No.44 - Breaking Window Panes, Rattling the plates and Scaring the Cat - our Ultimate Crisis?

Dear James,

This is not how a crisis should be. A crisis should shake the earth, rattle the plates, break a few window panes, scare the cat. And yet this crisis leaves everyone quietly dumfounded, dismayed, disenchanted, discombobulated. It has been going on now for months if not years. Unknown, unrecognized, seeping out from beneath the floorboards and through the rafters like an odourless gas that leaves us numb, saps our confidence and leaves us feeling enfeebled in a world that carries on as usual, relatively sanely, without us.  

This crisis is in our minds and in our hearts. It is a crisis of government itself, a government torpedoed in 2016 by an over confident, over entitled Prime Minister and a rogue weapon called a referendum. It struck our system below the water line and has capsized the liner of state so that it now, lies on its side, rudderless, engineless and taking on water daily. But this ship of state was already frail and unbalanced. All the torpedo needed to do was to nudge it.  The inevitable capsize has shown how our system is, from top to bottom, bereft of logic and common sense. From the process of selecting MPs to the question of a written and agreed constitution through to the social culture of our nation as a whole, things have got to change. 

Our current national enervation is expressed in parliament by the deadlock. Parliament is broken. There are no leaders. Our two party structure and the first past the post voting system are dead. In extremis, a two party system lays itself open to polarisation. What the current deadlock has revealed is the deep mistrust of many for that system. The scourge of inequality, the stain of undeserved privilege, the scars of patronage on all sides - from the honours system, to union power, to corporate lobbying – they all leave the ordinary voter dismayed and disconnected. What is their vote worth if it is immediately swamped by the privileges and patronage of the established centres of power?  

The two party system embeds these distortions. Your party has conservation in its very name. The other party bows to organised labour and excludes most outside it. Now both these parties are facing a new benchmark – whether they wish to be open, inclusive and internationalists or become closed, isolationist and nationalistic. At the moment your own voting record suggests that you’re still riding the horse called ‘Fence Sitting’. I am afraid that the time will soon come when you have to choose James. I hope you are not one of the 174 Tory MPs who wrote letters to the PM yesterday revealing their anti-European views. It is time to stop defending the indefensible and to consider the national interest. 

So in this, the biggest political crisis since the Second World War, we know that unless something drastic happens very soon, we will enter a period of steady decline - politically, economically, diplomatically and socially. Window panes will not be repaired, the plates will not be replaced and the cat will not get its usual milk quota. And it is all so unnecessary.  

At the moment you are probably blinded by the minutiae of Westminster procedures and tactics. Please stand back for an instant because the solution, James, is obvious. It is time to find your own feet and vote for the national interest. No more safe, vanilla Tory party politics. No more sitting on the fence.  Please demand that Mrs May puts the vote back to the electorate.

Kind regards,  

BH - Your Concerned Constituent