MPs and the outrage game

It was never clear what this Parliament was going to do if it was no longer prorogued. For three years the UK Parliament has been unable to act on the 2016 referendum result. It was never clear what they were hoping to achieve if they got an extra three days, weeks or months.

But the Parliament that reassembled yesterday managed to live down to even what low expectations there might have been. The Members appear to have decided, as is the way in modern British politics, to win by playing games of language and offence taking.

The signs were clear when the Attorney General, Geoffrey Cox, at one stage referred to a question as being like a ‘When did you stop beating your wife’ question. Emma Hardy, an MP for Hull, swiftly contrived to squeeze some offence out of that. Soon she was on her feet objecting that such a phrase was horrifically, wildly inappropriate and somehow made light of a domestic abuse bill due to go through the Commons. In the armoury of modern British political warfare being able to disingenuously or otherwise accuse someone else of making light of domestic violence is almost as good as claiming that they have used a ‘dog-whistle’ racist term.

The fact that Hardy had herself used the phrase she had complained of in the recent past was a reminder – if reminder was needed – that much of this is now performance. People pretend to be offended in order to win an actual political point. As Hardy made her intervention the Labour benches around her supported her horror with ‘disgusting’ and the like.

All that turned out only to be the warm-up for the main offence taking however. Paula Sherriff MP chose to go for the nuclear offence taking option by claiming that in saying things like ‘surrender’ the Prime Minister was using ‘dangerous’ words.