How does the world look from Westminster? Foreign policy is woefully under-scrutinised in the UK, where governments can wage war and sign treaties without reference to parliament, and the limited attention it does receive could arguably be better directed.  One way to assess the prism through which MPs view the world is to analyse the slot for foreign office questions, which comes around only once every five sitting weeks and lasts about an hour. To judge from the map generated by the questions that MPs have managed to put to Foreign and Commonwealth Office ministers since the general election, their concerns bear curiously little relation to the way the world is moving.

There are some troubling omissions. The Brics, for example, are conspicuous by their absence from parliamentary questions. Brazil and Russia have each been the subject of just two of the 268 oral questions asked so far this parliament. India has done little better, generating only three such questions, all of them on Kashmir, none on its emergence as an economic power. China, astonishingly, has fared little better, piquing the curiosity of MPs sitting on the green benches on just five occasions. The questions are invariably hostile, too, focused on human rights, Tibet and arms sales to Africa.

In total, the Bric economies have so far this parliament notched up just 12 oral questions between them — taking up less than five per cent of the airtime available for the scrutiny of foreign policy on the floor of the House. Nor is this just the result of bad luck in the ballot for high-profile oral questions. Exactly the same pattern emerges from an analysis of the far larger sample of 1193 written questions that MPs have submitted to the FCO over the same period.  If backbenchers were to be our geo-political cartographers, with responsibility for allocating the department's meagre resources, the Brics would be a very low priority indeed.

Other omissions are also striking. Take Wikileaks, which by disseminating information about regimes in Egypt and Tunisia, gave repressed populations a glimpse of truths they had merely suspected, fuelling popular demands for democratic reform. There has been barely a word on it, or on any of the other internet technologies that are transforming the conduct of diplomacy. Or take the war in Iraq, the most controversial foreign policy intervention by the UK since Suez. It is as good as forgotten. In eight months, there have been just two oral questions relating even tangentially to one of the costliest conflicts in blood, treasure and credibility in post-war British history.

By contrast, there is an extraordinary interest in what amounts to the dull business of departmental pencil-counting. Nearly a fifth of all questions have been devoted to such matters as the condition of the foreign office's wine cellar, the amount it has spent on works of art and office furniture, the number of items recorded lost or stolen in the previous year, the cost of repairing water damage at 1 Carlton Gardens, the budget for Christmas trees, the operation of the department's Low Carbon, High Growth programme, the size of the service's conferences budget, the number of diplomats subject to disciplinary proceedings and the value of any vacant buildings.

What time remains is sub-divided according to a skewed perception of Britain's strategic interest. There is an obsession with the politics of the Middle East that can often crowd out effective scrutiny of other subjects. There have been 50 per cent more questions about Gaza and the Palestinian question than about our relations with the European Union, the second biggest single category, and more than twice as many as the total number of questions asked about our relations with all the Brics combined. Size may not be not everything, of course, but the fact that the combined population of the Brics – at about 2.85 billion – is 250 times that of Israel/Palestine suggests that something here is seriously out of kilter.

Parliament is right to invest energy on the Middle East and on the various human rights issues that concern it in countries such as Colombia and Burma, but there is a problem of prioritisation. China is now the UK's second most important bilateral relationship after the US. It receives virtually no attention from MPs, at least in the chamber. Entire sessions of FCO questions pass without reference to Brazil and India. The danger is that MPs inadvertently give the impression of inhabiting a parallel universe, immune to the changes going on in the world around them. For a country intent on hitching its bandwagon to the growth in the Brics economies, that must be worrisome.