Paper chasers

Christmas books pages usually invite columnists to nominate their publishing event of the year. Well, here’s a corker: The Ties that Bind: Citizenship and Civic Engagement in the 21st Century, published by the House of Lords Citizenship and Civic Engagement committee. That obscure body has 12 members and takes itself seriously. The Ties that Bind was the fruit of hearings it held into ‘civic engagement through the prism of the civic journey each one of us who lives in Britain will undertake’. Its 168 luxuriant pages of red and black print, published ‘by the Authority of the House of Lords’, has nine chapters, bullet points, footnotes, boxes, appendices and a further wodge of evidence online.

The word ‘evidence’, once reserved for blood-stained kerchiefs at crime scenes, now means ‘waffle from vested interests’. And perhaps ‘civic journey’ means an expenses-paid trip to Westminster to talk to -parliamentarians.

Apart from the clerks who assembled it, did anyone read The Ties that Bind? I picked up my copy from a table outside the Commons press gallery, where, each sitting day, a dutiful fellow stacks the numerous reports produced by parliamentary organisms. I have never seen a journalist so much as flick through one of those publications. Yet The Ties that Bind had a sticker on its cover announcing a ‘STRICT EMBARGO’ to ensure no review was published before a certain date. There was something forlorn about that sticker. It was like hotel Gideon Bibles that say ‘Do not remove’.

So much activity at Parliament is pointless. Take other titles on that press-gallery table. The Countryside at a Crossroads: Is the National Environment and Rural Communities Act 2006 Still Fit for Purpose? ran to 95 pages and ended with a flowchart of rural commissions.