The Maiden Speech I never got to make
WHEN I stood for Parliament, the second time in 2015, I was asked what I would do if successful.
Having explained that ‘democracy’ very rarely returns an
‘independent’, I said: “They will get a Maiden Speech they will never forget.”
I shall not now live to beat the system, so here is my Maiden Speech.
Mr Speaker, I address you thus, observing protocol. Protocol will be a theme running though my offering today.
Maiden Speech protocol directs one to praise one’s predecessor.
How might I, a quintessential ‘independent’, returned under the credo: ‘Spoil Party Games’, address such requirement with integrity; an attribute so hard to find in public life but very dear to my heart? I see no way.
Protocol adjures me to be positive about the constituency that returned me here.
That’s an easy matter with respect to the voters of Newbury and, indeed, the scenic idyll that is my part of the Thames Valley.
That said, I shall, for now, draw a veil over the malpractices and hypocrisies, of various state bodies that cast a blight over that green and pleasant land.
Mr Speaker, not unlike Parliament, school is a place of protocol; a place to which most bog standard Britons are drafted by law.
It is in school that the 3Rs of education are subtly subverted by the 3Rs of conditioning: Rote, Repetition and Regimentation. (Pavlov and Skinner are in the room!)
Those so conditioned to blind conformity, when of age, are endowed by The State with universal suffrage, a putative foundation stone of British ‘democracy’, but not the touchstone of integrity.
The schooled voter provides a manipulable mass upon which the party-wolves fall with customary cunning; the sheep having no defence.
It is upon this deception that the much-vaunted legitimacy of this house depends, thus that legitimacy is illusory.
Political parties know full well that the typical voter has been schooled to accept the concept of ‘authority’, and is so cowed as not to challenge bogus authority’s effrontery.
General Election law permits ‘political falsehoods’, so long as they are printed, not broadcast.
A very British ‘accommodation’. The schooled voter ‘sees no evil’ and swallows the lies.
Thus many (oh the irony) honourable and right honourable members of this house are present fraudulently; protocol stretched, even beyond the ohso-relevant imaginings of Lewis Carroll.
In conclusion, for those who were otherwise engaged while I was speaking (another protocol of this house) I close with a nod to Winston Churchill and an epigram of simple words – easy to remember.
“Politics: The art of self-deception, wrapped in the craft of deceiving others – for their own good.” BARRIE SINGLETON
River Walk
Shaw