bad news under other, more exciting events.
Perversely, the current ‘media-sees-it-first’ system means less rather than more effective scrutiny of the government. For example, more announcements to MPs (in committee or to the Commons) would allow them to point out deficiencies and inconsistencies in policy shifts and permit ordinary people (with or without jobs) to make a more informed judgement on the government’s actions.