Time for Parliament to leave the Palace of Westminster behind?
A report in today’s Times suggests that repairing the Palace of Westminster could cost up to £14 billion and require Members of Parliament to move out for twenty years. Inevitably, the question arises as to whether this is a good use of an enormous amount of public money. But there are bigger, more fundamental questions than that. At a time when British politics appears to be in a state of existential crisis, is the building itself, the Palace of Westminster, part of the problem? Is it time for Parliament to move out, for the sake of our politics?
Consider the Senedd Cymru — the Welsh Parliament building. A modern working environment in an iconic, environmentally-sensitive building; one that cost £70 million — a tiny fraction of the cost of refurbishing Parliament.
But, more than that, with its circular chamber, its open spaces — including the space outside that offers a natural space for demonstrations and rallies, recognising that such events are and always will be a part of our Welsh politics — it is a building that shapes the politics that take place within it. In the early days of the Senedd, by all accounts former Westminster Parliamentarians tried to replicate the noisy, oppositional Chamber manners of the House of Commons and failed utterly: in our Siambr, it was just false. Our Siambr calls out for a more mature, adult, constructive politics than Westminster. It both reflects and shapes our aspirations to be a modern, grown-up, serious democracy. It is a Siambr in which, for all the vigour of debate, working across party for the good of Wales has become the norm.
On the other hand, Pugin and Barry’s behemoth is a building and a project that privileges the past. Its Gothic revivalism speaks of the mythology of Englishness: the Whig conception of history — the fiction of English destiny from King Alfred on, finally achieved in 1688 and given expression in Acts of Union — set in stone (as it happens, cheap stone, which is one of the reasons why it is falling down). Its undersized chambers and its faking of the accoutrements of an age of chivalry speak of a leisured, part-time politics; its red and green benches of a hierarchy in which the Upper House is untouched by democratic mandate. And, built in the middle decades of the Nineteenth Century, it epitomises an Imperial ideal that we now see through very different, more critical and more intellectually honest eyes.
More recently, it has come to symbolise something altogether more urgent: political failure. Its every stone and furnishing exudes an English exceptionalism that, as Brexit is demonstrating as it falls apart in front of our eyes, has no relevance to the modern world or to modern British society. The crumbling of Barry and Pugin’s edifice is quite a powerful metaphor for a British politics that has descended into corruption and sleaze, and where it has become increasingly clear that our colourful constitutional arrangements offer no defence against a Government with a Parliamentary majority that is determined to subvert democratic practice and principles. It’s not just that the mythology that the Parliament buildings seek to perpetuate is fake, based on a misreading of history; it is that its picturesque rituals have long been used to disguise the realities of power and of the denial of democratic constitutional agency.
William Morris, in News from Nowhere, turned the Palace of Westminster into a manure store. Faced with the dishonesty and corruption of the Boris Johnson era, it’s difficult to deny that he had a point. But the answer, surely, is to turn it into a museum; one that, curated honestly and with historical context, tells a story of a political system and a political Union that, for all its delusions of imperial glory, ultimately failed when it proved itself unable to move beyond the post-Imperial fantasy of the buildings that housed it.
And perhaps we should use the commissioning of a new Parliament building to start confronting the questions that Westminster politics so studiously avoids — what sort of society and polity do we really want to be? Is the nineteenth-century post-Imperial concept of a United Kingdom sustainable any more? Are we really willing to accept an appointed Upper House, attended by the flummery of medieval nobility, and what does it tell us that this same House is often the last line of defence against populist legislation undermining rights introduced in the Lower House? Why do we need cramped and overcrowded Parliamentary chambers in which two parties confront one another, like a public school debating society, across a space designed to replicate the length of two swords’ blades — and in which debate is turned into a Pythonesque braying contest?
Relocating Parliament into a new home might just force the United Kingdom — England above all — to ask the questions that the crumbling splendour of Westminster has bamboozled us into avoiding.
We who live outside England — in nations where new Parliaments and new institutions have been part and parcel of the growth of more distinctive, more diverse, more democratic political cultures that are outgrowing the ethos of the Palace of Westminster and the Union it represents — know that Westminster politics is no longer fit for purpose. Perhaps the abandonment of that Palace of Westminster could be the catalyst that leads to real questions about how far the United Kingdom has been shaped by a delusional pseudo-history, and post-Imperial exceptionalism: questions about what this United Kingdom really is, and in what form, if at all, it survives.
