To be embarrassed by our politicians?

[domineastronomy]

What an absolute shambles in the Commons this evening.
Voting on Gaza was secondary to pathetic game playing and point scoring.

It was the speakers fault for changing the rules despite being warned 3 times by the chief clerk what he was doing was breaking commons rules and was showing huge bias to Labour. He should resign before he's pushed.

I'm so so ashamed of the entire lot of them!

What a shitshow today was!
How are any of the parties electable?
I feel so sad for the UK that this rabble are the ones in charge.
I'd leave the UK if I could.

British politics has been a shitshow and a shambles for many years, I’ve stopped paying attention at this point

Back in the 1980s and early 1990s (around time of HIGNFY beginning), we used to look in absolute bemused horror at how other parliaments conducted themselves (eg near punch ups in Taiwan).

And we have become that.

I have no political "home" at the moment, and am likely to vote for a spoof candidate (screaming Lord Sutch, where are you now your country needs you?)

From what I can gather the SMP position (which was worded differently to Labour's - it specifically mentioned collective punishment ) was ignored by the speaker - on one of the few occasions the SMP are able to put forward motions - in favour of Labour's more balanced statement of holding Hamas to account/the necessary release of hostages plus need for ceasefire.

More than willing to be corrected as am not exactly an expert.

Forgive typo - SNP.

Can someone clarify for me, as it was mentioned very briefly but overshadowed by everything else-were both motions passed yesterday? Is that it now, no debate?

I think the chaos yesterday is reflective of the ridiculous media hype/ cancel culture we live in. Politicians are so scared of saying the wrong thing and being crucified in the press or on Twitter that they tip toe around, not answering questions or saying anything that (in this case) could possibly be construed to be anti-Israel or anti-Gaza. It’s like a ridiculous game gone mad.

Yes, but the only reason that they are both on the same side is that they were both hellbent on dividing Labour and humiliating Starmer.

None of them seem to give a toss about the Israeli hostages or the innocent people of Gaza.

Shame on the whole bloody lot of them.

The motions passed were those of Labour and Conservatives- not the SNP one which was far more left. And could have split the UK Labour Party.

I'm not interested in Israel and Gaza. I don't live there and I/we have no influence over hopelessly entrenched, decades long conflict rooted in religion and sectarianism.

I am interested in the mess our country is in, that this parliament has caused.

We hold fuck all influence there.

You're not missing anything because it doesn't do anything.

The purpose of the vote was not to send a clear message about the war in Gaza. If they had really wanted to do that, they could have worked cross party to get to something that a majority of the house could have agreed on.

The whole purpose was to target Labour on a topic where the other parties saw that Starmer was struggling to unite the Labour Party. And they are only pissed off because that plan was thwarted.

The whole shitshow had everything to do with domestic politics and nothing to do with the suffering of people in Israel or Gaza.

I wish we could get rid of the whipping system and simply allow MPs a free vote on matters of conscience like this. Take the party politics out of it and let people's individual moral judgements prevail.

So join them be part of the solution not the problem

Yes I am embarrassed too. We have seen decreasing standards of behaviour since the Conservatives under Boris with more insults, name calling etc and our elections looking more and more like the American slanging matches.

He will. Speaker has to act for the widest range of MPs, Erskine May guides decisions, but speaker has a lot of discretion and power to deviate from precedence. As Bercow said, if you never do anything differently, things will never change. Bercow took procedural decisions which were more radical (and maybe greater chance of impacting on the UK) - and has been punished as a result. The first speaker in Donkeys years to not be enobled into upper chamber once he stood down.

This is where the British obsession with bloody tradition comes and bites us on the arse - our style of government is not fit for purpose in the 21st century and needs a complete overhaul. The current adversarial, far too small, HoC needs replacing with a brand new building that has a circular chamber where everyone sits together. Get rid of all the stupid pomp and ceremony and the ridiculous pantomime outfits and mothball it all to history. It’s utterly embarrassing.

He didn't change the rules as such, but he broke with parliamentary precedent. We don't yet know exactly why.

It's possible that he bowed to pressure from the Labour Party - and there are all sorts of rumours about what was/wasn't said to him by the Labour whips. If this was a factor in his decision making, then I agree that he needs to stand down.

However, he also seemed to be suggesting yesterday that he was doing it with concerns about MP safety and security in mind.

Or maybe he was just trying to stop the human tragedy in Gaza from being used for cheap political point scoring.

The Tories and the SNP didn't have to throw their toys out of the pram in the way that they did, and Hoyle clearly failed to anticipate this. He got it wrong, but I don't think he was solely responsible for the chaos last night. The Tories, the SNP and Labour all have a share in the blame.

Ridiculous

Starmer got to the speaker because he has a weak position

His own problem he can’t deal with

I agree, but in a very general sense.

I'm pretty old and I can remember that, whatever party you supported, the politicians of the Wilson-Callaghan-Thatcher era were of a totally different calibre. They were all well-educated, able to speak eloquently and basically cut a dignified figure on the national and international stage. They appeared highly intelligent and driven by some kind of genuine belief - whether or not one agreed with them!

There were brilliant minds from the professions, but also from trade union backgrounds and I look back on them with nostalgia!

It's the same in the US. That huge population, all that wealth and the best they can come up with is Trump or Biden. Pathetic!

I wonder what the cause is? I think in this country it's partly 'career politicians' - go to Oxford to do PPE, get a job in Westiminster as a researcher to an MP and then stand as a candidate yourself when you're all of 29. No wonder they are out of touch and have little realistic life-experience which most people can relate to.

It's also populism. Our population is less well-informed than it once was and social media has meant that people can choose to completely ignore current affairs, history etc etc. I grew up in a time when there were 2 TV channels and we all watched the same things - which included the news (we had to shut up and watch it as children), serious docs and programmes like Panorama. This is not fantasy - at my mainly working class school we would discuss these programmes the next day. If you wanted to watch something, there wasn't the choice there is now to just watch wall-to-wall crap.

We get the politicians we deserve, don't we?

You don’t think war in the Middle East is going to affect you? Really? It already is with delayed goods having to travel around the Horn of Africa rather than using the Suez canal because of the Houthis, taking weeks longer and costing more. That’s just one aspect and it could get a lot worse. Never mind the humanitarian aspect of people starving, living in tents and being killed by the thousands. You don’t think we should at least TRY and intervene, that we should stand by watching this happen? You don’t think we have some responsibility for creating this mess in the first place? You think we can live in a little bubble here sorting our own mess out? Brexit is a good example of how that is just not working. What happens in the wider world affects us whether we like it or not. Grow up.

Yes I agree.
When we have a GE I have absolutely no idea to vote for and I’ve been voting for 45 years.
Any wise MN’s want to stand? You must be 100 times better than these load of clowns

The question people should be asking is:
Why are certain (mostly Labour) MPs so afraid of the consequences of a parliamentary vote? They act as if they're being intimidated. If so, that's an affront to democracy which should concern us all.

I thought what happened in commons made sense and is nothing to be embarrassed about.
I don't think anyone did wrong, actually, series of mistakes & great speeches & high emotions about important topics.
<shrug>

The Newscast podcast had a good report on this last night. I do think that the Speaker was trying to find a fair path through a very complex political situation and safeguard MPs from attack. The latter is probably because of the fairly recent murders of MPs which must have affected how he felt.

It didn't play out as he expected and lots of politicking got mixed up in everything. He was right to apologise but I don't think he is the only person who needs to.