While You Were Watching Them Moo

It started with a perfectly innocent question

How long is Parliament’s summer recess?

This rapidly became less innocent.

Because Parliament taking an extended summer break seemed rather peculiar when the country was simultaneously dealing with drought, fires, crop problems, financial turmoil and wars.

Obviously MPs are entitled to holidays.

But hospitals don’t collectively close because the doctors would quite like August off. Most organisations arrange people’s leave while continuing to function.

Why couldn’t Parliament?

This led to a broader discussion about what Parliament actually does when it is there.

Moo.

For most people, the visible face of Parliament is the House of Commons chamber.

Someone stands up.

Someone opposite makes a noise.

Several hundred adults join in.

Mmmmmrrrrrhhhhh.

The Speaker gets cross.

Somebody produces a rehearsed line which appears on the evening news.

More mooing.

And meanwhile, largely outside public view, committees are taking evidence, reports are being published, legislation is changing, amendments are being proposed, ministers are being questioned and all manner of potentially consequential things are happening.

Things that rarely become a thirty-second clip on the news.

Which raised a rather more interesting question:

What did Parliament actually do this week?

Not what did somebody say.

Not who shouted at whom.

Not which exchange went viral.

What actually happened?

And there it was

A weekly roundup.

Go through Hansard, select committee work, parliamentary publications, votes, legislation and other official sources and find the consequential things that happened in the background while everybody’s attention was elsewhere.

Then explain them in ordinary English.

What changed?

What progressed?

What was uncovered?

What did MPs vote on?

What was questioned?

What might actually affect people?

And, importantly, provide the evidence so readers can go and look for themselves rather than being asked to trust somebody else’s interpretation.

The title arrived almost immediately:

While You Were Watching Them Moo

What Parliament Actually Did This Week

Unfortunately, it was far too good.

The slight practical problem

Doing this manually would be hideous.

Parliament produces an enormous quantity of material. Finding the handful of genuinely interesting developments buried inside it every week would involve hours of reading documents most normal human beings quite reasonably never want to encounter.

But an AI can trawl large quantities of dull parliamentary material without subsequently demanding gin and a lie-down.

That changes the economics of the idea rather considerably.

AI could do the first pass: gather the week’s material, identify potentially consequential or unusual developments and trace them back to the original official sources.

Then a human can do the important bit:

Is this actually interesting?

And explain why.

Current condition

This one is becoming troublesome.

It has a clear purpose.

It has reliable primary sources.

It has a repeatable format.

It has a title.

And the difficult, labour-intensive part is precisely the sort of work AI is rather good at assisting with.

Which means it is becoming increasingly difficult to justify leaving it floating peacefully in the ether.

Showing suspicious signs of corporeal existence.