MPs and their screens: should mobile phones be banned from the chamber?

Some would ‘do well to rethink their whole relationship to smartphones and social media’

Neil Parish
Neil Parish MP resigned after admitting to watching pornography on his phone in the House of Commons
(Image credit: Ian Hinchliffe/Alamy Stock Photo)

If we want to ensure that Neil Parish is the last MP to watch porn in the Commons, there’s an easy way to do it, said Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph. Just ban mobile phones from the chamber. Politicians shouldn’t be using them there anyway. Over my years observing the chamber as a sketch writer, I increasingly saw “rows and rows of MPs gazing listlessly at their phones, like a vast roomful of bored teenagers”.

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