Thursday, January 11, 2007

Dizzy Thinks: on Parliamentary Questions

THIS doesn't need any comment from me. Though I might come back to the question of how many clumsy, ignorant and plain silly questions have not been answered because they are clumsy etc.

By Chris Paul at 3:20 pm

4 comments:

dizzy said...

For the record, in my on running "disprportionate cost" watching I have noted many that deserve that response because, as you say, they are sometimes clumsy and silly, or more often just request granularity that is unlikely to exist.

However, there are also many, and I mean many, that are simple straightforward questions. Often they are to the Treasury and request the most basic of accounting info. It's the sort of thing that if a company could not produce for an auditor it would be in trouble.

Some good examples include, saying that it will cost too much to find out what the Territorial Army budget was for 2006.

11 January, 2007 19:30
Chris Paul said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
11 January, 2007 21:08
Chris Paul said...

I agree Dizzy. And I didn't think your tally was including the swerving of deserving timewasters. One of our local MPs has a rather quainter use for these questions though with 9 out of 10 following up a letter he has written to a Minister. The reply usually apologises but says a reply has been made. This way Gerald Kaufman gets letters answered I'd wager far more quickly than most (a) to avoid his public follow ups and (b) if not -a- then to be able to state a reply has been made.

11 January, 2007 21:10
Chris Paul said...

John McDonnell asked eight well formed questions on 8 January, getting pretty good answers to them all.

John Leech asked this one among his quota of "what is he getting at this time?" and "aren't the answers already in the public domain?" and got the bum's rush.

It seems very difficult to know what he might do with the answer to that one - I suppose he could ask about the number of convictions, the type of sentences, and so on.

But then what? Road to nowhere? Road to redundancy I hope.

12 January, 2007 18:53

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