Wheeee! The PM was like a toddler on a merry-go-round
BRITISH politics feels unhealthily one-sided, as was again evident yesterday at a depressing Prime Minister’s Questions. On the Government benches: greasery and forced hilarity. On the Labour benches: despair as their leader failed to dent David Cameron’s streamlined bodywork.
No MP asked Mr Cameron about the ‘Dublin Convention’, the European agreement which deters some refugees from crossing our borders. We learned yesterday that this is under threat. It was the biggest political development of the morning yet Tory loyalists avoided it for fear of upsetting their Whips. The Opposition Left has talked itself into a position so devoutly in favour of new arrivals to our shores that it, too, was silenced.
And so the PM whooshed past the danger, waving to one and all like a toddler on a merry-go-round. Wheeee! What a time he is having, unquestioned, unopposed, unchecked. Undemocratic.
John Baron (Con, Basildon & Billericay), honourable yet laborious critic of Brussels, did at least raise the EU renegotiation and asked for a meeting. Mr Cameron mocked him. To guffaws from sycophants, he told the round- shouldered Baron: ‘I have always felt he has slightly made up his mind already and wants to leave the EU whatever the results. I do not want to take up any more of his time than is necessary.’ In other words: get stuffed, mate, you’ve already decided your hand on the EU.
Precisely the same can be said of Mr Cameron, whose ‘renegotiation’ so resembles a charade. I write that as one who a few months ago might have wanted to stay in the EU had there been a proper renegotiation. Yet Ministers now treat Euroscepticism with nonchalance. They barely go through the motions of respect- ing the coming referendum’s ‘Leave’ camp. What a blatant, contemptible lie this ‘renegotiation’ has become. I have seldom felt such fury. Blood boils my bones like casserole juices bubbling round a rabbit carcass.
But where is the danger for Mr Cameron, who intends to retire by 2020? Jeremy Corbyn stood at the Commons despatch box yesterday with his usual, admirable lack of nerves but I am afraid he is a dead loss in the Commons. He lacks the suavity, shrewdness and quickness demanded for parliamentary combat. When Mr Cameron has nothing else to say he just mentions the Falkland Islands or nuclear weapons and the Tory herd moos its approval. It is too easy for him.
‘Leave’ campaigners on the Right, moronically, are refusing to unite. And yesterday the Labour party’s own ‘Leave’ group held a launch. Or ‘lunch’ as a sign outside the door of the 10.30am event said.
The arguments made at this event were strong ones, which in a perfect world would grab honourable Labour party supporters. Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) gave us a pungent minute on the lack of democratic accountability in Brussels – i.e. the fact that the European Commission, which runs our lives to such an extent, is unelected.
KELVIN Hopkins (Luton N) cogently laid out a case for how the EU undermines workers’ bargaining powers. Roger Godsiff (Hall Green) said ‘the people of this country have never been told the truth’ about European federalists. The EU suited the boss class. All this was intelligently argued, but the youngest person on the platform was 64, white and male. Does that matter? It does. The ‘Stay’ campaign is going to be slick. It will be fronted by people with sparkly teeth and cuties with tight, ballooning jumpers. The ‘Leave’ lot at present are all dandruff and grumbles.
Back in the Commons, there was no sign of Michael Gove – who is apparently about to deny Euroscepticism like St Peter after the Last Supper. Rubber-spined Philip Hammond, Foreign Secretary, sat near Mr Cameron, eyes hollow. Around and behind Mr Cameron was a claque of job-seeking Osrics, cackling at his every evasion.
At a time of global disgust with the failed status quo, our EU Referendum is already being fixed by principle-binning corporatist schmoozers. Why is there not more outrage?