Changing Parties

This week: unparliamentary language, extra-parliamentary Liberal Democrats, and the disappointing presidency of John Tyler.

I have just returned from my annual pilgrimage to LibDem conference. This is absolutely not, despite what you may have heard, something I undertake merely because it’s probably the event anywhere on the planet at which people are most likely to tell me they liked that thing I wrote.¹ This year, in fact, I was there with some official status, reporting on the mood for Prospect. 

You can read the lengthy feature that results, plus hear me on that fine magazine’s podcast, now. But to give you a taste, here are some of my big takeaways:

Oh my, there are a lot of LibDem MPs now. It’s easy to underplay this, because the result was not as mad as the more extreme MRP projections that some of us – ahem – got very excited about. The Tories did not fall below 100; Ed Davey did not become the leader of the Opposition. 

You would not believe what the Polyphonic Spree look like now. Image: author who plagiarises his own jokes’ own.

Still, though, there are around 60% as many LibDems (72) in the Commons as there are Tories (121). In Brighton, I kept bumping into people I couldn’t pick out of a line up, but whose badge read “PARLIAMENTARIAN”. That feels like it could affect the vibe of our politics – there’ll be two questions from Ed Davey at every Prime Minister’s Questions, for starters – in ways that it will be hard to predict. 

The LibDems are planning to put tanks on Labour’s lawn. The single topic we’re most likely to hear Davey use those questions to needle the Prime Minister about is the NHS – invented, he claimed in his speech, by a Liberal, William Beveridge. That could get uncomfortable for the government: this is natural Labour territory, but it’s going to be tough to fix the mess left by the Tories without spending a lot of money the government just doesn’t have. Expect to see a lot of Davey’s “not angry, just disappointed” face.

They’re also hoping to replace the Tories. This, too, was explicit in Davey’s speech: the Tory party has proved itself “unfit for opposition… Let’s finish the job”. This sounds mad, until you realise it’d only take winning another 25 seats off the Tories – ambitious, but not crazy – to do it. Of the top 30 LibDem targets, 26 are currently Tory. It’s not the most likely outcome, but given the Tories' determined refusal to think about the reasons they’re now out of power, it must at least be possible.

The party is annoyingly happy about all this. Honestly, they were ecstatic. It was excruciating. Not to mention, hard to write about. 

There are probably tensions looming. To replace the Tories the LibDems will have to prioritise the sorts of policies that play well in the “blue wall” of the south – opposing housebuilding will be a big one; so might bitching about VAT on school fees – and generally leaning slightly to the right. That may not go down well with either younger members or the party’s more social democratic instincts. Given the democratic nature of the party’s policy-making apparatus, any fights that result will play out publicly on the conference floor.

This year, everyone was in a great mood. I’m not sure that lasts past, say, 2027.

Anyway, you can read a longer version of this, with more slightly upsetting anecdotes concerning things like Glee Club, on the Prospect website – or, if you prefer to wait and do things the old-fashioned way, in the magazine out next week. An extract, to surprise and delight you:

 On a table were a series of Morph-like creatures, the product of an earlier round. “Ed Clay-veys,” someone explained. One of them had tiny yellow genitalia. 

Enjoy.

Spivs, scumbags and troglodytes: some unparliamentary language

In 2021, the Labour MP Dawn Butler was thrown out of the House of Commons for accusing Boris Johnson – a known liar, whose inability to stop lying would be instrumental in the end of his premiership the following year – of lying. The deputy speaker had asked her to “reflect on her words”; Butler replied, “It’s funny that we get in trouble in this place for calling out the lie, rather than the person lying”. She was told to leave the chamber.

This is stupid – but it was, also, predictable. In the Westminster Parliament, in those the British Empire scattered around the planet like rabbit droppings and even in some places beyond, a tradition has evolved that there are some words or phrases that it is simply inappropriate to use in a legislative chamber. “Unparliamentary language” often includes the use of profanity – which is not entirely unreasonable; few forms of professional communication are big on that. But it often also includes the suggestion another politician is dishonourable or is lying – which is problematic because many of them are and do. 

At any rate, the Wikipedia entry on unparliamentary language is one of those pages you can lose yourself for an hour in –  and which newsletter writers shamelessly looking for something quick and list-y he can do in a busy week might shamelessly trawl. 

With that confession made, here are some of my favourite examples:

1. Notable words that have been classed as unparliamentary in Westminster include “blackguard”, “git”, “guttersnipe”, “hooligan”, “hypocrite”, “idiot”, “ignoramus”, “pipsqueak”, “rat”, “sod”, “slimy”, “squirt”, “stoolpigeon” (one assumes in the sense of police informer, rather than, well, a pigeon), and (although only occasionally) “dodgy”.

2. That list is quite dry, though. So let’s turn now to the examples which some thoughtful benefactor has pulled together from Canadian history: