Parliament is rife with sleaze and corruption
Sleaze in Westminster is nothing new, and‘sex scandal’, ‘bullying scandal’, ‘sexism’, ‘harassment’ and ‘misogyny’ are all common words to see in headlines about the place.
The number of these scandals has been increasing steadily throughout my lifetime.
People have long known the place is a cesspool, but when people ask me about Parliament, I must tell them the truth; things are getting worse.
The toxic masculinity has been heightened from already appalling levels, but even I never expected to read that an MP was caught watching porn on their phone while sitting in the House of Commons chamber.
It would be bad enough to be caught doing that in your private office, but in the Chamber itself?
It’s disgusting. Once the complaints were made public there was the usual swirl of whispers and questions as to who the culprit is but ultimately, he revealed himself, and he apparently was trying to find out information about tractors… Make of that what you will.
Alongside that we find out that there are 15 active complaints currently being investigated by the Independent
Complaints and Grievance Scheme for bullying, harassment, or sexual misconduct.
These two scandals follow the ongoing party gate scandal, the Angela Rayner having legs scandal, the illegally proroguing Parliament scandal, the getting party donors to do up your flat in Downing Street scandal, and many more. It’s a never-ending tide of scandal and sleaze.
I have previously mentioned that this Government is much like the Trump administration in that is creates so many fires that it is overwhelming.
It gets to the point that no one knows which fire to deal with first. This past week was yet another example of this in action.
Whilst everyone is rightly horrified by these pornographic revelations, the Government have pushed through some of the cruellest and most dangerous legislation that I have ever seen.
The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill and the Nationality and Borders Bill.
These Bills curtail people’s right to protest and lay the legal groundwork for the horrific, callous, and cruel plan to ship asylum seekers from the UK to Rwanda.
This has happened and you probably didn’t hear much about it because it suits the Government.
You probably heard a lot less about the cost-of-living crisis in the past week, too, because all the focus is on the scandals.
The scandals need to be focussed on don’t get me wrong, but when there are so, so many of them how do you decide where to put your focus?
It is impossible to have a situation where things don’t fall through the cracks.
After ten years of Tory Governments squeezing everything they can out of them and compounded by Brexit and the Tory cost of living crisis, people are too busy trying to survive to keep an eye on everything that needs to change.
The place is rife with sleaze. It’s rife with misogyny. It’s rife with corruption. It won’t ever change.
There’s been so many scandals and so many times MPs have been trekked out in front of news cameras to say that things need to change, but it won’t ever change.
It’s baked in to the system.