h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-33184160

£5,700,000,000 needed to renovate it.

They will still have a building too small to hold all of the people required with many facilities such as over a dozen bars that seem to be surplus to the requirements of a modern parliament.

Is it time to knock it down and sell off a valuable Thames-side plot and re-build a modern purpose built building elsewhere? (I would suggest that it is.) This is exactly what would happen if this were a building in the private sector or a building elsewhere in the public sector.

PP.

The cost represents about £88 for every man, woman and child in the country.

PP.

Tax lotto winnings and gambling winnings on line

It's an extremely prestigious building - sell it to a hotel chain and use the money to build a building that actually works in the 21st Century. Even better, take the chance to relocate it out of London to somewhere more central.

Shut it down and let them work from home electronically.

- solves the building problem
- saves a fortune in travel, accommodation and associated expenses
- makes it easier for all the ones who never manage to turn up to vote
- and when they are sitting conducting parliamentary business on a computer in their bedrooms, the mundane nature of the job will discourage all the ones who are in it for perks or ego trips.

With all those savings, we could afford to send them on a course to learn how to use Skype and email if they need it.

I remember the furore when the Holyrood building went over budget, yet that cost less than a tenth of the price of this prospective restoration.

For something that's only been up since 1870. it clearly wasn't built very well. Look at Westminster Abbey opposite. It's been up for centuries longer (although I concede the abbey's Western towers were completed in 1745)

"makes it easier for all the ones who never manage to turn up to vote" [KB]

When my sister visited London, she went to observe a session of Parliament. She was not impressed.

However, face time plays a huge role in the life of our species. We don't always pay close enough attention to the people we're with [often because we're distracted by those electronic gadgets too many of us stare at], but that diminishes us in ways many of us later regret. Just see the Emily's poignant scene in "Our Town," where she's granted the right to return from the dead to one day in her youth, and she sees how little she appreciated life when she had it.

If members of Parliament are going to behave like jerks, let them do it face to face, and let the rest of the citizens observe them doing it. Letting them hide their idiocy [if that's what they have to offer] only makes them less accountable. Plus, elected officials acting badly is good material for satirists and other writers to use.

Video conferencing and the like are a widely accepted and perfectly serviceable way of doing business in the modern world - I'm not advocating anything drastically novel.

Given that the Tories are currently in charge, I'm sure they're already considering PFI proposals and/or the possibility of privatisation. Because paying for it entirely with public money would be a bit hypocritical really, wouldn't it? Given that public money isn't apparently available any longer for (eg) repairing and improving hospital and school buildings.

I don't think knocking it down is an option, because for some unfathomable reason it's a World Heritage Site. But there's no reason to carry on using it as the hub of UK democracy - it's entirely unfit for that purpose in the modern age. I'm sure it would make an excellent hotel.

Some committee work could be done via video-link but I don't think it would be a workable option for full debates - it is quite hard to hold meaningful discussions via video-link. So I think we do need somewhere for MPs to assemble. I don't think it needs to be in London - I'm not even convinced it all needs to be in the same place. Defence debates could be in Manchester, say, and education debates in, I dunno, Winchester.

Relocating parliament would also provide a good opportunity to reconsider timetabling, so the business of parliament is (say) focussed into three-day weeks throughout the year, or four week chunks. That would allow a better balance of parliamentary work, consituency work, and work outside parliament (which I think it's important all MPs do, a proper job that is, not consultancy).

But I'm quite sure parliament will fail to grasp the opportunities on offer for change, and will somehow find several billion pounds tucked down the back of a sofa.

Mol

"Video conferencing and the like are a widely accepted and perfectly serviceable way of doing business in the modern world [KB]

I'm not against that per se. I just want what they do to be visible so that they aren't hiding form the people whom they elected. But if having them congregate in London for their sessions no longer makes geographical sense, perhaps they could congregate in three or four more reasonable places, connected by videoconferencing equipment. I don't want to lose face-to-face contact entirely. Not that it's my country, of course. I'd love to shift America's House and senate to a more central spot like St. Louis or Memphis or Omaha, but you can't tell those self-important people *anything*!

Sorry, that should have been

so that they aren't hiding from the people by whom they were elected.

There isn't really a lot of "visibility", in the democratic sense I think you mean - the sense of people watching government - about the Houses of Parliament. It's not a place where people keep an eye on what their elected representatives are doing: we, the people, usually do that by watching Newsnight or listening to the radio, anyway, so it already is done with new-fangled technology. The bits we see are largely a pantomime, like "Prime Minister's Questions".
The face-to-face contact that I worry more about losing has been, to a large extent, lost already - and that is the face-to-face contact between the representatives and the people who elect them. That's why the majority of eligible people don't even bother to vote. They think it's Not About Them, but about the career politicians in the HOC.

That's true where I am, too.

Can't they do another gunpowder plot and cash in the insurance money?

I thought that's what they were doing - I thought we weren't supposed to mention it!

Those masks are a dead giveaway.

Adolf made a good start on improving the House of Commons in 1941...
http://www.parliament.uk/business/news/2011/may/70th-anniversary-of-commons-chamber-bombing/

Adolf's sense of taste and perspective was already suspect long before he went into politics. I get queasy when I see images of some of his paintings, even though I can't pin down what it is that unsettles me. On the other hand, maybe it's because I know that Hitler painted them. Would I feel that way if I didn't know?

Short answer.No.

Too many historic buildings have been lost and our Parliament buildings are the most iconic and historic of all.As for the cost I suggest that it's worth it having seen the numbers of tourists alone that come to London to see our historic buildings and in particular Westminster.