What a funny pair Lee Anderson and Zarah Sultana are: so vehemently opposed to one another’s politics and yet so similar in the way they operate, right down to getting sent out of the Commons this afternoon for calling the Prime Minister a liar. Anderson was first up with his question:
‘The problem the Prime Minister has got is no one believes him. The public don’t believe him, the MPs on this side of the House don’t believe him. His own gullible backbenchers don’t believe him. Does the Prime Minister agree with me he’s been lying?’
By asking a question containing unparliamentary language, they ensured that Starmer didn’t have to answer it at all
The Speaker demanded that he withdrew the word ‘lying’, as it is considered unparliamentary language. Anderson, predictably, refused to do so. ‘I will not withdraw. That man couldn’t lie straight in bed,’ he replied, and was duly sent out. Much later in the session, Zarah Sultana rose and told the Chamber: ‘He is gaslighting the nation. So let’s call this out for what it is. The Prime Minister is a bare-faced liar and if he had any decency left –’
The Speaker interrupted and told her, somewhat confusingly, ‘sit and leave’. Sultana repeatedly said, ‘I have a duty to speak the truth’, and Lindsay Hoyle duly called for a motion for her to be suspended from the house. ‘I’m sorry you’ve done this. I really am,’ he said.
Sultana obviously managed a more dramatic reaction from the Speaker, but Anderson was quicker to get his lines in for the social media clips. Both will have their moment circulated in their own respective anti-politics echo chambers but neither of them have actually done their jobs as MPs. By asking a question containing unparliamentary language, they ensured that Starmer didn’t have to answer it at all. That doesn’t matter so much if you’re not really interested in accountability and only want to go viral.
The reason ‘liar’ isn’t permitted in the commons is that – as we saw with Boris Johnson – it has to be properly investigated before it is determined that a prime minister has deliberately misled the house. There should be a high bar for that word in politics.
But more immediately the problem with asking a question that gets you sent out of the chamber is that it turns the focus away from the prime minister and what he did or didn’t do, and onto the MP in question. Which suits Sultana and Anderson down to the ground: neither really believe in parliamentary democracy anyway.
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