Queues at the Commons

I should know better I know, but bear in mind I am a Hertfordshire rural lad who works at a bookshop in a village in Cambridgeshire, so I was not to fully know this would happen.

To explain, one of the events at the House of Commons I was invited to was a talk by Jim Murphy MP and hosted by Progress. The talk was on Faith and Politics and Labour's Fourth Term, and, as a Christian, Labour Party member, and CSM member I was intrigued enough to accept.

I finished work as per usual at 4PM, by quarter to five I was on a train for King's Cross, I got to King's Cross at about twenty-five to six, made a dash on the Underground for Westminster Tube Station and arrived just after Six PM, only to find to my horror that there was a large queue outside St Stephen's Entrance. I agree that it is a wrong idea for bloggers to have passes, but just this once I was momentarily impressed with the idea and if I lived in London I would have turned around and set off back immediately. As it was that would have made a waste of a train journey (even including the Network Rail Card I use) and reluctantly queued, whilst ruminating on the argument that people are turned off by Westminster politics because the physical evidence before me said otherwise.

According to one Security Guard this is happening more often and after arriving in Committee Room 7 forty minutes late and apologising to everyone concerned, I spent twenty minutes observing the Q and A session, before the meeting finished at 7PM.

Chatting with others about it afterwards, it seems this is getting fairly common, although it doesn't often happen at Portcullis House, which makes one wonder how this whole thing is handled! Either more effort is needed to be made to improve entry standards to the Palace of Westminster, or else the Commons Authorities and MP's need to make use of buildings nearby, subject to security issues. In any case I have now decided not to attend any evening event at the actual Palace of Westminster unless it's my day off and I feel that other members of the public have also felt deterred from visiting and this is not good nor healthy.