Corbyn's first PMQs: a joyless spectacle

Jeremy Corbyn’s first performance at Prime Minister’s Questions was bland, boring and uninspiring.




Spare a thought for the poor man’s PA who, if Corbyn is to be believed, would have had to wade through 40,000 questions to assist Labour’s new leader to pick 6 questions. Perhaps it is a measure of how exhausting this was for the poor soul, or how lacking in quality the submissions were, that 2 of them focussed on the same topic – mental health. Without any of the theatrics and squabbles, the event was joyless and without purpose. Every government department answers for itself in the house and in committees, in debates that are serious and informative. PMQs is not by any means the best place to highlight issues or hold the government to account. It is, rather, an exercise in credibility maintenance for the government and opposition, and it’s the spats that make that a spectacle worth watching. It’s the performance that makes it memorable, not the topics. The minute Cameron looked like he was going to inject some life in to the agonisingly tedious event, he was immediately shot down by Angus Robertson. Cameron said it would “take some getting used to.” Well, I agree with that.

What really makes me sick about Corbyn’s new approach to this event is the way it is billed and, it seems, universally accepted as a new style of politics, but what exactly is new about ordinary people or specifically young people asking questions of parliamentarians? In 2006 when I was 16, I campaigned in opposition to what I considered to be appalling treatment of detainees at the Campsfield immigration centre, Oxford. I gathered a lot of evidence, wrote a letter to John Reid, Labour’s ‘fixer’ who was then Home Secretary, and received pages of evidence back, including Home Office responses to the specific cases of mistreatment I highlighted. That’s political participation for you.
It’s never been impossible to write to your MP, or directly to a government minister. It’s never been impossible to lobby and arrange meetings to secure support for your cause, and that’s what passionate people have done for decades. Nearly every job advertised in Parliament is for a constituency case worker, for backbenchers and frontbenchers alike. Yet Jeremy Corbyn believes that there is something to celebrate in 40,000 people instead choosing to send a one-liner, knowing that in all probability it would never be read out anyway. Mr Corbyn is, quite frankly, making a virtue out of the politics of easy answers and the politics of laziness. A decent leader wouldn’t throw the mailbox open to the public, but would draw on his own experience (yes, still always 'his' when it comes to Labour), having met constituents and taken advice from colleagues, to come up with a decent set of questions on his own. Yes, Corbyn’s questions were decent and indicative of a distinctly left-wing critique, but at the end of the day, they weren’t even his own questions. I think it’s unlikely that many of those 40,000 would actually write a substantive letter to their MP, join a pressure group or, if one dare be so immodest, write properly-referenced articles on subjects of interest. Yet we are supposed to welcome this as some kind of democratic awakening. If political participation is reduced to a one-line complaint or question emailed to Jeremy Corbyn, and it becomes something you slot in between watching Eastenders and going to the pub, it shows how disenchanted people really are. Jeremy Corbyn is making a self-righteous spectacle of his own laziness and refusal to concern himself with compromise and meaningful engagement with his party. His voters, who gave no thought to Labour’s electoral credibility with a wider public that isn’t as left-wing as this cohort, showed the same laziness in plumping for the politics that sounds good and pleasing to the ear.
The stark truth is that if political participation was renewed, alive and well, Jeremy Corbyn’s PMQs exercise would have been seen as the lazy gimmick that it was. In fact, its warm reception is testament to the extent to which politics is peripheral in so many of our lives. Corbyn’s hailed as great because he gives us a kind of politics that can be confined to our spare time. For the rest of us, he’s made PMQs a strained, false and meaningless event that has had the joy, dynamism and oratorical artistry sucked out of it.