“Speak-ah!” “Speak-ah!” Twice the cry went out as Lindsay Hoyle and his liveried entourage slow-marched the quarter-turn through Central Lobby. The policemen doffed their caps, tourists hushed their tones and the vaulted hall room smelled of cold stone. So, I thought on Monday 1 September, the first day of the new parliamentary term, this is British democracy’s constitutional alarm call after its summer slumber. It felt neither especially efficient, nor especially dignified. But even as parliament appeared to go through its motions, in this premature autumn prompted by an overheated summer, this staid institution couldn’t hide from the angry and accelerating politics that has swept the country in the past two months.
The House of Commons does at least look much as the New Statesman left it. The members still loll, slouch and lounge, some with their legs hooked on to the bench next-door, others with them stretched out in horizontal pairs along the floor. You can still find your fill of the Westminster B-list: Keir Mather, the 27-year-old baby-face of the House; Katie Lam, the latest coiffed blonde hope of the Tory right; and Gavin Williamson, who as Tory chief whip kept a tarantula in his office and whom the Russian defence ministry once called a “market wench”. I even spotted a cheerful and carefree Rishi Sunak. Everyone still speaks in pointless tricolons and meaningless buzzwords: it wasn’t for nothing Dickens called the sound of MPs debating “parliamentary bagpipes”. And almost all the parliamentarians continue to suffer from a shocking smartphone addiction. Seriously – I know at one time parliamentarians used to appear half-cut in the Chamber, but Chris Philp has got a problem.
And the first order of business was a seamless resumption from the early summer in the form of Oral Questions: Work and Pensions. In practice, this meant some fresh slinging over the government’s climbdown on the welfare reform bill. On the Tory bench, Danny Kruger and Helen Whately asked how the government could seek to make up its lost savings on personal independence payments, in attacks pepped up by mentions of “Labour lawyers”, “subsidising… foreign nationals” and “free cars” (a reference to the online right’s obsession with the motability scheme for disabled people). Liz Kendall meanwhile kept boasting about the size of the triple lock on pensions, as if she should somehow be proud of it and not as if it were the source of her ills. (“Investing an additional £31bn in the triple lock over this parliament!” she gloated.)
So far, so July 2025. But the original order of business planned for the afternoon was updated over the weekend, disrupted by two ministerial statements. And they represented concessions, if hardly answers, to two national spiralling crises: the protests against migrant hotels and the war in Gaza.
The Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, was first up. She was there to update the House about border security and the asylum system. And she effectively confirmed that Labour is making several concessions to the arguments of Reform UK and the legalists of the political right by “reforming the way the ECHR [European Convention on Human Rights] is interpreted”, specifically its eighth article, which refers to the family reunion of refugees. She also confirmed that government policy was to “end asylum hotels”, a commitment she repeated in one turn of phrase or another no fewer than 24 times (I counted) over the next two and a half hours of debate. She did not use the phrase “smash the gangs” once.
But in a context of surging ethnic nationalism, a parliamentary update was far from Cooper’s only job. At the end of her statement (“fix every aspect of the broken system we inherited”, etc), Cooper launched into a brief thunder of Ingerland rhapsody, talking about how it felt “when we sing ‘God Save the King’” and of “our flags, our King and our country”. It was as if, rather than green benches, she was staring down the breach at Harfleur, the yeomen of England at her back. You half expected her to tear off the mellow blue blazer to reveal a Geri Halliwell dress. Clearly the “be more patriotic” directive has already gone out from the newly resettled No 10 team. “I strongly support the flying of flags across the country,” Cooper repeated. Keir Starmer has since claimed that he has a St George’s flag in his flat.
The Tory response to this issue is fundamentally compromised: the shadow home secretary (that’s Chris Philp, not Robert Jenrick) was the immigration minister who presided over the original expansion in small-boat arrivals and migrant hotels. In the only joke of the debate – it just wasn’t that kind of afternoon – Oliver Ryan MP weakly chortled, “He opened so many hotels that at one stage I thought he might take over from Lenny Henry in fronting Premier Inn.” But some of the language from our hot Reform summer leaked in. “Detain, deport,” suggested Lee Anderson. “Detain and deport,” repeated Richard Tice, and “leave the ECHR”. And while several MPs rose to remind the government of its war-born human rights obligations, multiple others, Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat, asked Cooper specifically to promise a migrant hotel in their constituency would be closed.
After Cooper came David Lammy who, following her John Bull-ish turn, looked more like John Bunyan’s Mr Facing-Both-Ways. He demanded a ceasefire, condemned Israel’s E1 settlement scheme, which allows for a new wave of construction in the West Bank, and reiterated the government’s commitment to the recognition of a Palestinian state, the latter awkwardly phrased as conditional on Israel continuing its offensive in Gaza. But that wasn’t Lammy’s only equivocation. He now refers to the starvation of Gaza as a “man-made famine”, which would imply that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war, which would constitute a war crime. This last phrase, or indeed anything stronger, did not pass Lammy’s lips. Nor did the words “Palestine Action”, or any mention of the pro-Palestine movement’s suppression. Even when probed by Jeremy Corbyn and another MP, Lammy did not directly answer questions about the RAF’s mysterious surveillance flights over Gaza, which continued in August.
Parliament is a neglected institution. This, in every political columnist’s favourite lazy metaphor, is an advanced architectural fact. Far from Augustus Pugin’s palace of marble, porphyry and stained glass, the place is a wreck, full of toilets leaking into buckets, buzzing plugs and fire inspectors anxiously pacing the corridors. A friend recently reported that a shard of gargoyle – he thought either a portion of nose or fang – fell on him in Westminster Hall. But more than that, parliament is neglected by politicians. This is a well-told tale – the rise of sofa government and the concentration of executive power around No 10 and the prime minister.
But in parliament’s absence this summer, politics has been racing ahead of it, and ahead of No 10 too, which has vacated the stage for Nigel Farage. The supporters of Palestine Action, and beyond them the sympathisers of the Palestinian cause, are in direct conflict with the police. On the right, the nationalism unfurling in protests across provincial England might see Reform UK as their champions – or the man periphrastically referred to on Monday afternoon as the “Honourable Member for Clacton”. But their concerns are local, and territorial, now being litigated in contests between district councils and high courts. Our highest ministers of state are latecomers, issuing rearguard statements, governing not in poetry or prose but in sub-clause. The mind turns readily to Lindsay Hoyle’s slow-moving train of inconsequential pomp.
[See more: Keir Starmer seeks to grip his government]
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This article appears in the 03 Sep 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Age of Deportation