The Judge RANTS!
Date: 04/06/15
Hand Signals - Now With Update
It's a fine old cliché that actions speak louder than words.
It can be equally valid to state that inaction can shout a bit, too.
Earlier today, in the Imperial Parliament (By Appointment to God, The Citeh and NewsCorp), the Scottish National Party bloc put forward a motion opposing 'austerity', making the demand that the policies which have been implemented under the convenient excuse of 'cutting the deficit', 'balancing the books', 'living within our means' (don'tcha just love the 'our' there?) and all the other blather which has been used for more than half a decade to mask what its proponents are really after, viz. the turning of our lands into a neo-feudal oligarchy; that such policies, as I say, should be resisted and reversed.
The motion garnered sixty votes in support. A respectable total in the circumstances.
But what did the parliamentary Labour Party do? You know, the one that's so much on the side of 'hard-working families' (presumably 'hard-working singles' such as me can just go swivel on it), 'the squeezed middle', and other such inventions of the best fever-addled brains money can buy?
They abstained. Or, at least, all those of the two-hundred-odd of them who could be arsed to turn up did.
That's right: in the face of a motion which actually challenged the cosy, costive consensus which has dominated Westminster and media discourse for so long, they deliberately sat on their hands.
Part of this, of course, is down simply to the fact that the 'Labour' Party (and scare quotes seem increasingly appropriate in describing it nowadays) is - the odd desperate bout of high-visibility hand-wringing aside - as fully embedded in the fiction of 'austerity' as any of the braying mob on the government benches.
The main part, however, is the same 'tactic' (to call it by a name far too grand for its worth) as the Party's Scottish branch office have employed in Scotland's Parliament ever since the people of that grand nation tossed them out of their Divine Offices eight years ago; namely, "Even if we actually agree with it, we won't vote to support anything proposed by those Nasty Nats!".
That the Party is continuing and expanding that vacuous, spiteful and infantile policy in Westminster shows that some deep, debilitating psychosis has rooted itself within; one which seemingly precludes them even from recognising where that tactic has already led them - electoral oblivion in Scotland, and electoral irrelevance just about everywhere else.
Taken in conjunction with the current race for what is risibly called the 'leadership' of the Party, in which all the candidates bar one (the one who is vaguely on the left as those of us who are long enough in the tooth to remember these things would recognise it, and who therefore has no chance in the cheery inter-communal strife between Blairites, Brownites and It'll-be-alright-on-the-night-ites) are simply repeating the mangled mantras which landed them their second worst electoral outcome in seventy years; taken, as I say, in tandem with this, I think that it is time for those of us of a genuinely progressive bent on this mis-governed island to send an unequivocal message to the Millibands, the Coopers, the Kendalls and Burnhams:
You have long since lost any remaining moral purpose you may once have had.
As a simple act of hygiene for the body politic, disband yourselves, get the hell out of here AND STOP WASTING OUR FUCKING TIME!
Update (06/06/15): And Tommy Ball nails it (thanks to the ever-estimable Philip Challinor for the link).
