What the hell just happened in Parliament?

14.41, a follow up: “Wait – it turns into a confidence issue in the time I looked away?!”. Betrayed by my whiskers, after all these years.

It is fair to say that things only kept snowballing after that. I won’t try to give you a blow-by-blow account of how the day unfolded, as it would take both too many words and too much of my sanity away. Instead, we can look at the current state of play, which is this:

1. SNP and Tory MPs have united in an unholy alliance against Speaker Linday Hoyle, who many believe no longer commands the authority of the House of Commons. At time of writing, an Early Day Motion calling for his removal has gathered around 60 signatures.
   
2. Threats of violence against members of Parliament have become such that they are now influencing the business of the House, as Hoyle explained when he tried to set out his thinking for allowing Labour to have its own amendment on an SNP opposition day.
   
3. While all of this was happening in London, the Knesset in Tel Aviv announced that it would “never recognise a Palestinian state”.

This order wasn’t picked at random, by the way, but instead reflects the amount of both coverage and fury that each piece of information is currently receiving in Westminster. Hoyle must go; MPs are terrified for their lives; innocent Palestinians will keep dying.

Well-meaning observers may argue that yesterday ought to have only focused on the third issue, and was mercilessly derailed by parliamentary procedure. They wouldn’t be entirely correct. What the SNP set out to do yesterday was to lay down a trap for the Labour party, which they knew is currently divided on the issue.

It doesn’t mean that the move was entirely cynical, of course, but the cynicism must be noted. Similarly, Tory MPs may have been irate at the Speaker’s decision to allow Labour an amendment but their leadership was the one who decided to pull out from the votes. How convenient, given that their motion didn’t have the numbers! Really, it’s cheap trickery all the way down.

There are probably a number of conclusions one could draw from yesterday’s disaster. An obvious one would be that threats of violence against MPs need to be taken a lot more seriously, both for their own sake and because they now influence the behaviour of our politicians.

Another would be that our MPs are bored and frustrated. The fury on show in the chamber last night was striking; they brayed and yelled so loudly that it felt like a wall of sound coming straight out of the screen. It is possible that some of them just felt especially strongly about Palestinian lives, but let’s be honest – that is not why most of them were apoplectic.

They took an issue that was, yes, unideal – the Speaker did break long-standing convention – but treated it like Hoyle had stomped on their collective childhood pet. They’re bored and frustrated because Parliament hasn’t debated any meaningful, interesting, useful legislation in some time.

They’re bored and frustrated because they all know that an election is coming soon, god knows when, and the Conservatives will lose it. Nothing they do right now will meaningfully matter, and it’s not like they’re doing much in the chamber to begin with.

Politicians are restless because most of them aren’t stupid and can tell that the country is not doing well but they’re not even attempting to fix it anymore. They yell and get red in the face about parliamentary procedure because they’re people who want to feel strongly about things, but they know this Parliament is dead already.

In short: strap in, it’s going to be a long few months.