The Perks

Access

My personal security pass for Parliament makes me feel great—I mean it. It says, in a silent way, that I belong here. I’m an insider and even though I’m totally lost and yes, I need directions… someone somewhere thought that I should have clearance.

You know how heist or spy movies always include sequences of people going to their top-secret workplace (the same place that the criminal or the spy will later infiltrate with their cunning and outrageous spy gear) and they need to do an eye scan and a voice imprint, etc. just to enter? I love that kind of stuff. And well… that isn’t Parliament, but it is still highly securitized and people need passes and pin codes to be able to wander about, so I frankly feel awesome with my pass. The many, many men with huge guns and funny bell shaped hats don’t see me as a stranger when I’ve got my pass; I’m someone they are protecting.

Appreciation

I told someone that I greatly admire once that I was incredibly nervous about a new job (not this one), and he said: “If they didn’t think you could do the job, they wouldn’t have given you a desk.” That sentiment has soothed me on numerous occasions. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed in new situations, but hey, someone else thinks that you can do it, and why should they be wrong? Desks are valuable commodities.

Not only do I get my own desk in Parliament, I get my own office. So you can imagine how confident I am feeling.

Today MP told me that she loved my brief on the rights of temp workers so much that she asked her Constituency Manager if they could get me to come work for them for real. Not to let a compliment like that go unused, I told her that I would love that.

Amusement

Today MP got me a special ticket to sit in the gallery during Prime Minister’s Question period. For those who don’t know, every week that Parliament is meeting the Prime Minister spends a half hour on Wednesdays fending off angry questions from the opposition and getting softballs from his own party (“Mr. PM, would you say that you are doing a great job or the greatest job?”). The Labour party (the Queen’s Loyal Opposition), got him quite worked up today and he shouted that they were “Muttering Idiots!” The Speaker asked him to withdraw the word “idiot” for being unparliamentary.

I originally saw the PM when he came to speak at my school this spring and I was quite impressed with his poise at some awkward audience comments. Now I can see that compared to several hundred members of the opposition party jeering you on a weekly basis, a few NYU nerds ain’t nothing.

While PMQ was fantastic, it compounded for me the realization that compared to the US Capitol—and especially compared to the Oregon State Capitol—Westminster Palace is not necessarily for the people. In order to see Question time, I and everyone else needed tickets approved by an MP. In addition, there are wings all over the building where you can’t go without a security pass, committee rooms are small and don’t give much room for an audience, and the “public gallery” in the Commons chamber puts you behind a huge pane of bullet-proof glass. To enter the palace just as a tourist you have to go though scanners and get a time stamped picture taken.

This may just be a cultural difference where Americans feel that Congress belongs to them and they paid for the Capitol building maintenance with their tax dollars so they should be allowed to tramp all over the place. And to me, as an American, that seems perfectly fair.

Here is the video for the PMQ that I sat in on today. For me, this is almost as fun as going to a Timbers game. The PM gives his "Muttering Idiots" comment right around 26:07