HYPERACTIVITY is not a virtue in a legislature. Winston Churchill thought Parliament should meet for no more than five months a year. Texas enjoys relative freedom from red tape partly because its state legislature meets only every other year. If the European Parliament sat only once every two years, the continent’s regulation-infested economy might well be healthier. But Britain’s current parliament is taking indolence to rarely explored levels.

In its youth, the coalition government was vigorous and uncouth. Beginning in May 2010, the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties set about reforming schools, universities, the police, welfare and health care. This newspaper called it “Radical Britain”, and depicted David Cameron as a punk rocker. Now the government has gone into a middle-aged slump. It has almost run out of bills to pass. The 2012-13 parliamentary session nearly broke a record for inactivity: in only one year since the second world war that was not interrupted for a general election did the House of Commons sit for fewer days. Parliament churned out 1,768 pages of government legislation. The 2013-14 session is going to be even less productive: with seven weeks to go, it has generated just 801 pages.

MPs have found ways of filling their time. Some have holed up in their constituencies, where they obsess over the politics of potholes, courting votes in preparation for the general election due in May 2015. A few are writing books. In February one was photographed bobbing about in the Caribbean. He had been invited to Cancún to give a talk on waste, he explained. Back in Westminster, MPs’ assistants sleepily browse YouTube and consult the cricket scores (see article).

Some of the reasons for the politicians’ enforced idleness are peculiar to this government. When they formed their pact in 2010, the Tories and Lib Dems feared that the alliance would soon wobble. So they passed a law fixing parliamentary terms at five years to provide their government with stability, before bolting through big pieces of legislation. Most of their programme has now been enacted. The rest—House of Lords reform and a plan to redraw constituency boundaries, for example—has been ditched following internal rows. So there is a hole in the parliamentary calendar.

But the pattern of legislative Blitzkrieg followed by indolence will probably outlast the coalition. Five-year fixed parliamentary terms may remain on the statute book. The gradual decline in support for the two big parties, the Conservatives and Labour, means further coalitions or administrations with small majorities are likely. Such governments are fragile, making dramatic early progress more appealing. In his memoirs Tony Blair counselled his successors to legislate quickly if they wanted to get anything done at all.

Don’t just sit there. Undo something

There are plenty of important things that Parliament should be doing. This newspaper wishes it was pushing ahead with new airport capacity for London, a better energy policy and a plan for the Trident nuclear-weapons system. But because broaching these issues would pull the coalition apart, they have been shelved until after the election.

Since Britain’s politicians seem incapable of passing any useful new laws, they should occupy themselves in scrapping some useless old ones. There are plenty of candidates for the legislative dustbin: the bit of the 2005 Clean Neighbourhood and Environment Act that requires people to obtain a licence to give out leaflets in a public place; the schedule of the 2006 Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act which demands so much vetting that it has led some schools to require parents to obtain a Criminal Records Bureau check before attending a sports match; the section of the 2010 Equality Act that requires anyone who exercises a “public function” to “have due regard” for various ill-defined imperatives like “good relations between persons who share a relevant protected characteristic”. We could go on.

With luck, it would start a trend. If, in a few years’ time, parties campaigned as much on the laws they scrapped as those they created, this idle parliament would have turned out to be rather radical—not to mention more useful.