An observant visitor from another world would surely find today’s Britain a troubled place, facing historic difficulties – inflation, war, inequality, its unsure place in the world, climate breakdown. But they might struggle to learn it from much of the country’s media, which is seemingly more interested in allegations against TV presenters than in illuminating the country’s much larger problems.
The visitor would have witnessed a dimension of this national disjunction if they had sat in the House of Commons gallery on Tuesday to hear MPs debating the latest stages of the government’s illegal migration bill. Here, after all, was indubitably a debate on an important problem. Migration policy is not working well, is in need of fresh and coherent approaches, and is causing concern to many. In short, it is a classic example of the many ways in which ours is a country – and a continent – no longer at ease with itself.
And yet how many of Britain’s 650 MPs – all of whom know extremely well that this is the case – even attended Tuesday’s debate, never mind actually took part in it or tried to shape the new laws? Maybe 40 were in the chamber at the start, on a generous estimate, with as many empty benches on the Labour as the Tory side. Even those numbers fell to less than half that total as the afternoon wore on. And only a tiny number of MPs spoke at any length.
The truly frustrating thing about Tuesday’s debate is that what was said was extremely focused on the realities of several aspects of migration and control. Most of this focus came from the Tory side, with Labour careful not to put forward too many specific ideas of its own. Theresa May and Iain Duncan Smith, improbable allies, mounted a defiant assault on the bill’s destructive impact on Britain’s efforts to suppress modern slavery. Vicky Ford and, in particular, Tim Loughton were terrier-like in trying to broaden and strengthen protections for unaccompanied child migrants.
In the end, though, it was not a debate that changed minds. When the votes came, the numbers were against the rebels. The payroll vote delivered for the government. The bill now returns to the House of Lords, where peers must decide how far to press proposed changes that, in the words of the immigration minister Robert Jenrick, would leave the legislation “riddled with exceptions and get-out clauses”. The Lords is unlikely to back down quickly, hoping that ministers will be forced to make concessions so that the bill can become law in this parliamentary session.
Even so, Tuesday’s disturbing debate cannot be explained without taking three wider dynamics into account. One involves the future of a Tory party that, as Professor Tim Bale puts it in his book The Conservative Party After Brexit, has now “slipped [its] moorings as a mainstream centre-right party”. The second is whether Labour has a migration policy that will be capable, in government, of withstanding a wholly predictable onslaught on just this issue from the Tories in opposition. The third is whether parliament can now deal with issues such as migration in anything other than a performative way in today’s media and populist environments.
The Tories first. Tuesday’s rebels did not just lose the votes. They were out of touch with the current party mood. The 2019 Tory manifesto said nothing about asylum seekers and small boats; indeed it made a positive case for more immigration. Yet, four years on, Robert Jenrick’s success at seeing off every pro-immigration revolt says a lot about the new and more rightwing centre of gravity in Rishi Sunak’s Tory party.
In spite of the best efforts of May and Loughton, they were able to muster only 16 and 15 Tory rebels respectively. There were significant liberal Tory names there, including Caroline Nokes, Damian Green and the father of the house, Peter Bottomley. But even after Brexit, there were still dozens of Conservative MPs willing to chip away at difficult legislation. Now the rebels are lucky if they can muster a dozen at all. This was, and felt like, one of the last stands of the old liberal Tories.
Yet they may get somewhere. At this stage of the legislative process, the real threats to the bill come from the Lords, where the government does not have a majority. Though there are not enough rebel Tory MPs to defeat the government, the two groups have a synergy, encouraging one another to keep up their campaigns for amendments. They have already forced the Home Office into some concessions. They may win more.
Where does all this leave Labour, especially if it forms the next government? Throughout recent migration debates, it has preferred to attack Tory headline-chasing, overreach and costly failure rather than bind itself to a detailed migration strategy of its own. This may be prudent pre-election tactics, but Labour is deceiving itself if it thinks it will get away with that in the heat of the campaign or in government.
Labour’s Stephen Kinnock had some good lines in his speech – the Conservatives had “sent more home secretaries to Rwanda than asylum seekers” he taunted. His acceptance that migration is a global issue that has to be addressed globally was sensible. But when Italy and Hungary have anti-migrant governments, with Spain perhaps joining them this month, and when the Dutch government has just fallen over the same issue, Labour cannot assume that international cooperation offers an escape from tough national decisions.
Underlying the dilemmas for all parties is the enduring impact of the anti-political mood on the way that parliament now works. In the age of performative politics, parliamentary scrutiny risks becoming pointless. You could see that on Tuesday. The record shows that the Lords amendments to the bill were voted down by around 300 against 230. Yet the vast majority of those MPs were absent for every minute of the debate.
Which is a matter of concern, to put it mildly. And perhaps also a scandal. Of course, anyone who has ever reported from parliament knows that the importance of the chamber has long been exaggerated; knows, too, that most MPs are simply lobby fodder whose role is to vote for the government’s business; and knows that media interest in parliament’s proceedings has fallen off a cliff over the last 30 years.
But a wider fact remains. Despite major efforts to strengthen parliament and to bolster the role of MPs, the central institution of our representative democracy is now increasingly an object of disdain in far too many eyes for comfort. Parliamentary sovereignty may be the constitutional cornerstone of Britain’s system of government. Yet with every passing day, our parliament is more scorned than sovereign. No government, of whatever party, can assume it will be able to change that.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist