Neil Parish is resigning as an MP after being discovered to have viewed pornography on a mobile devise in the Commons Chamber.
Yet all uses of such technology needs to be banned in such circumstances. For MPs are supposed to be there to follow and potentially participate in debates and to pursue procedural avenues.
If an MP on the floor of the Commons needs to be contacted urgently, then Commons Officials can always contact them in the Chamber and the MPs concerned can leave and then use a phone or a mobile. They are supposed to be present to listen to debates and follow procedural developments.
Mobiles and the like often kill off such possibiities, with MPs following non-relevant issues.
5 comments:
I agree. But, I also think that the hoo-ha over this is extremely hypocritical. The majority of people - men and women - have watched porn at some point, many do so on a regular basis, and employers will tell you that they have great difficulty trying to stop workers doing so at work, sometimes using the work's equipment. I know of one Chief Officer when I worked at a local Council more than 20 year ago who used the work computer for arranging dates through an adult dating site, and said he didn't want to lose contact with one of his dates "because she's a really good shag".
All surveys show that if you ask young people, you will be struggling to find one that does not view porn on a regular basis. And, what's more hypocritical is that TV Channels like Channel4, depend on a steady diet of soft porn like Naked Attraction, Mum's Make porn and so on to keep up their ratings. Its likely that nearly all MP's will have watched porn, or else they truly are unrepresentative of the population. Remember a few years ago a Labour Home Secretary and her husband having paid for it on the TV in a hotel?
I really thought we had gone beyond all this Mary Whitehouse, reactionary prudishness, back in the 1960's, when we scrapped much of the ridiculous censorship, and viewing of sex as something to be hidden away. It seems that the reactionaries are back in this sphere of telling us what we should watch just as they are back in many other walks of life.
The case against Parish is not that he watched porn in private, but that he did so where other MPs around him in the Common's Chamber could observe what he was doing. My case is to ban the use of mobiles in the Chamber completely, but instead for MPs to pay attention to what is taking place there and to seek to participate in debates when it is relevent. What MPs or other people get up to in private is another matter. For procedural purposes whoever is in the Speaker's chair and officials may, however, need access to the facility.
For some odd reason this response from Boffy does not seem to have appeared in my comment box - A mobile screen is a pretty small thing. If other people saw what he was watching it must have been because they went to some effort to look. The answer to that is the same as we used to give to the Mary Whitehouse gang, if you think that what is on the screen is offensive to you - DON'T LOOK! The problem here is both hypocrisy and opportunism. Its a bit like Marx and Engels wrote about the bourgeois accusations against communists that they wanted to introduce a "community of women" to which they responded, "Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives. Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private." We all know that the large majority in society watch porn, including MP's, journalists and so on, and yet, they have to hypocritically claim that it is some minority activity that is beyond the pale. They do so, for purely opportunistic political reasons. The opposition uses it opportunistically to attack Government MP's, and Government MP's, have to fall into line so as not to be seen as giving the opposition a public relations victory. Its compounded by the watching of porn being compounded with misogyny, whereas the two things are unrelated. Studies show not only that as many women watch porn as Men, with entire websites created by women for women - not to mention gay porn - but that around 40% of women make their own home made porn, using phone cameras and so on. So, yes, I agree that phones should be banned in parliament where our well paid MP's with cushy careers should be devoting their time to their business, instead, rather than watching porn, cat videos or anything else. But let's have no more of the hypocritical, prudish nonsense about it being about watching porn rather than anything else.
In the comment I have added from Boffy I clearly agree with his conclusion in his penultimate sentence.
Cheers Harry.
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