Where do you start with something like this?
Let’s start with the context. Jeremy Corbyn was asking Theresa May, “Did she actually know what arrangement was made with Surrey County Council?” This relates to the still unfolding scandal of a sweetheart deal being struck with Surrey Council ‘to persuade one of the richest councils in England to cancel a planned referendum on a huge council tax rise’ of 15%, which May categorically denied to parliament, despite leaks of emails and texts proving that, in fact, the government had intervened, which included her own Chancellor, Philip Hammond.
I am very sure that readers of this do not require me to explain the reason for an outburst of mocking hilarity in such a moment, after all if you have to explain a joke, it inevitably fails like a damp squid. The best response you’ll get in such a situation is, ‘Oh yeah, I get it’. And you’ll have to forgive me if I do indeed get it and consider it is not in the least funny.
The range of thoughts that went through my mind were impossible to capture and it has taken some days for me to get to a place where I can even write about it.
I am a retired community and youth worker and as such I was a public servant. I have served on and made representations to many committees in my time. In one of my more personally pleasing moments I took it upon myself to drive a career politician, seeking the office of mayor, from a youth committee in which she made it abundantly clear that youth, as far as she was concerned, should do as they are told by their superiors and betters, meaning her. I took it upon myself to discredit her before the committee from which she silently disappeared without notice or trace. What I did not do at any time was bray like a jackal at her obvious absurdities, absurdities which were entirely absent in Jeremy Corbyn’s questions to Theresa May in parliament.
What Theresa May did in parliament that day was mock the nation, flanked by two laughing sycophants. There are no circumstances in which such a hideous display of mockery is appropriate in the highest office in Britain and within the confines of the seat of parliament in the, supposed, mother of all parliaments.
I was a display of unrestrained arrogance, mocking the many lives that have passed, shattered and ruined by government dictat. What Corbyn was addressing was the issue of social care budgets slashed by this government and Surrey, a Tory stronghold, was shamefully seeking preferential treatment despite being one of the wealthiest councils in England. May even accused Corbyn of presenting “alternative facts” which, along with ‘fake news’, is the latest right wing ploy in its inexcusable murderous intentions of depriving ordinary people of life and the means of survival.
The chief thought going through my mind as I watched this obscene display was that she was mocking, above all, the poor and, specifically, the most vulnerable people in Britain in the last, waning, years of their lives.
But, worse, many times worse, is the arrogant presumption, which has marked Tory misrule since 2010, that they act with impunity, that they can and will get away with it and see fit to mock the entire nation. That is what Theresa May did, and that is what makes this so utterly obscene. And what is also abundantly clear is that redress is never going to come from the top, were that so then ample time has passed for it to have done so. It falls to us, ordinary people, to hold them, these abysmal excuses for humanity, to account by any means at our disposal, to be the gad fly to power, to bite and keep biting at every opportunity. It is too obvious that they should be drummed out of power, shamed and humiliated, and it we who must raise and continue to raise the kind of stink that will drive them and their filthy, corrupt, policies out. Clearly, no one is going to do it for us. That, at least, should be obvious by now.
In 2011 David Cameron introduced the fixed term parliament and they still plan to gerrymander electoral boundaries which will effectively see them in power for a very long time and preferably, they hope, forever. They do not like democracy in any form, and they have no interest in accountability, which was also what May was mocking apart from anything else. Any movement of the people is something they fear and, as we’ve so often seen, will attempt to brutally suppress. If Theresa May is reduced to hysterical displays of mockery in parliament, and it looked nothing if not hysterically contrived, then it falls to us to turn her into a gibbering wreck, it is the least she deserves.
KOG. 16 March 2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yl5uXAQidqQ
https://skwawkbox.org/2017/03/08/smokinggun-email-proves-may-lied-re-surrey-sweetheartdeal/
https://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/jeremy-corbyn-just-destroyed-theresa.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-term_Parliaments_Act_2011
