What is this 'democracy' of which you speak?

Parliament is rubbish.

I've been meaning to write a post along these lines for a little while now, but have been too busy struggling against the crushing rubbishness of parliament at work. Now I finally have some breathing space I feel the need to vent.

After nearly seven months running my MP's Westminster office, the main (and probably rather obvious) conclusion I've come to is this: the notion that the House of Commons is the place where our elected representatives decide on matters of importance through the democratic means of voting is a laughable fiction. In nine out of ten cases, attempting to influence legislation by lobbying your MP to vote a certain way has about as much chance of changing the outcome as putting your faith in the magical legislation fairies.

It's not just the fact that the government's majority means that effectively, the power to defeat them in the Commons rests largely with a few Labour backbenchers - Tories and Lib Dems can whip as hard as they like and shout till they're blue in the face, but without Labour rebels there's nothing doing. You don't really need to work in Parliament to know that that's the case. The thing that's riled me more is realising just how much control the government have over the legislative agenda - to the extent that much of the time, the question of whether there would be enough Labour rebels to defeat the government on a particular issue is largely irrelevant.

If the government thinks they might lose a vote - or even if they just don't want to talk about something, or don't want the embarrassment of being forced to declare an unpopular position - there are a staggering array of ways they can just stop it taking place. They can fiddle the agenda so that the vote has no chance of being reached. They can talk for hours about trivialities and call random votes about nothing in particular to waste time. In the case of Private Member's Bills, all they have to do is make sure the Minister has the floor at the point when the guillotine falls on the debate, and hey presto - no vote. When the government already has a virtual monopoly on deciding what gets discussed and what legislation is debated, you'd think you would need some procedural safeguards to rebalance control over the agenda in a more democratic manner. Instead, the rules do precisely the opposite. Pretty much the only thing obliging the government to allow votes it might lose is political pressure. It's insane.

This post was originally going to be about one or two particularly outrageous examples of this that I've experienced at work, but they really deserve posts in their own right, and this one is already obscenely long. Besides, I've got a feeling this is going to rumble on in almost any work-related blogging I do. So just think of this as useful background to my future rantings.

The point is: this is no way to run a country. Our political system is a sinister joke - and it's got to change.