Opinion

Alex Kane: Brexit has exposed the ineptitude of this generation of politicians

Alex Kane

Alex Kane

Alex Kane is an Irish News columnist and political commentator and a former director of communications for the Ulster Unionist Party.

The House of Commons, London
The House of Commons, London The House of Commons, London

I first attended a House of Commons debate in the early spring of 1975, just a few weeks after Margaret Thatcher had become leader of the Conservative Party.

My father was a friend of North Down MP Jim Kilfedder and Jim had arranged a tour, a lunch with him and a number of other Northern Ireland MPs and then a good spot in the visitors' gallery. I can't actually remember the debate in question, but I do remember being mesmerised by the sheer talent of most of the speakers.

This was a time when the Commons was choc-a-bloc with 'big beasts' of the political jungle; politicians who didn't need speeches written for them by special advisers. They had experience of the outside world. They had an understanding of the national and international agenda; and while they clearly disagreed and argued their own case with skill and passion, it was similarly clear that they respected their opponents across the floor. They enjoyed debate. Many of them seemed to thrive on it.

They were passionate, fierce, articulate, ideological and, on many occasions, genuinely funny. Most were also ferociously well-read; even those Labour MP's who had worked in docks, mines, factories and heavy industry and who, according to Tony Benn, had been propelled into politics after years of evening classes and 'long nights getting to grips with George Orwell and Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist'. And while both benches had their fair share of younger entrepreneurs, QCs and trade union mouthpieces, they still had many older men who had served in the 1939-45 war and whose experiences there shaped and steered their belief in a determination never to return to those days.

I'm not pretending that the Commons at that time was some sort of 'hall for heroes' or a storehouse for unrivalled wisdom and circumspection. But I sensed that the people there were capable of rising to the great challenges of the day and making decisions. I didn't always agree with those decisions, of course, but, generally speaking, I trusted them to make a decision and then--or, in most cases--stand over those decisions.

Today, it is different. Far too many MPs join a party at university, work in a constituency office or Commons office as some sort of researcher, pinpoint a seat they have a chance of winning and then get elected. Some work in the so-called 'real world' for a few years, before finding a berth in party headquarters and then find a seat. But it is obvious listening to the standard of modern debate (when many MPs are, in fact, sitting on their laptops and mobile phones) that the passion, knowledge and experience which used to underpin debates has gone. I've done enough public speaking to know when someone is using their own words or the words of a party speech writer or adviser. I've heard enough political speeches to know when personal outrage is genuine or manufactured to suit the needs of a later Twitter or Facebook post. I've observed politics long enough to spot a fake from half-a-mile away.

Brexit has presented Parliament--and the House of Commons in particular--with its greatest challenge since 1945. Greater than the creation of the welfare state; the Suez Crisis; the original debate over joining the then Common Market; the Falklands War and a host of other domestic and international crises. And yet 33 months after the vote to Leave the European Union there is--at the time of writing, on Wednesday afternoon--still no certainty about what is happening. The government has failed to build a majority for its own position; and the opposition parties have failed to build a majority for their alternative.

I have a close friend, a successful, wealthy businessman, who voted Remain. We breakfasted on June 24, hours after the Leave victory had been announced. He wasn't happy, but he was prepared to make the best of it. "But," as he put it, "to prepare, I need to be aware. I need a clear steer from the government. I've survived the roaring inflation and strikes of the 1970s and at least two economic crashes. I'll survive this." His anger now is directed at everyone in the House of Commons. As he put it to me at lunch last week, "they are a shower of useless, inexperienced tossers. No experience of the real world and experts at little more than playing rather than practising politics."

The irony, I suppose, is that it has taken a debate like this to expose the chronic, collective ineptitude of a post-1973 generation of politicians who have no experience of governing the United Kingdom outside the confines of the Common Market/EEC/EC/EU. Membership of the EU--where so many decisions are made for them--has hidden their ineptitude. That's why so many of them are terrified of having to stand on their own two feet.