Europe by Jan Morris

Author:Jan Morris [Jan Morris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571265947
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2010-09-09T04:00:00+00:00

72 An interlude on parliaments

All the States of Europe have their parliaments, because they all call themselves democracies. The worst police States of Communist Europe used to be called Democratic Republics, and it was a pretence even of the crazy Ceauşescu that he was the popularly elevated guide of his people. Like markets and law courts, for a taste of the national flavour the parliaments of Europe are always worth visiting, if you can get past the policeman at the gate. (‘Anything interesting to see this evening?’ I once asked the doorman at the Irish Dáil. ‘There’s always me,’ he said – ‘I’m interesting.’) Most of the buildings are unexciting, generally cast in the neoclassical mode that was fashionable and symbolically explicit when the parliamentary system took hold in Europe in the nineteenth century, but one or two have flair. The British Houses of Parliament seem to me the most exciting buildings in London, all spikes, towers and serried windows beside the Thames. The parliament at Budapest, although for most of its career it has been hardly more than a creature of despotic masters, stands with a similar but more monstrous panache beside the Danube. They used to call it ‘The House of Lies’ in the Communist days, when its parliamentarians met for only eight days in the year, but one can forgive it a lot – it was the first European public building to be air-conditioned, and until 1839 all its proceedings were in Latin.

Most parliaments turn out to be fairly dull in performance, too, the delegates sitting chaste and ordered in their horseshoe ranks, but sometimes there are flashes of animation. London’s House of Commons, which likes to call itself the Mother of Parliaments, can sometimes be interesting to watch, if only because the confrontational style of British politics brings out the worst and occasionally the wittiest in parliamentarians. If you are lucky you might come across a minor riot in one of the assemblies of southern Europe. But for national revelation I most recommend the infinitesimal parliament of the Icelanders, a modest little grey assembly house next door to Reykjavik Cathedral, at least as I knew it in the 1970s. No pomp and little circumstance attended the deliberations then. If it was winter, the members’ galoshes were parked neatly outside the chamber door, and in the public gallery loungers cheerfully read newspapers in the warm. Icelandic politics can be vicious, but the parliamentarians rarely burst into invective, perhaps because they were nearly all each other’s cousins, and often in armchairs at the side of the chamber members comfortably smoked their pipes together, for all the world as though they had dropped by for a family discussion. Occasionally a page hastened in, with a quotation for the Foreign Minister perhaps, or a statistic for the Minister of Finance, but he was likely to be wearing a check shirt, a green jersey and corduroy trousers, and as often as not he interrupted the flow of debate by banging the door behind him.

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