My experience of the commercial world is now dated but my prejudice is that, for the most part, we do not work as effectively from home as we did from the office. So much of our productivity has arisen from spontaneous conversations in the workplace, rather interactions over a telephone or computer.
What I can say with certainty however, is that Democracy doesn’t work so well over Zoom.
The very sparsely attended and sanitised chamber of the House of Commons is not nearly as effective as the ‘bear-pit’ to which we were accustomed before the coronavirus pandemic.
The atmosphere in the chamber can itself be a powerful corrective to ministerial behaviour, but not if it is virtually empty. Big parliamentary debates can shape events and change policy in a way that a sequence of soliloquies, read from a script in front of a screen over a dodgy computer link, can never match.
The voting lobbies are also empty when divisions are called. This is because MPs are all strongly encouraged to stay away from Westminster and to vote by proxy instead. This denies us another important opportunity to badger colleagues and ministers where their only escape is making it past the division clerks and tellers, obstructed by a great queue of other members in front of them: they’re trapped!
Proper democratic scrutiny of ever more prolific and powerful government activity needs elected members to come together in one place where they can exert pressure on each other and on ministers in a way that is just not possible when we a spread to the four winds, irrespective of how well we may be connected by technology.
It is time to resume normal working.
Sir Desmond Swayne TD
