Nick Clegg's first PMQs Live Chat - 21st July 2010 - #PMQs

To mark Nick Clegg's first PMQs I thought I would host a Live Chat on here whilst it is in progress.

PMQs starts at 12:00noon with coverage on BBC Two and the chat will start a few minutes before. Join us below:

Nick Clegg has a great opportunity when he takes PMQs tomorrow

If Nick Clegg is a bit nervous tonight he can be forgiven. Tomorrow he will stand in for David Cameron for Prime Minister's Questions for the first time.

If someone had suggested 4 months ago that by July Nick Clegg would be taking PMQs you would probably have thought they had gone a bit peculiar, but here we are. One of the duties of the Deputy Prime Minister is to answer the questions when the PM is away as he currently is in the USA.

What I am particularly interested in is how he handles the inevitable mischievous questions. You know, the ones that will deliberately pick a part of the government's programme that the Lib Dems are known to be uncomfortable with and effectively try and embarrass the DPM by showing up "splits". I hope he deals with them in a mature fashion explaining that that is how coalitions work. He should not feel compelled to pretend that he and the Lib Dems agree with every dotted i and crossed t of the government's programme.

I also hope that he does his best to answer the questions fully. David Cameron impressed me on this in his first week but seems to have slipped a bit recently. Clegg would do well to demonstrate that he can properly answer questions and not try to use every question as an opportunity to score points off his political opponents. The more statesmanlike he can appear, the better the prospects in the longer terms for the Lib Dems. Our party has often been accused of not being serious about power. What could be more serious than our leader being held to account in the House of Commons by fellow parliamentarians on the key political issues of the day?

Nick Clegg widely impressed in the first leaders debate during the election campaign. The public knows him a little better now but tomorrow is still a great opportunity to further cement his reputation as a substantial political figure.

I fully expect him to rise to the challenge.

Keep it up Mr Speaker

I have noticed recently that the Speaker, John Bercow has been going further and further in trying to control the baying mob at PMQs. There is still barracking and heckling but when it gets too much he is more frequently stepping in and embarrassing individual members who are behaving badly even threatening to sin-bin them. He also keeps pointing out how most people watching outside the chamber find this sort of behaviour very off-putting.

Mike Smithson now thinks that Bercow is being high-handed and that PMQs is in danger of becoming a bore.

I'm afraid I totally disagree. If anything he has not yet gone far enough. He should start to exclude MPs from the chamber if they persist with this sort of infantile behaviour. I would much prefer there to be little or no barracking and heckling at all.

What Mike is failing to appreciate is that there are only a few thousand political junkies in this country (in which I include myself) who largely view PMQs as theatre and a sort of verbal jousting with the opposing sides cheering for their leader and heckling their opponents. They perceive it as good sport and sit on the sidelines "scoring" it often based on how up or down the "troops" seems to be in response. For most of the rest of the population, the highlights that they see on the evening news of those who we have elected to represent us in our primary political chamber consist of grown adults baying at each other like schoolchildren. It is one of the things that drives a wedge between the political classes and the rest.

Of course our Prime Minister should be held to account and the fact that we have this weekly session is admired around the world. But there is no need for the sideshow stuff and it regularly spoils what should showcase the best of our political system.

Keep it up Mr Speaker. Who knows, eventually maybe even I will be proud of the weekly sessions.

Harriet's boundary objections are objectionable

At PMQs today Harriet Harman asked about the government's plans for redrawing the constituency boundaries to even up the sizes. She particularly focused on the fact that there are lots of people (3.5 million according to her figures) who are not registered and implied that the redrawing of the boundaries would not be valid unless this was resolved. The crux of her point is here taken from Hansard:

The danger is that if the Prime Minister presses on in the way he has indicated, he will be making the system less fair, not more fair. As he said, the Deputy Prime Minister acknowledged to the House this week that there is a problem with the register. The Electoral Commission study found not just the number of people who are not on the register, but who they are: a third of all black people, half of all young people, and half of all private sector tenants are not on the register, despite the work that has been undertaken by electoral registration officers. Those people will not be counted if the Prime Minister redraws constituency boundaries now. He says he wants equal constituencies, but does he accept that he cannot have equal constituencies based on an unequal register?

Paul Walter has already suggested that this is an attempt to throw the political equivalent of a "police stinger" in front of voting reform.

The first point to make in response to Harman's question is the one that David Cameron did which is to point out that Labour had 13 years to sort this out if they consider it to be so vital. A related point is that the constituency boundaries were redrawn near the start of the last decade when presumably the imbalance was as bad as it is now, perhaps even worse. It didn't stop them then and nor should it have.

But perhaps a more fundamental objection to this approach is that if we were to accept Harman's principle that there should be no redrawing of boundaries until voter registration figures improve, what criteria would be used to determine success? A 5% improvement in each of the categories she states. 10%? Parity with the average? Parity with the highest rates of registration? Who would decide? What other minorities are also disadvantaged that would also have to be considered? How long does she think that will take to achieve? And what would happen in the meantime? Would we keep the existing (in some cases already woefully outdated) boundaries?

Don't get me wrong, I think Cameron's plans to redraw the boundaries are largely designed to improve things for the Tories and if I was Prime Minister there would be other reforms I would put before this one. However it is not easy to argue against the idea that the sizes should be more even in principle and they have conceded a referendum on AV as part of the coalition agreement which shows they are willing to compromise.

What we cannot have are spurious arguments that held no water when Labour were in power being used to scupper any change at all which would effectively be the result if we were to follow Harman's logic to its conclusion.

Oh and in case anyone is in any doubt of course I think we should do our best to improve voter registration. It just cannot be used as a way of holding all other reforms to ransom.

Cameron's first PMQs as PM - Review

I thought David Cameron did pretty well at PMQs today. The whole affair began in a fairly understated way largely due to the deaths this morning in Cumbria.

Harman asked some difficult questions about anonymity for rape suspects and deliberately chose a good wedge issue between Tories and Lib Dems on married tax allowance. Cameron handled all of this OK though in my view.

In fact (whisper it) but he seemed very statesmanlike at the dispatch box. Someone commenting on my live chat mentioned that he seemed to be following some pretty specific body language routine to appear so. That's probably the public school education coming through!

What most impressed me though was his willingness to actually try to answer the questions. Where Gordon Brown would have just reeled off a list of tractor statistics and then insulted his questioner I got the feeling that Cameron was trying to engage properly. He was a bit evasive in some places but if we are to be fair PMs cannot know the answer to everything. Cameron himself made this point when he said he would write to a member about an answer to which there was some heckling. His response then was that at least he was trying to give correct answers rather than making them up on the spot. This would be fair enough except that when Brown use to try that Cameron used to accuse him of dithering! Some level of hypocrisy would seem to be par for the course even in the "new politics".

The overall level of jeering and heckling seemed less than normal (although not totally absent). This can probably be partly ascribed to the fact that the Lib Dems (whose leaders always used to get way more than their fair share) are now in government. It is probably also due to the sheer number of new MPs who are still finding their feet. However it is welcome and I hope it continues and maybe even improves further.

An impressive outing for the new Prime Minister. It will be interesting to see if this sort of standard can be maintained as he it battered by events in the coming months and years.

PMQs Live Chat - 2nd June 2010 - #PMQs

To mark the first PMQs of the coalition government I thought I would host a Live Chat on here whilst it is in progress.

PMQs starts at 3:00pm and the chat will start a few minutes before. Join us below:

Cameron should start PMQs as he means to go on

Today will be David Cameron's first Prime Minister's Questions.

I am sure there will be much excitement among political watchers. Will he acquit himself well? Will he best the opposition? Can Harriet land a couple of blows? Will anyone trip him up?

I am hopeful for something else though. The last Prime Minister allowed PMQs to degrade to the point where I cannot remember him often answering the question. It was merely an opportunity to list the latest set of tractor statistics and make spurious points about the opposition. Also, he had a dreadful tendency to ask the leader of the opposition questions. It's not LOTOQs!

I hope that Cameron does a few things differently to his predecessor:

1) Answer the question! This might sound obvious and I am not so naive as to expect him not to try and make political points as he responds but in doing so he should try his best to answer whatever has been asked of him.

2) Stop with the planted questions. It gets so tedious hearing backbenchers invite the PM to agree with them how wonderful the government is. Cameron should have no truck with any of this.

3) It is a new parliament with well over 200 new MPs. There has not been a better opportunity in the last few decades to try and change the culture so Cameron should lead by example and discourage jeering and heckling. He did this a bit when he first became leader of the opposition but soon abandoned his attempts. He now has the chance to do this again from the position of PM. If he really wants a new politics, this is one way of trying to get it and to communicate to voters that the awful barracking that so turns them off in the chamber will not be tolerated.

Once he has a couple of PMQs under his belt the tone will be set and it will be too late. Today is the best opportunity to show that he really means to do things differently.

Zero percent rise!

Gordon Brown has just announced during Prime Minister's Questions that there will be a "Zero percent rise" in spending in 2013. So no increase is apparently a "rise". It's amazing how with Mr Brown words seem to mean whatever he wants them to.

Like Humpty Dumpty.

UPDATE: Now with added embeddage:

"Gordon Brown resign" petition is still there

With all the other stuff going on at the moment about MP's expenses, it seems to have slipped off the media's agenda but the "Please Go" petition asking Gordon Brown to resign is still there on the Downing Street petitions website. At the time of writing, the numbers have just gone past 56,000 which is almost double the next largest one.

Brown is still an awful Prime Minister with no democratic legitimacy and if like me you think the time has come for him to go, please go and sign the petition.

There have been some suspicions that not all the signatures are being added and the rate of increase tapered off rather oddly, just as the media coverage was ramping up a week or so ago. I posted about it here last week. If you have problems relating to this, please contact Kalvis Jansons the petition's creator via this Google group.

"Gordon Brown resign" petition - Tory asks him about it at PMQs

A Tory backbencher, Andrew Rosindell asked Gordon Brown about the "Please Go" petition at Prime Minister's Questions today in the House of Commons. He pointed out that the number of signatures on the list are now more than twice the number of votes he got in his constituency at the last general election (which as I have posted about previously when the signatures passed this number is his only democratic mandate at all, as an MP for Kircaldy and Cowdenbeath).

Brown's response was to bat this question away by claiming that Mr Rosindell should be "ashamed" for not asking about policy.

I can assure Mr Brown that people like myself who have signed this petition and want him to go are not ashamed of doing this, or having our representatives in parliament bring it up like this. I am however ashamed that our Prime Minister has no democratic mandate to lead this country, is politcally tone deaf, has completely ballsed up our economy and yet has not accepted any responsibility for this. At all.

If you disagree with Gordon's analysis and think it is time he went then go to the petition and add your name to the 50,000+ people who have already done so in the last 2 weeks.