Crawley has enough challenges, why must our MP focus on trivia?

A few weeks back, I was sent a link to this blog in a WhatsApp group of my old school friends in which Mr Henry Smith, Crawley’s voice in the House of Commons, asked Parliamentary questions relating to the importing and exporting of reindeer, the consequence of which being that we now know that the thriving international reindeer trade amounts to two imports and one export in the years 2020 and 2021.

What surprised me was not the question, it was the reaction that it received from my friends. Having had alerts set up for Mr Smith’s contributions in Parliament since he was first elected, I’ve long got used to almost nothing of anything he does in Westminster having any possible benefit to Crawley. Clearly, this was a new discovery for these residents, and not a welcome one.

I don’t actually have an inherent problem with Mr Smith asking questions unrelated to the constituency or his concern for animal welfare, frankly being long-time vegetarians is one of the few things the two of us actually have in common. My issue is that amongst all the questions about the wellbeing of animals, I really do think we should find more questions relating to the wellbeing of his constituents.

For instance:

Mr Smith’s top campaign pledge in the 2010 General Election was to campaign for a new NHS hospital for Crawley. So, naturally that would be the top issue he would raise in the House of Commons, at least for his first term, right? No, in fact in thirteen years he has only raised the issue of a new hospital on one occasion, a decade after he was first elected to Parliament. It would be nice to think he was just late in following up on his campaign pledges, but as this single reference came after a General Election campaign in which I repeatedly pointed out that he had yet to deliver on his commitments from his first term, and that he has made no further mention of a new hospital in Parliament over the following three years, I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

There’s another aspect of this which also grates with me. Back before Mr Smith was first elected to Parliament he attacked the previous Labour MP for tabling an Early Day Motion congratulating a local organisation on some achievement, I’m afraid after 14 years I can’t remember the precise details, and complaining what a terrible waste of money it was. For anyone who is unfamiliar with this aspect of Parliamentary process, Early Day Motions are a means through which MPs can make a collective statement on an issue. Yes some are trivial, but others are a means of applying pressure to achieve useful change.

Anyway, by making such a fuss about it at the time, he has essentially bound his own hands from being able to sign any himself once elected, thereby cutting himself–and therefore his constituents–off from one of MPs’ main ways of applying pressure. His website makes it clear that he doesn’t sign EDMs, but it is still worth bearing in mind two things: first that there is another potential motive for refusing to sign EDMs and that is that it avoids having to give constituents any more than a blanket ‘I don’t sign EDMs’ response if someone asks you to sign one in future, and the second is that despite that statement he has actually signed them on four occasions in the past when those things clearly mattered to him personally.

Now, there is a cost to running the system for EDMs, although frankly it wouldn’t take much to automate this away with a bit of thought, since in practice it’s just an online petition system limited to MPs. Written questions on the other hand require someone to go away and process the request, some might be easy to answer (so easy in fact you wonder if those MPs have ever heard of the internet), but the key issue here is that it’s not something which can currently be automated. Consequently, at an average cost of £149 per question, you might hope that MPs would think carefully before asking a question. As it costs me nothing to ask a question here, let me pose the following: as a UK taxpayer, do you feel you received your money’s worth from Mr Smith spending £298 of your money to map the expansive corridors of the Anglo-International reindeer trade?