The Trendy Vicar

I have just finished reading Alex Massie's recent article in The Spectator amusingly entitled 'John Bercow: Garden Gnome or Trendy Vicar? Or Both?'. To give a quick summary, he dismisses the Speaker's suggestion for removing the proper forms of address for MPs as demonstrating a juvenile understanding of how to reconnect Parliament with the people.

One of the online commenters, rather perceptively, highlights the trendy vicar comparison - pointing out the failure of 'modernisers' in the Church of England (I had a friend at university who bemoaned the same in the Roman Catholic church, condemning everything since Vatican II as 'watered-down silliness') and remarking that 'of course, all the polling shows that the public aren't bothered about dodgy, badly thought through "approachability" reforms.'

Well, give that man a coconut! A nail has been hit on the head.

The trendy vicars (trendy ministers and rectors in Scotland, of course) that have plagued the church since the 1960s have continually failed to connect with their parishes. The same fate awaits the Speaker if he insists on continuing down this path. Whilst not wanting to delve into the realms of discussing religion, I feel church attendance is a fairly good analogy for politics: in both cases a public interest still remains, they are simply not being engaged.

The public want reforms to be meaningful, rather than surface changes to how MPs are addressed, or whether the Speaker chooses to wear in the morning. The British public is, frankly, not that foolish. Those so-called modernists who remain within our once-noble institutions are looking increasingly tired and old fashioned, trying to justify their outdated dogma by applying it to any event that comes along.

When people criticise harmless tradition, it is not often the tradition which they are attacking, but the pomposity, or indeed hypocrisy, of a poorly performing institution glorifying itself. When these same institutions succeed, their pomp is earned. To posit a controversial idea, how about a little more tradition? Could we not gain from reviving the tradition of the town and village hall at the centre of a community? Imagine: MPs' surgeries connecting with the public rather than remaining the preserve of those constituents with a lost cause, or a completely barmy one, who shuffle along with little hope of accomplishing anything. Or how about MPs addressing public meetings of their constituents? Rotten vegetables may well be thrown, but it's a damn sight better than our parliamentarians of old who were 'peeble[d]... wi' stanes when they werena gude bairns'.

If the Commons want to learn from the Scottish Parliament, hailed as an example of where members are addressed by name only, it should not examine surface differences, but rather seek out ones of significance.