05.19.08
parliamentary screensaver
BBC Parliament this evening has taken on the role of a strangely soothing screensaver - muffled conversation, tiny moving blobs of colour shuffling around, and occasionally a loud voice shouting “Order!” before announcing relaxing, positive news in a cut-glass English accent. It’s wonderful.
This, for those not in the UK, is the BBC’s live broadcast channel for the Houses of Parliament. When the House of Commons is in session, it broadcasts everything that happens live - and it’s available for free on just about every TV service in the country, be it cable, satellite or digital terrestrial. It also broadcasts the House of Lords on occasion, along with recordings of select committee sessions (which hear evidence on a variety of topics and eventually report back with a view to informing the legislative process) and even of meetings of the London Assembly with the Mayor. Mostly, it’s as boring as it sounds, but occasionally it’s absolutely fantastic to have a window into these proceedings, and I (being quite boring myself) find the whole thing fascinating.
(If you wake up feeling mildly hung over, playing “count how many old codgers in Lords are asleep” is quite a good distraction, too.)
Anyway, this evening’s business in Commons is regarding the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill - and the reason it’s so relaxing is that after several weeks of debate, tonight I’m watching amendment after amendment to this vital bill being struck down. Pretty much all of those amendments have been tabled by MPs on religious grounds - objecting to continued stem cell research, the selection process for saviour siblings, and so on. All of them are being defeated by huge margins.
This is good news on several grounds. Firstly, because this research is important and could change (and save) the lives of millions of people. Secondly, because to my mind those MPs who have objected on religious (mostly Catholic) grounds have betrayed their duty as MPs in doing so. They are elected as representatives of the people, and to act according to their personal religious beliefs rather than acting in the best interest of those people is a disgraceful act. The fact that so few of them are doing so, even in the face of what has been a hugely scaremongering and uninformed media campaign from certain quarters, is a heartening sign.
There are more votes to come tomorrow - one in particular, on the question of whether the time limit for abortion should fall from 24 weeks to a lower limit, is extremely contentious. There’s no hard science to support such a change, and the campaign for a lowering of the limit seems to be fuelled once again from the religious lobby, who view a small reduction in the limit as a step on the way to much bigger reductions down the line. I hope that’s transparent to most MPs, and results in another resounding defeat; once we’ve taken the moral decision, as a society, to allow abortion, the question of the medical limit on that procedure should be based on strong scientific evidence, not vague “ethical” standpoints based on books that were written before we knew the first thing about foetal development. (The charge to a lower limit is being led by one Nadine Dorries, a Tory MP who has spun an astonishing web of barefaced lying and deceit on this topic in the past few weeks - it’s worth doing a google search on her name and finding some of the better rebuttals to see just how low the anti-abortion lobby in the UK will sink to try and make themselves relevant.)
We’ll see what happens. For tonight, though, I feel a little bit good about British politics for the first time since before London’s public transport shunning outer suburbs lumbered the rest of us with an anti-libertarian bigot for the next four years.
Technorati Tags: BBC Parliament, Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, Nadine Dorries, politics, abortion, stem cell research
