the hellbound train has left the station

Julian Glover thinks it’s morning again in Parliament: 

After every winter of depression, there's an automatic rebound. It's true of the economy and of the Commons, post-expenses, for all the misery among MPs about the way the rules are applied. New MPs, a new government and a new way of doing government have added a superficial glamour. You sense it in the chamber, where business is more topical and quicker. The late sittings engineered by Labour, and even the recent embarrassed drunks on the terrace, are signs of something stirring. There is a buzz, a sense that the place is starting to matter again, that maybe voters are noticing. 

Julian Glover hasn’t been reading his own newspaper.

MPs will this afternoon get their first chance to debate a bill that allows every school in England to become an academy – with schools rated outstanding by Ofsted being fast-tracked, so that hundreds could convert by the start of the new school year. To enable this to happen, the government has compressed the committee stage in which bills are usually studied in detail by a panel of MPs. Instead, this stage will take place in two days on the floor of the House of Commons. 

... He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "Rushed laws can be bad laws. But it is also the case that if you've had extensive debate during the course of an election campaign, if you have, as we have, hundreds of schools who are anxious to take advantage of these proposals, then it is understandable that you want to honour the manifesto commitment." 

Because, you know, who needs a parliament when you’ve had a plebiscite? A couple of other things occur. Needless to say I don’t like most of what the government is doing. But they’re surely getting on and doing it, and doing it without, technically speaking, a majority. 

Compare that to the comparative timidity of the Blair government in 1997 while it was sitting on the largest majority in modern times. Remember that “post euphoria, pre delivery” guff that Blair came out with when people began wondering what was supposed to happen next? None of that here. The hellbound train has left the station. But then the 1997 government seemed absolutely petrified of being forced by the momentum of its majority into doing something leftwing. 

I suppose one reason to frontload everything and ram it through parliament is the government’s unwillingness to put the coalition through an extended series of stress tests. On the other hand coalitions are supposed to prevent hot legislative action of a radical and precipitate kind. So it’s another datapoint to the notion that the Lib Dems no longer really exist as an autonomous force.

Comments

[ejh]

Glover - he's a towering intellect, isn't he?

[Alex]

I believe he is a commentator of bottom.

[Chris Williams]

As in, his arse is so large that a steel cutout of him, pivoted atop a steeple, is sure to point unerringly in the direction from which the wind's blowing. How convenient.

[johnf]

I thought he was an actor.

[dsquared]

That's not a train; it's a handcart.

[Abelard]

I knew JG a bit at university; he was a nice guy, bright, totally of the London intelligentsia of that moment (at the time: Italian peasant food, super-long distance holidays starting to become a bit passe), and oddly enthusiastic about empty political projects that he thought were realistic. Thus he evinced a very strong interest in the Newification of Labour and had dinner parties with iirc Margaret Hodge about how exciting it all was. I think the move to excitement about this particular cross-party project is wholly in character. He will probably be a leading indicator of its failure, too, eventually.