When a sick MP is forced to vote, our politics has lost touch with reality

She came in a wheelchair, heavily dosed on morphine, clutching a cardboard bowl in case she was sick. The sight of the Labour MP Naz Shah voting in her pyjamas this week was, frankly, disturbing. What kind of workplace asks a woman to discharge herself from hospital for something she could have dealt with on the phone?

The same one, of course, that expects Shah’s colleague Laura Pidcock to shuffle through the parliamentary lobbies despite being eight months pregnant, and in pain from the baby pressing on her sciatic nerve; or an even more heavily pregnant Jo Swinson to show up two days past her due date.

If the exercise of democracy genuinely relied on ambulances decanting people into the Commons car park – as happened all too often when John Major had a knife-edge majority, and will happen again through the coming tight Brexit votes – then noble sacrifices might have to be made. But it doesn’t. There’s no earthly reason why sick MPs can’t follow the debate on TV and vote remotely, by proxy or even electronically. As with last week’s procedural nonsense over upskirting, all that stands in the way of a sensible solution is stubbornness, an exaggerated respect for tradition in some quarters, and fear of the reaction from a public too embittered to feel sympathy for any politician.

That’s not the backlash parliament should be worried about. If the result of the EU referendum was in part a response to feeling ignored and excluded, then political culture needs to become less, not more, remote. And yet bogged down in the legal grind of Brexit, parliament has inadvertently done the opposite. And for the forces of reason to look ever more baffling and bureaucratic, while extremists perfect the art of creating movements that anyone can join in, feels downright dangerous.

There is something so tired and stale now not just about parliament, but about our political culture more generally, and if someone as boringly middle-of-the-road as me feels it, then Lord knows what anyone under 30 thinks. Never mind being remote from ordinary lives: it’s out of step even with the political junkies.

The Today programme is losing listeners as it struggles endlessly to digest Brexit. And regardless of who succeeds David Dimbleby on the BBC’s Question Time, it’s time for drastic surgery to the programme itself, which is currently lurching awkwardly between trying to recreate Twitter punch-ups live on air, and general irrelevance. The joke doing the rounds is that maybe we should put the audience on the panel and let the politicians yell at them – but in all seriousness, maybe there’s something in the idea of switching things around. Reading Aditya Chakrabortty’s account this week of a bold move to teach economics to ordinary people in Manchester made me wonder why the BBC doesn’t try something similar with politics: why can’t we watch audiences grappling live with policy problems, maybe in the process realising that it’s not as easy as it looks?

But parliament too must do its bit. The general air of being trapped in the 19th century didn’t bother me when I went to work there back in 1997, because it was so clearly changing: female MPs flooding in, outdated sitting hours ripped up, sacred cows challenged.

But the wave of reform unleashed in previous decades (much of which was about transparency – letting in the cameras, putting Hansard online, letting voters petition for things they wanted debated) has ground to a halt just as the fallout from Brexit should have been putting rocket boosters beneath it. Talk of moving parliament out of London, meanwhile, founders not just on the thorny question of who’d be paying for it, but because it’s what parliament does that needs to change – not just where it happens.

Not all the traditions are outdated. The exaggerated courtliness that makes debates hard for outsiders to follow – the ban on MPs directly addressing each other by name, the ingenious euphemisms for forbidden insults – has always usefully lowered the temperature. It seems even more important now that MPs routinely face death threats outside the chamber.

But millennials do their politics differently, which doesn’t just mean digitally; there’s a hunger out there for something collective and social, which is why public meetings are back in vogue (even if post-millennial Generation Z likes to rebrand them as pop-up idea salons). Half the people crowing last week that Labour Live was an embarrassingly damp squib will doubtless be saying the same thing about Saturday’s march for a people’s vote on Brexit, but both movements have an energy about them that parliament is lacking. If nothing else, they meet a powerful need to come together and do something, share ideas, feel less like a passive victim caught up in scary times and more like a participant. Parliament can’t afford to be left behind.

• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist