When the Harrumphing Had to Stop. From Dunkirk to D-Day.

High tory Sir Patrick Cormack baffled the house of commons and the daytime TV audience at Mick Martin's Last Shamble on monday by comparing the disintegration of British political credibility with the Norway Debate of 1940, now remembered as the moment Neville Chamberlain was forced to resign as leader and make way for Winston Churchill.
To sum everything up in the same vein, today is being portrayed more and more as parliament's Dunkirk, a British disaster which turns the tide, leading presumably to a D-Day assault on the real den of democratic corruption, the frightful European Parliament gravy train, which we will all be voting about next month, and which the fascists and Little Englanders are hoping to join.
Parties are striving to outdo each other as reformers, some going as far as to demand elections to select those to be elected, which will mean a logarithmic rise in election expenses to be paid by the taxpayer. But in another way, this repersents a welcome show of Obaman co-operation in the face of an agreed threat, and a move away from the negative competition usual between British political parties. And why shouldn't they co-operate more? They don't have many ideological differences to fight over since the Labour party signed up to the capitalist consensus in about 1926.
The British people are somehow shocked by the fact that MP's fiddle their expenses as diligently as journalists, or anyone else who feels they are not paid enough. They are shocked by the fact that their MP's are just like them.
The big question is why, after everything they have been told about politicians and bankers and businessmen and the police, are they only outraged now? Why has it taken them so long to wake up to the emasculation of politics by the same culture of consumerist greed which they have enjoyed for ten years, and which was ushered in by their idol, Margaret Thatcher - who, incedentally, also introduced the very expenses system now being dismantled.
More mischief from the grave, which a chastened generation has to now undo.
As for Martin himself, his position was made clear by handling of the illegal police raid on tory shadow minister Damien Green's office months ago. As Nye Bevan put it as prosecution counsel in the case of The People Versus Anthony Eden:
'If he knew that the police were going to raid without a warrant, he is complicit in an illegal action, and should resign. If he did not know, he is too stupid to be speaker.'

The popular accusation is that MPs have undermined of democracy. Also that they have no morals, conscience or backbone. This was exactly the kind of politician needed to allow mad 90's marketonomics free rein. And the same people who demanded this race of eunuchs in parliament are now outraged to discover they have no balls. The generation of politicans which made Roy Hattersley look like a Trotskyite was bred in the kennel of reaganomics and monetarism, and reared in the dreamworld of global digital consumerism. What do the British middle classes expect? A breed of Aneurin Bevans?