Good Parliament Report
Debate between Kirsty Blackman and Philip Davies(8 years ago)
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Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Moon, and to follow the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman). We may not agree on much, but she has made a strong start to her time in Parliament and should be proud of that. She is a very good role model for other people—women, young people and whoever else—who want to enter Parliament, and she is doing an excellent job in representing her constituency, for which I have a great affinity. I think Dyce is in her constituency.
Philip Davies
Is it a bit further north? I used to spend a lot of time in Dyce when I worked for Asda. I am sorry it is not in the hon. Lady’s constituency, because it is a fine place.
When I first saw that this debate was taking place, my first question was, what is “The Good Parliament” report? After reading it, I rather wish I had not asked. It could be referred to as the “less accountable Parliament report” or the “dumbed-down Parliament report”, and it would certainly be better titled the “politically correct Parliament report”. There is not time to go into all the things that are wrong in the report, but I will pick out a few points in the limited time that I have.
The hon. Lady made the point that it is absolutely terrible that she cannot get up to her constituency on a Wednesday evening, and said that everything should be changed to allow her to do so. I checked, and in the 2015-16 Session of Parliament this House sat for 158 days out of 365. When people complain to me about Parliament, they say that none of us seems to be here when debates are taking place. I have never heard the complaint from the public that we are spending too much time here or that there are too many of us here during debates. I suggest to the hon. Lady that having 158 days to represent her constituency in Parliament is not too much to expect.
I am completely opposed to all-women shortlists and quotas. I could not care less if every single MP were a woman, if every position in Parliament were held by a woman or if everybody in the Cabinet were a woman. It is of no interest to me. As far as I am concerned, as long as they are there on merit, their gender is irrelevant. We should be gender-blind. I really think that the true sexists are the people who see everything in terms of gender. We should judge people not on the basis of their gender, but on the basis of their ability.
One thing I very much agree with the hon. Lady about is that we need more people from a working-class background in Parliament. One of the points I always made to the Conservative party when we were looking at things such as all-women shortlists—fortunately, we did not go down that route—was that replacing Rupert from Kensington and Chelsea with Jemima from Kensington and Chelsea does not do an awful lot for diversity in the House of Commons. Replacing Rupert from Kensington and Chelsea with Jim from Newcastle would do an awful lot more for diversity in the House of Commons than a tokenistic approach to diversity that sees things only in terms of simplistic diversity—gender or race.