One final Questions
Well, today was the last time I’m going to listen to Prime Minister’s Questions. What a witless, unedifying, depressing, demeaning and useless spectacle it all is. You want to be informed about politics and parliament? You’d be better off trying to find it in Nuts magazine. I’d say that PMQs was an unilluminating event but it’s become all too illuminating of late.
It shows us in technicolour and surround sound that a very large percentage of the Members of Parliament are a bunch or braying, shouting, toadying, ill-mannered, boorish, obsequious wankers. Somebody should tell those sitting around someone asking a question that the microphones pick up their every witless, gobshite utterance. I’ve seen reality television contestants with more self-respect.
I thought it couldn’t get worse than last week when Gerald Kaufman waved the corpses of his dead family and Tory MPs gave him a round of mock ‘Aww’s. But they managed it today.
You’ve got a moral and intellectual coward of a Prime Minister who can’t or won’t answer a question. The Leader of the Opposition’s last substantive question was asked 35 years ago when he debated with his mummy as to why he couldn’t have another biscuit. And they both take turns to hammers the Lib Dem leader whoever the poor bastard is this week. No substance, just petty insults and point scoring.
You wouldn’t want friends like these twattish specimens. You’d be embarrassed to go to the pub with them. But there they sit, at the heart of our democracy, screeching away like over-excited and self-important parents at a primary school football match. A match which is a dull, muddy and interminable show of midfield scrappery with a referee, speaker Michael Martin, who gives every impression of having been dropped on his head as a child. If a headmaster ran a school like Martin runs the Commons chamber, they’d be out on their arse inside a week.
‘That’s politics’ some will say. Like that was ever an acceptable answer. Like we should settle for that. Is it any wonder fewer and fewer people give a shit? Brick the whinnying pricks up and push food under the door.
Posted on March 5th, 2008 at 12:46pm under UK politics
Well, up to a point. But maybe there’s something in the view that we get the politics we deserve. And the UK has become overwhelmingly a social and political culture where next to nothing is discussed, in a proper sense: everything seems to follow a scare-of-the-day pattern in which somebody is selected as a scapegoat, some statement by a public figure blown out of all proportion, some false doom-mongering claim hawked from paper to paper and getting worse with every fresh publication. So if the country’s politics consists of cheap point-scoring and shrieking at one another – isn’t that what society wanted? When it decided it wanted to stop being society?
And the UK has become overwhelmingly a social and political culture where next to nothing is discussed, in a proper sense …
As Broonie and buddies would like it to be.
If that’s the case, the Opposition, in their abject failure to oppose, allowed it to happen.
You’re right about ‘let’s kick the LibDems’ – Nick ‘Brains’ Robinson on Today seemed to think that this was the real story and not the evasiveness of both major parties on the issue.
PS: I gave up on reading reports of PMQs when Blair was still in charge, for pretty much the same reasons as you describe. (though I still read Simon Hoggart occasionally).
The coverage by the media of the Lisbon Treaty parliamentary debate has been little short of a disgrace. Simon Carr in the Independent has been just about the only person to point out what a stinking fix the whole thing has been.
There’s a real possibility that Ireland (the only country who actually plan on holding a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty) will vote against the thing. God knows what’ll happen if we do, as technically every member state must ratify it. On the one hand, it’s hard to see Europe performing a major U-Turn based upon a million or so Irish ‘No’ votes. On the other hand, they’d be legally bound to do just that.
That said; could I take this opportunity to request that British Eurosceptics keep well clear of the Irish ‘No’ campaign. Nothing is more likely to cripple the ‘No’ camp in Ireland than association with UKIP.
Europe has already voted to ignore Ireland’s referendum, and one has to wonder if at this stage they’d do the same if we held one.
Wow, really? I honestly had no idea about that.
One wonders what the hell we’re holding it for then. Clearly there’s no chance of us actually pulling out of the EU if we vote “No” and Europe ignores it.