MPs are living on another planet
I’M 62. I know, after all this time, that I’m not exactly stupid. Yet night after night I stare at my TV screen mute with incomprehension as the latest gibberish about Brexit dominates the news.
Do you understand what our political class is chuntering on about? Even the BBC’s doughty political correspondent Laura Kuenssberg increasingly struggles to extract any sense of meaning from the latest round of wrangling at Westminster. The other night she spent almost five minutes trying to unravel the metaphysical doubletalk of the day and when she’d finished Judy and I looked at each other, shrugged and chorused: “Uh?”
The Brexit debate has become horribly incestuous. Not in the real world where most people grasp the fundamental democratic imperative that the referendum result was clear, unambiguous and must be respected but on the increasingly insane Planet Westminster. MPs have stopped talking to us. They’re talking exclusively to themselves and what they are saying is unintelligible. So three cheers for Labour’s Caroline Flint, below, who told it like it is. She lost her temper at a meeting of her party’s MPs when Remainers made their now-reflex and patronising allegation that people who voted Leave didn’t really understand what they were doing. “You are basically saying that my constituents are thick,” Ms Flint exploded. “Well they aren’t. They are intelligent and they knew what they were doing and I am sick of them being insulted. You don’t like it because they voted Brexit and you can’t handle it.” She’s right, they can’t. Unlike most ordinary people who voted Remain – me included – who accept the result and just want the Government to get on with it. But instead of that we have this endless, impenetrable dickering over pointless detail. Why the argument over whether we should stay in the customs union and/or single market? To do either would mean, in effect, remaining inside the EU. It shouldn’t even be up for debate, and Theresa May should be making that robustly clear to both Parliament and Brussels. And if the odious, Machiavellian M Barnier doesn’t like it, we should do what the Queen reportedly suggested months ago when she asked, with more than a hint of exasperation: “Why can’t we just leave?” As a veteran political commentator wrote this week: “Our political class… has become so far removed from the desires and judgments of ordinary people that democratic accountability is becoming impossible.”
Spot on. While Westminster squabbles interminably about amendments to amendments to amendments, the rest of us feel increasingly bewildered and disempowered. That’s dangerous. If Parliament isn’t very careful, it might be in for a rude awakening when it discovers the reality behind these two little words. “People power.” The British are slow to anger. But we have a long history of defending our hard-won democracy.
Don’t push us too far. I LOVE a good horror film and after all the hype about newly released movie Hereditary I couldn’t wait to be frightened out of my wits. Reviews said it was terrifying. One critic said he couldn’t sleep afterwards.
Reader, it was rubbish. I’d brought a cushion to hide behind. It never left my lap. I didn’t jump once. Richard almost fell asleep.
Horrific? More like soporific.