Dung Parliament

In 1890, William Morris published a rather silly socialist ‘Utopia’ called News from Nowhere. Set in London 200 years in the future, money, politics, organized government etc. have all been abolished. Work is a pleasure, passed around so that everyone gets a chance at doing different jobs. The sexes are equal (although the women still wait on the men in a guesthouse). 
 
There are many absurdities, like the gang of happy road-menders with gold and silver embroidered clothes looking like ‘a boating party at Oxford’. How happy would they have been doing the job in mid-winter, with snow, wind and rain and the ground as hard as stone… 
 
But the book does contain one gem: since politics and formal government have been abolished, the Houses of Parliament are used to store manure…
 
How that idea resonates today, when, with a few honourable exceptions, members of all parties in Westminster seem determined to place their collective common sense on hold and damn the interests of the country. 
 
I have never made any secret of the fact that, in my view, the referendum result was a catastrophe. Certainly, many people were concerned over immigration; others, terminally against the ‘European’ project. How many though, I wonder, have had their views poisoned by the stream of anti-European prejudice, based on innuendo, half-truths and downright lies, peddled by the right-wing press.
 
Nevertheless, the country voted to leave, and for better or worse, that is what our government had been instructed to do. No matter that anyone with half a brain and 10% of the common sense of a nine-year-old, would realize that from the point of view of the EU, the UK could not possibly be granted even as good a position vis a vis trade etc. outside of the ‘club’, not paying the dues, as within it.
 
Furthermore, that same person, unless they were completely fooling themselves, must have known that – as I said in one of these posts right at the beginning of this process – the Irish border problem is a circle that cannot be squared without serious concessions.
 
So what happens? After months and months of haggling, a deal is finally thrashed out. Is it a good deal? I have no idea, but I’m guessing that given the enormous constraints, it is probably the best that could be hoped for. And, it is clear from the EU that it is either this deal, or no deal. 
 
Does the Prime Minister get the backing of her cabinet and ‘The House’? Not a bit of it. A string of cabinet resignations, backbenchers calling for blood, and the Labour Party – what planet, I wonder, are they living on – calling for the government to ‘step aside and let them have a go’.
 
No, we have been brutally let down by our representatives; they are a Dung Parliament, a crock of shit, a pile of ordure. The British People want this business settled without bankrupting the country, stifling business and bringing chaos to the channel ports. And all Parliament can do is abrogate their responsibility, stamp their collective feet and refuse to bow to the inevitable.