Members of Parliament may soon get to experience the guilty pleasures enjoyed by company office workers in meetings - IMing each other with gossip, or simply scanning the internet for something (anything) more interesting - while ostensibly they should be debating affairs of state.

Lewis Page in the Register covers a UK Govt report in which Jack Straw suggests MPs should be allowed to work on mobile phones, PDAs and wireless laptops in the chamber of the House of Commons. The theory being to encourage their presence in the House, which - for our overseas reader - 90 per cent of the time has only a couple of MPs speaking and a few stragglers looking for a comfortable spot to rest their eyes.

The idea forces a debate on the difference between simple presence in a meeting, versus active engagement or even actual participation (how often have you presented to a group of laptop screens?).

It also opens up all sorts of opportunities for product placement - are you already working on it at Nokia, HTC, RIM? What price the Honorable Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath slipping to the top of the list for one of the first iPhones into the UK?

Tags: The Register, Jack Straw, Lewis Page