I recently attended an event on Parliament Hill in the West Block, where the House of Commons is located these days due to the Centre Block renovations. And I was struck, as I always am, how small and intense the parliamentary world is.
MPs stopped in and out. The event was well underway when our host, Speaker Greg Fergus, finally entered, in his Speaker’s garb minus the robe. He stayed for the rest of the event, but eventually was nudged away to something else by an aide. A prominent parliamentarian brought his young child, explaining in his remarks that the House child care had closed for the day. Other MPs bobbed around in the middle of small groups, the conversation veering between friendly socializing and gently trying to slip in a point of view without violating lobbying rules.
This is the life of an MP. There are other types of busy, frantic jobs. But parliamentarians do lead unique lives.
I wrote in The Paradox of Parliament that “MPs do not spend a lot of time working alone at a desk. Their work is primarily transactional and in multiple places. They roam the parliamentary precinct for House, committee, and other events, interacting with fellow MPs, political staff, parliamentary staff, the media, lobbyists and interest groups, constituents, and more.” And this doesn’t even include the other half of the job: travelling to, from, and around the constituency; again, always moving and transacting. (I’m focusing exclusively on the House of Commons here; I’ll leave the Senate and senators for another time.) Nor does it incorporate family members, who often need to accommodate this unusual lifestyle. Meanwhile parliamentary political staff (at least the more visible ones) are well-dressed, crisp, and terribly smart and efficient; hustling everywhere both for their MPs and their own careers.
When you see this intense and sometimes frantic environment up close, it’s easier to understand how MPs sometimes make stunning mistakes, such as Mr Fergus’s recording of a partisan greeting in his Speaker’s robes (which he said was “between two meetings”) or his predecessor Mr Rota’s colossal misjudgment in honouring a Waffen SS veteran. Parliamentarians are responsible for their actions, but they can easily be carried along the wave of events and expectations of party, constituents, and their own staff, and in this hurried atmosphere they sometimes mess up big.
There is also an intense need to always be ‘on’ as a politician. One of the many ways smartphones have shaped politics is that everyone now has a high-quality recording device in their pocket and the ability to post its contents instantly to the world. Elected officials consequently become even more wooden and scripted, and afraid of spontaneity. I sometimes think one reason for Mr Rota’s bizarre error was that he was reacting against the often predictable and constrained nature of his role and wanted to get one thing done completely on his own, inadvertently undermining the Western alliance.
Parliament is also a tightly controlled space.
In my office I have a collection of parliamentary passes issued to me every time I enter one of the parliamentary precinct buildings (I don’t usually retain the paper passes, but I always forget to give them back when I leave, and so I collect and occasionally remember to return the clips for reuse). Every time I visit an MP or attend a parliamentary event it feels like going to the airport as I go through security (and the airport doesn’t make me remove my belt, as the parliamentary protective service does).
MPs of course move freely through the buildings, with a little pin on their lapel to signify their all-access status, while staff have permanent passes. But the larger point is that this is anything but a relaxed environment. The House of Commons is a highly securitized and controlled place, protecting it from outside threats, but further turning up the intensity of every moment inside.
So, and while it presumably gets easier if you spend enough time there, every time I enter the West Block I can feel the force of its pressure cooker; a place packed with ambitious people, both MPs and staff, most of whom only win if others lose.
It’s common to look back at earlier parliamentary eras as times of greater civility and a more relaxed atmosphere, especially across party lines. I don’t necessarily disagree, but these were also eras of white men being civil to other white men. It did take genuine effort for many of them reach out across linguistic, regional, and class lines; I don’t want to downplay that. But as parliament grows ever more diverse, the shared unspoken cultural codes diminish further, and it becomes ever more challenging to move from diversity to actual inclusion and respect.
One of the most interesting areas of legislative research is ethnographic studies of parliaments; observing everyday life for what it tells us about the institution. Emma Crewe has led the way with her studies of the UK Parliament and more recently the Texas State Legislature; another is Sarah Child’s feminist analysis and recommendations for Westminster, The Good Parliament.
In Canada we have almost nothing of this and I am not sure that our Parliament is ready to be candidly observed, though I would be happy to be proved wrong. But this is the sort of analysis we really need to understand how Parliament, and the people within it, work. Because the pressure cooker never turns off.
Good to know that our MP's have on site child care......along with a decent salary , health and pension benefits.
Nice work if you can get it......clapping like trained seals to honour a Nazi and half heartedly denying a genocide.
Interesting introduction , as a non political science person, to the work being done with ethnographic studies of parliaments. Yet my experience has been that many polisci professors who are now celebraties in the media are defensive about people in other fields knowing anything about politics or politicians.Purhaps, not to be rude, has there been an ethnographic study of political science communities? Maybe there has been.