There was a time, not so long ago, when the political elite was looked up to. They were our betters, the ruling elite. That changed somewhat with the fall of John Profumo in 1963. It wasn’t the affair with Christine Keeler that did for him, it was the lying to the house, that was the transgression too far.
During the intervening forty years, politicians have become less and less revered – indeed, now they are reviled. Is it any wonder when they lie? Not just lie, but blatantly, transparently lie and obfuscate? As did the unelected buffoon Charlie Falconer on the radio the other day.
“The argument for devolution was that the Scots and the Welsh felt policies could be imposed upon them for which there was little or no support in Scotland or Wales. That’s why devolution was popular,” Lord Falconer said.
But because 80% of the population of the UK was English there was “absolutely no need for the sort of protection for the Scots and the Welsh by having their own parliament or assembly,” he argued.
If his comments caused you to experience a “WTF!?” moment, don’t be alarmed, you weren’t alone.
His oxymoronic outpourings were compounded when discussing peerages – you know the ones; those for sale to people who donate loan money to the ZANU Labour political machine.
Evidence of this was given on Friday by the aforementioned Falconer on the radio, when he was reduced to defending the prime minister by telling two blatant untruths. In the first place he stated that it was “absolutely not” possible to buy an honour from Tony Blair. It is. I know people who have. The late Lord Montague of Oxford boasted the fact to me. How else is it explicable that everyone who has given £1m to Labour has been given a knighthood or a peerage? I know of one expectant donor who was denied an honour by Blair’s “collector” on the grounds that he had not yet given enough. Falconer must know that chapter and verse on this will come out one day. His final throw was a hilarious inversion, that it would be “quite wrong to bar donors from getting honours”.
I guess, if you are going to lie, you might as well go down for a great big one rather than a little fib.
It’s not just the lies, though. It’s the arrogant, boorish behaviour towards anyone who dares to confront them. Like Rachel’s father, for example when attempting to talk to his MP:
My father tells me he at this point left his seat and strode up to Clarke, because he wanted to ask his question, and he said,
‘’Congratulations on fixing the meeting so that nobody can ask questions! You will have heard about Rev Julie Nicholson who is so angry she cannot forgive the bombers who killed her daughter on 7th July , well, I have a question, my daughter was feet away from the 7/7 Kings Cross bomb, and she and some other surivors have said they are not angry with the bombers, but with the Government, because there was no public enquiry. Why is there no public enquiry?’’
Charles Clarke looked at my father ‘’in a very nasty way’’, and then he said to my father
‘’ Get away from me, I will not be insulted by you, this is an insult’.
And he stormed past, and Dad was so upset he could not share Eucharist with this man,
That this story does not surprise me in the least is, itself, telling. I have become hardened to the nasty, bullying and boorish behaviour of the ZANU Labour party elite (and, indeed, some of the not so elite) that I expect nothing else. Yet Clarke is Rachel’s father’s MP. He has every right to ask questions of his MP – and, in so doing, should expect a courteous and reasoned response. Even if that response was that he could not discuss the matter on this occasion, but would correspond later. But, no, being questioned by one’s constituents is, to the safety elephant, an “insult”. Yeah, well, I know who is being insulted here, and it isn’t just Rachel’s father – it is the country at large; the electorate who are being royally shafted by this bunch of pestiferous, bullying incompetents.
What is it about this party that makes it so blatantly and self-righteously arrogant and obnoxious?
“What is it about this party that makes it so blatantly and self-righteously arrogant and obnoxious?”
Years of practice coupled with natural ability.
meanwhile Dr Patel thinks he is being traduced? Others would, I think, consider rather that he is being quite accurately characterised. I heard him huffing and puffing on the radio – of course he never mentioned the ‘loan’, only that he had given ‘over £5,000’. Res ipsa loquitur, as m’learned friends would say.
Good morning, Mark! ‘Pestiferous’! I’ll have to remember that one!
I don’t read Rachel North’s blog (I was pointed to the entry in question by Mr. but when I did I was disgusted. As can be seen by my comments. The word for Charles Rodway Clarke is not ‘politician’, it is ‘vermin’.
If the public vote in dickheads they get will be treated like same. It’s quite simple to me and many of us in the British blogosphere (apart from Ãœber cretins like Messrs Piper and Harding). The vast majority of fuckwitted poltroons politicians in this country aren’t worth the paper they write to the foolish bastards who vote them in every four years constituents on.
On devolution: I’m against it and would quite like all the existing devolution measures to be dissolved but one idea I like was mentioned on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions? yesterday – that of doing what the John Major government did with Scotland: set up a ‘Scottish Committee’, where Scottish MPs meet together and deal with issues affecting Scotland. The same could be done with the other three constituent countries of the UK: England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Worth thinking about, I guess.