Is Prime Minister's Questions a waste of time?

Whenever it’s on, I'll try and watch Prime Minister’s Questions to try and engage myself more with politics; however, I find myself becoming more tired of it. Whether it’s the fact I skip past Labour MPs because all they will do is glaze the PM, even if they are part of his rather unfavourable popularity rates, or the fact no questions are ever answered.

It’s just one big drama show, like a midday EastEnders where there are all the people fighting in the Queen Vic, and the Speaker of the House is Peggy Mitchell, and if they get a bit too reckless, they’ll get kicked out. Are we able to step away from this dramatised 30 minutes, or are we stuck with it?

On the Thursday before, 15 MPs are picked out of a ballot where they cast themselves, and if they get picked, they ask the question. The person at the top of the list will ask the PM to list his official engagements for the day, and it’s just a boring answer where he says the same thing each time he’s stood at the dispatch box. Surely there’s no need for that, as he just sounds like a broken record.

The leader of the opposition can ask up to six questions, but they don’t have to ask all of them or ask them consecutively, which will prevent the PM from reading his script. I find the back and forth between the PM and the Leader of the Opposition the most interesting because it gives each of them time to respond and get their points across; of course, neither really responds with an answer to a question but more sort of digs towards each other and their parties.

But the other questions come from the leader of the third biggest party in the House, and they get up to two questions. This is currently Ed Davey, who weekly gets referenced back to the coalition government, but only 3 out of the current 72 Liberal Democrats were elected back then. If we wanted to dig back 16 years into each MP, there would probably be a lot of faked apologies and resignations.

Civil servants would make a briefing pack for the PM, which will contain background information which might seem relevant so he seems a bit more in touch and draft answers for MPs’ questions which are usually kept secret to keep him on his feet, but the PM’s parliamentary private secretaries, or abbreviated to PPS, will try and find out which MPs have been picked out of the ballot and what their question might be. The pack also contains pre-prepared attacks which he may wish to use if he doesn’t want to answer the question or cause a bit of uproar with MPs all over the House; he could reference another defection from one party or somebody’s colleague turning out to be doing Russia’s bidding.

But what would I do differently? Thanks for asking; well, researching all of this, I came up with a few ideas. The first one being scraping it, but there’s no fun in that, and where would an A-level politics student feel engaged in politics? Also, how would the party post their catchy scripted one-liners on social media to attract younger supporters through the flurry of online bots?

Secondly, they could throw the PM and MPs in with nothing but the questions to get a true idea of how much they grasp the situation and not how much their civil servants and scriptwriters grasp it. The only problem with this is it would just descend into chaos, proving that nobody really knows what’s going on. It would be funny, though.

Lastly, maybe the biggest lobbyists should go in there as well, as they dictate most of the decisions which happen in our politics. We should really hold them to the same scrutiny as we do with some of our MPs.

I limited myself to three changes because there could be a never-ending list of ideas, like adding a cheering limit where if an MP goes over, they have to donate money to cover university students’ debts. However, what I would like to see is less drama and more questions being answered; otherwise, it’s just a waste of everybody’s time and taxpayers’ money.

Thank you for reading, this is my second time writing this because I accidentally deleted the last one and don’t know how to undo it on Notes, and annoyingly, I couldn’t remember every point I wrote about.

Chris Gillesspie