This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column They bundle off that bemused old booby, Michael Martin, and imagine that we will regard this grudging, trivial gesture as a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the whole political class. Ho ho. Do not pay any heed to this self-serving diversionary tactic. They do this because they hope to win it by default, even though they know they don’t deserve to. They intend to govern the country just as the Blairites did, and hope you won’t realise this until it is too late. They are wildly over-confident about this. Conservative constituency associations are arrogantly rallying round their discredited MPs. One overpraised Tory, the noisy Nadine Dorries, has even had the nerve to claim that MPs are the targets of a ‘McCarthyite witch-hunt’ and to snivel that the poor persecuted things will do away with themselves if things go on like this. The stomach heaves. Hundreds of thousands of homes are hard-pressed by debt and redundancy through no fault of their own, and bravely making the best of it, and this spoiled woman dares to suggest that the exposure of someone’s grotesque expenses claims is a reason for suicide. God forgive her. I know that it is fun to concentrate on the woes of the ghastly automaton Hazel Blears, or that smooth old time-server Geoff Hoon, but these people are all used up anyway. As it happens, I warned you against them 12 years ago, but you wouldn’t listen. Nothing can save them. What you have to realise is that the next Hazel Blears and the next Geoff Hoon are lurking now on the Tory benches, ready to ignore us and laugh at us once they are safely back in power. If they can fool enough people into thinking this is a mainly Labour problem, then they may just get away with it. They shouldn’t. The last thing we need now is a General Election which would bury the real problem under the slurry of Lib-Lab-Con politics, with the three near-identical parties pretending to be different for a few noisy, dishonest weeks. Once they’ve had their election, they will instantly be able to stop caring about what we think. They’ll be safe for five years, by which time we’ll have forgotten all about the swimming pools, moats and dog food. On the principle of ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’, all the very same people who have helped to wreck the country are now using the expenses scandal as a pretext for more of the same. We get thoughtless drivel about turning the House of Lords into a copy of the Commons - how could that possibly be the answer? Bringing back the incorruptible old hereditaries would make more sense. Do not be fooled by this. The problem is quite simple and it is one they do not wish us to notice. It is that most Members of Parliament have been purchased by the European Union and the liberal elite. They know that their absurdly padded lifestyles are their reward for selling their souls to power, for concealing that 80 per cent of what they do is rubber-stamping European law, and most of the rest is pursuing the relentless agendas of political correctness. They dared not ask us for more pay, because they feared we would enquire too deeply into what they do and what they don’t do. So they fiddled themselves more money in secret complicity with their true masters. There should be no General Election until most of them - and I mean most of them - have retreated in shame into private life. I quite like her but, like so many celebs, she is clueless about politics. I nearly curled up and died when I heard her ‘ideas’ for Middle East peace on a TV show a few months ago. A few independent MPs, or even a lot of them, are not the answer. Even if I could get into Parliament - as some of you urge me - I’d be powerless unless I belonged to a party that I more or less agreed with. What we need are two new parties. One should be a proper pro-British one that believes in quitting the EU, leaving good people alone, punishing criminals, slashing the corruption out of the welfare state, proper schools and an end to mass immigration. The other should be one that argues openly for what the existing three now do - the dissolution of this country into the EU, making excuses for crime, putting egalitarian dogma before education, flinging wide our borders and taxing the productive to pay for the idle. Wouldn’t you just love to have a General Election fought on these arguments? And who do you think would win? But I’m not sure where it would leave Esther or Martin Bell. But what do they think we are like? I suspect they think we are rather like the Piplings - the BBC’s new Teletubbies: wide-eyed, simpering little creatures who will believe anything provided it comes from their own party leaders. They live in the world of Nara; a land of happiness, laughter and friendship. When Piplings experience pure happiness they achieve ‘Buloo’ and rise gently into the air. Yes, ‘Buloo’ is not a bad word for what we will achieve if we all vote Tory next time. I am sorry to hear of the retirement of the genius Keith Waterhouse. I still remember reading Billy Liar for the first time in the middle of a teenage illness, and laughing so much that by the time I had finished it, I had forgotten I was ill. But as well as being astonishingly funny, he has always loved and defended the hard and beautiful English language against its many enemies. The rest of us will now have to take over this task as best we can.23 May 2009 7:45 PM
The last thing we need now is a General Election... not with the next Hazel Blears and the next Geoff Hoon lurking on the Tory benches
Just how stupid do they think we are?The Tories, sunk right up to their bald patches in the swamp of self-enrichment and soul-selling, babble urgently about a General Election.
New parties are the answer, not Esther RantzenOh please, please let us not have Esther Rantzen as an MP.
Like a Pipling, they think we'll believe anything ...We now have a pretty good picture of what an MP is like - a rich person who thinks he can make you pay for his chimney to be fixed, while you help him buy a second home on an interest-free loan.
After Waterhouse the great, we all have to mind our language
Saturday, 23 May 2009
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