Smoking-Bun

I’m still hung up on this expenses scandal here in the UK. Members of the public are still sounding off ad nauseum about their disgust with politics and politicians, and it’s all quite nauseating. Of course this sort of anger in the UK can only stir up angry letters to The Times. “I was so angry I changed my status on Facebook”. We are such a docile breed now as the public.

The trouble with this debate is that a significant percentage of the public seem to be casually suggesting the idea of just tearing up our democracy with the vague notion that we would be better off ’starting again’. Whereas in reality there is no hope for that sort of process.

It’s an idle threat. “You’re never getting chocolate again” is what we say to our kids, both with the full knowledge that it’s a course of action we would never actually have the stomach to carry through.

Imagine we tore it all up or went communist or anarchist, or started some new and independent and highly successful system of self-governance. I guarantee that within five years the US would invade on some humanitarian pretext, if our closer neighbours in Europe hadn’t got there first. Start fucking about with our current system of government and we’d simply be swallowed up by those whom it threatens.

All we really want to do is vent our anger – we want our indignance noted. It’s not very healthy is it. It’s the equivalent of shouting down the phone at some poor dogsbody in India because you’ve been charged extra on your overdraft.

It makes me wonder if I’m just out-of-step with the general public. I have always assumed that politicians are power-hungry and money-hungry wankers – the expenses scandal tells me nothing that I didn’t feel I already knew. Is the public shock faked? I have to wonder. Are the public only shocked because the Telegraph tells them they should be?

Tom Dalyell is an interesting example. He claimed 18,000 pounds expenses to build a bookcase and was eventually given £7800 for the project. String him up? But he was one of the handful of MPs who actually vocally opposed our aggression in the middle-east, and thus one of the handful who blessed British politics with some sort of reasonable alternative in a crucial debate. His agitation may have saved lives. What do his bookcases matter in the face of a genuine political debate?

The biggest irony of the last week comes from some of the suggestions that the Queen exercise her right to dissolve parliament – I’d take a wild guess that the idea that anyone should live like royalty at the expense of the public probably doesn’t disgust the Queen too much.