Innocent casualty of an uncivil war
PARLIAMENT is a circus. The Government has lost control. The Speaker seems not always to be as constrained as former Speakers have been by impartiality, to put it mildly.The opposition denies the nation a general election in case it votes for Boris Johnson and Brexit. The Lib Dems are hell-bent on overturning democracy and the result of the 2016 referendum. The country is an international laughing stock. The EU smirks in happy disbelief. Well, we know all that... what’s new?
What’s new is the extent to which we now seem to be engaged in unarmed civil war and to be descending into savagery, for what else can you call it when a mob intimidates a child?
I watched with horror the pictures of the bespectacled, innocent 12 year-old son of Jacob Rees-Mogg surrounded by police as a mob of Remainers yelled abuse at his father.
Most of those engaged in the lynch-mob antics looked old enough to be parents themselves. How would they feel if had been their child? But of course the children of Brexiteers don’t count, do they?
REMAINERS like to present themselves as cultured, thoughtful individuals who are intellectually superior to the ignorant masses who voted to leave. Really? Those pictures tell a different story. Some of them are just coarse, hatefilled thugs.
Of course Jacob Rees-Mogg could have avoided the scene by taking the ministerial car but he had no reason to believe that in 21st century England a politician and his young son cannot walk along a street without being threatened and abused.
This is not the domain of some dictator or middle-Eastern trouble spot. This is well-mannered, democratic Britain.
Now he knows differently and so do we all.The sooner Brexit is done, the sooner we can return to normal politics and normal civility but getting Brexit done means getting us out of the single market, the customs union and the jurisdiction of the ECJ. Boris’ deal fails that specification. We should not let fatigue win, however much we are tempted.