The Enshittification of Parliament

Social media has made parliamentary debates dumber and more boring

Over on his Substack, James Marriott cites this fascinating data from a 2025 piece in The Economist which suggests that social media has profoundly transformed the nature of speeches in the British Parliament:

In 1938 the average speech was almost 1,000 words long. In 1965 James Callaghan delivered a budget speech that was almost 19,000 words: less a speech than a novella. Until 1970 the average was still almost 900. Then they start to shrink—dramatically so after 2015, when video functionality appears on Twitter (now X). Last year the average was 460: less a novella than a few Tweets.

This would be harder to quantify, but I’d wager that the average quality of parliamentary speeches has declined alongside their length. One, of course, at least partly follows from the other — not because length is synonymous with eloquence (plenty of long speeches at Westminster and elsewhere are boring as hell, and it’s always been thus) but because oratory whose main function is to be chopped up into bite-size pieces on Facebook or Twitter will inevitably be structured with that end in mind. The introduction of television cameras into Parliament had a similar (if comparatively benign) effect in that it created an incentive for politicians to craft their speeches so they could be clipped by the evening news.