A Little Bit of Politics

Little time goes by without some mention of the Salisbury spy saga and very little of the coverage seems to be measured or have any context. Rather the siren voices of the press make ever more outrageous statements. Before I start this blog let me say that the attempted murder of anybody is completely wrong, it is something that should be tried through the courts and due process.

At the moment we are operating in a fog of uncertainty, the government has told us who the perpetrator is without sharing any of the evidence. Boris Johnson is a serial liar so why should we believe anything he says without something to back it up. In truth the media and we know nothing about the background to this attempted murder, yet we make many assumptions.

To my simple mind there could have been many people who would seek revenge on the victim, this was not a saint we are talking about. He was a serious spy who caused great damage to the Russian spy network by defecting probably at a personal level. Who knows who bore a grudge?

What we also know is that state sponsored killing is not a preserve of Russia, both the UK and the US use assassination as a tool against alleged terrorists, though we should note the due process of the law is not followed. A thoughtful article by Simon Jenkins makes a strong case that there is considerable moral ambivalence in our position.

I think we have to be much more rational in our response, expel some diplomats, that just satisfies the desire for revenge and newspaper headlines, in the end what does it achieve. Why don’t we surprise everybody and start a dialogue. Invite the Russians to play a part in the investigation; the very surprise element would give the UK the moral high ground.

Food for thought.

Parliamentary Play

On Friday we travelled to the West Yorkshire Playhouse to see the play, House, which had transferred from London. It was a work of faction set in the House of Commons during the Labour governments of 1974/79. It used the device of focusing on the two Whips Offices and the main protagonists were the four whips in each office. From my reading it would appear that the play was historically accurate, though obviously it did not reflect the exact words spoken.

Now superficially this is a very dry subject and one would think have difficulty in sustaining nearly three hours of entertainment, yet it was witty, had pace, character development and moral dilemmas. The acting was powerful within the confines of a simple set that wittily had devices like an opening for the member’s bar. It also teased the political nerd in me, apart from the whips the MPs were rarely called name but rather their moniker was the constituency that they represented. This meant that all the time I was trying to identify the name of the MP. Some were easy like the member for Henley, Michael Heseltine, while it took me a long time to identify the member for Newham North East as Reg Prentice.

The play framed the parliamentary session as an adversarial contest between the Labour whips who were trying to maintain a minority government, and the Conservative whips who were hell bent on bringing it down. It did shine a light on a parliamentary system that counted MPs as voting who were on hospital beds in the precincts of parliament. This presented the classic device of the whip agonising whether to bring a member into vote if it could cause them harm.

It did seem like a bygone age in the language, bullying, and treatment/lack of women. Then I read the weekend’s headlines about bullying in parliament and I wondered!

It was a thoroughly enjoyable evening helped by good company, and a great Indian meal in advance.

Catastrophists

During the recent spell of bad weather, the so-called Beast from the East, I was watching the local news programme. They featured a primary school headmaster from Bradford who had quote “agonised” over the decision to close or open his school due to the weather. He said he had to take into account the surrounding roads, the pavements and the parent’s safety coming to/from school. This set me thinking; actually he had taken on a huge number of problems that were not his responsibility. To me his role was simple he had to ensure that the school environs were safe for pupils and that there were enough members of staff to supervise them. No more no less, it was not an agonising decision but actually quite an easy one that could be based on simple facts. Extending his responsibility beyond the school gates is ludicrous. If instead of citing the icy pavements he had said that he must ensure that all parent’s cars were road worthy then it would have been obvious.

It is similar to the way that we catastrophise the ordinary events of life. This is particularly evident when there are transport delays, and people state that for instance that it is like being in a war zone. No it isn’t it is a mild inconvenience that will be forgotten a week later. Being in a war zone is being a refugee in Syria. A lady who had been stranded in her North Devon village for two days because of snowdrifts called it “disgusting” that the council had not dug her out. No that is a sensible use of resources; they should be first deployed where they have most benefit. One of the hazards of living in an isolated location is that it is isolated. What is disgusting is that during the cold spell we have homeless people sleeping on the streets.

So lets sit back and let nature take its course, we cannot do anything about the weather other than prepare if extremes are forecast, though quite why my local shop had been stripped bare of bread and toilet paper today is quite mysterious.

View from our house on Tuesday