the brilliantly leaping gazelle

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May 2, 2025

34:63 presents “Mari Wilson.”

As with all things, the devil is in the detail, and there is a lot of detail for Farrago to dwell on, following the overnight constituency, local council and mayoral elections. It is now Friday afternoon and more grim tidings are expected to be heading Plonkers way. But the results are just as troubling for Farrago, albeit in a different way, one replete with potentially longer term damage. 

First of all, a quick shufti at the actual results. The Reform UK candidate, Sarah Poitin, won the Runcorn and Helsby by-election by six votes, overturning a majority that rights, shouldn’t have been vulnerable. However, as stunning – and widely predicted –  as her victory undoubtedly was, she only got 38.7% of the votes cast and only 42.6% of the voters actually bothered to vote. And even that was lower than the turnout less than a year ago. at the general election.It’s not like there hadn’t been any publicity, media interest and speculation about it or anything.

Which means a few things, none of them good for her glittering parliamentary career, which may or may not happen or for Reform UK’s positioning of itself as a viable electoral proposition. Firstly, with a majority that is the very definition of ‘by the skin of their teeth’, and with such a low turnout to boot,  a better result for her would’ve been to have lost by six instead. Because you can bet that the local Labour Party will scrutinise her parliamentary attendance record, forensically examine her expenses claims, flood her constituency surgery with labyrinthine constituent problems, all designed to portray her as bad MP at the next election. They’ll also be all over her social media content – especially in her youthful postings – for any damaging content, and trying to unearth anything in her past that might be used against her. So basically what every political party handed such opportunity would do.

The situation in Greater Lincolnshire, where Dame Angela Jenkins became Reform UK’s first mayor, is if anything, potentially even worse. Yes, she’s a former Conservative MP so she knows how the game is played and yes, as mayor of newly formed super council, essentially overseeing three smaller councils each represented two senior councillors each, – given as how all of whom are Conservative,- this in theory doesn’t pose as much of a problem as if they were Labour.  I didn’t know this, but prior to last night, over 65% of Reform UK’s local councillors were defectors from the Conservatives. But be that as it may, Ange got her gold chain with a vote share of 42.2% – good -, a majority of nearly 40,000 – double good -, on a voter turnout of, er, 29.9%.  

So her election has succeeded in highlighting the flaws in our voting system and nothing else. As the mayor of a new super council, she needs the support of six others to ratify any policies she wants to introduce. They in turn are at the mercy of local officials, in town halls and council departments to make those policies real. And successful implementation of her policies will, even if they succeed in permeating down through the layers in bureaucracy, rely on council staff and contractors, who might be instinctively opposed to Reform UK. They won’t want her mayoralty to become a shining example of good governance should Farrago enter No.10.

And this is why the greater the electoral success that Reform UK has, the greater the threat to Reform UK has of suffering irreperable reputational damage. It can only present themselves as the change Britain needs for so long. At some point, they’ll have to deliver that change, and whilst bemoaning the structural unfairness of the first-past-the-post voting system chimes with people who care about such things, if potholes are left unrepaired, schools face staff shortages, or social care is pared back even further,  nobody will much care.

They won’t care that central government has cut the councils budget, but they will care the their council tax bill goes up or that they have to buy a residents parking permit. They won’t care that the council is barely meeting its statutory obligations but they will care when those statuary obligations are perceived to be applied discriminatorily. They won’t care when council run things that they never use are closed, but they will care when things that they do use close. Then they’ll care, then they’ll care a lot. 

And it won’t just be Farrago regretting getting the thing he always wanted.

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April 30, 2025

34:63 presents “The Corporal Jones guide to politics.”

In recent days there has been a lot of speculation in the press concerning what exactly Plonker will do in order to nullify the threat of a Reform UK rout of Labour at the upcoming local elections tomorrow.  They have pretty much conceded the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby, which voting also place tomorrow, which on paper they should win, given as how the former MP Mike Amesbury won it with a majority of nearly 15,000 at the General Election barely a year ago. 

But then having a by-election forced upon you because the sitting MP had to resign after recieving a 10-week suspended prison sentence after pleading guilty to punching a constituent last year, is not a good look. But neither is it a good look for a politician to carefully finesse his public image so that him saying little about actual policy in the general election campaign – so that everyone can fill in their own hopes onto him – works only so far. Which in his case, turned out – to no-ones surprise – to be until he was elected and soon thereafter revealed himself to be as slippery as most other politicians.  

Anything less than a resounding victory for Labour- an increased majority, an increased voter turnout from the general election and the other parties being thoroughly rejected by the electorate – will be a defeat. It remains to be see if its a crushing one or not. The local elections pose more of a threat, because most people will vote based on how competent or not they judge central government to be. Sad but true. Its politics. Just like when in February Local Government Secretary Angela Ratner announced that local elections in East Sussex, West Sussex, Essex, Thurrock, Hampshire, the Isle of Wight, Norfolk, Suffolk and Surrey would be delayed for one year to allow major reorganisations to take place. It may well be true, maybe there’s a compelling rationale behind her decision. But in order to prevent the taint of political chicanery being levelled and gaining traction, making the announcement less than three months before they’re happening, again, isn’t a good look.

But this government seems to be constantly bedevilled by events, responding to them, and being in constant firefighting mode, rather than shaping them and exuding calm. The postponement of the aforementioned is but one example of this. Another is sudden flurry of headlines this week suggesting that Plonker will take a stronger line on immigration in order to try and mitigate the threat from Reform UK.  Its not because of something as old fashioned as its the right thing to do and that doing such – reducing the numbers of people being granted asylum – might have a beneficial effect on already overstretched public services. That Plonker seems unwilling to grasp this obvious political calculation is one reason why Reform UK is polling so well and why all Plonker has are desperate last minute throws of the dice. His default position on immigration is to label anyone who thinks that immigration needs tougher action as racist or bigoted or far right extremists, effectively attempting to shut down any sensible discussion on this topic.

But as Reforms growing threat, and Labours craven reaction to it amply demonstrate, while such a strategy might work in posh metropolitan circles, out in the wild, out where most of the electorate live, out where the very real consequences of immigration are being felt, that strategy isn’t working. 

Don’t be thinking I’m in any way a fan of Farrago. I think he’s nothing more than a snake oil salesman, all smarm and the kind of bluster that most people mistake as plain speaking. Like a lot of people flirting with Reform UK, its only because of the lack of any other viable political alternative And like a lot of people who are considering voting Reform UK, my values and principles, my fundamental conception of what the state should do – and what it shouldn’t – and what obligations the state owed to the citizen – and vice-versa – haven’t really changed. Its the political parties who have changed out of all recognition. 

Despite the many horrors that the Grocers Daughter visited on the UK, she at least had ideological underpinnings to them. There was a logic, twisted and serving the interests of a minority, yes, but a logic.  The most socialist thing about Plonker is his first name, and the only thing he stands for is a piss.

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April 28, 2025

34:63 presents “Neither shaken nor stirred.”

My last few posts have not been about especially frothy and lightweight topics, so you’ll be delighted to read that I’ve decided to put my earnestness to one side and instead focus my attentions on the worlds most famous secret agent, James Bond.

I’ll try and be as brief as possible, because eventually I’m going to name the person who I think has been more of enemy to Bond than SMERSH, Blofeld and Oddjob combined and the reasons why I think that.

First of all however, I need to be clear about which James Bond it is I’m discussing. Is it the Bond of the books or the Bond of the movies?

There’s the Bond of the original looks penned by Ian Fleming. There are 12 of these and 2 books of short stories. Fleming died in 1964, and the first ‘continuation novel – which either kept a beloved character alive or kept a lucrative cash cow going , your pick – was written in 1968 by Kingsley Amis. 

So far, six authors have written a total of 25 such books, some writing Bond as existing in the modern age, others writing their Bond as existing within the timeframe of gaps of Flemings originals. With me so far? Original Bond and ‘Continuation’ Bond.

Then there’s also ‘Spin Off’ Bond, the ‘Young Bond’ book series – started in in 2005, two authors and nine books – which has the schoolboy Bond doing things that only exist because of the authors guaranteed payday, the ‘Double 0’ series that doesn’t feature Bond at all but instead the lethal licence holders – one author, two books, and most bizarrely of all, ‘The Moneypenny Dairies’ one author, three books. 

Therefore a compelling case could be made for suggesting that the Fleming estate, who commission these ‘continuation’ ad spin-off books, have not exactly covered themselves in glory when discussing who has tarnished the Bond of the literary world. However, they are but amateurs when it comes to disgracing the world of Bond. Reading all the guff that followed the news that the Broccoli family have upped sticks and handed full creative control to Amazon for the film rights, one might think that the Bond films were great masterworks of cinema, rather than being little more than ‘Carry On’ films, albeit with better production values. A lump of coal has more in common with a flawless diamond than the films have with the books. The films took the books title, characters names and basic plot and essentially made up the rest and not even that in the recent ones.

In the original Fleming books – two of which contained nine short stories – Bond sleeps with fourteen women. The films though turned the Bond of the books into little more than a sexually transmitted disease in a tuxedo, while avoiding all references to his borderline sadistic, clearly misogynistic and other qualities that not suited to thrilling cinematic romps.  Another bugbear is that in the books Bond is often in real danger, and has only his courage to rely on. There are hardly any gadgets and the ‘Q’ in the books is simply the quartermaster who gives Bond advice on guns.  The films? Things got so bad that Eddie Izzard even did a sketch about it

So in the same way as the Fleming estate, the Broccoli family can quite legitimately be accused of tarnishing the name of Bond. But even they are not the villains here. Nor is it Jeff Bezos, despite him looking like Blofeld and being a megalomaniac billionaire who controls a vast retail and media empire and dreams of conquering space. I mean, if he had a furry white cat he couldn’t be better suited to the role.

No, the person I hold uniquely and irrevocably to blame for all of the ills that have befallen James Bond since 1970 is George Lazenby. 

‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’ (OHMSS), the only film in which he played Bond, is by quite a wide margin easily the best Bond film ever. If you think otherwise, you’re wrong. Unusually faithful to the plot of the book, great cinematography, real emotional heft, a great soundtrack and above all, in Lazenby a Bond who could fight. Just 20 minutes in and already we are treated to two fight sequences that make one realise just how poorly served by Connery we were. Critics often suggest that Lazenby couldn’t act, as if Connery was treading the boards instead of water, using his Bond pay checks to fund his forays into doing Ibsen and Shakespeare between, rather than playing himself in every film he was in. He even played the commander of a Russian nuclear submarine with a Scottish accent in ‘The Hunt for Red October. He really put the con into Connery. 

Far from being a flop, as received wisdom has it, OHMSS was a hit, not a huge one, but enough of one for Lazenby to be offered a seven movie deal. Had he accepted, we’d have got Bond out for revenge, a Bond fuelled by single-minded desire to kill the person who had killed his wife, only minutes after getting married. That Bond had talked about giving up being a spy, so more ruthless, more character driven Bond might have been ours. Audiences would have believed in a simple quest for revenge more than an implausibly far fetched scheme for world domination. But we had to wait until 1989 and Timothy Daltons ‘Licence to Kill’ to get that Bond. 

But he didn’t and Connery, together with acting so wooden he was fire risk, returned in ‘Diamonds are Forever’ a film that pretended that the events of OHMSS had never happened and instead reverted back to the Bond of underground lairs built out of dormant volcanoes. Had he accepted, we would have spared Roger Moores Bond, all the eyebrow acting, smutty innuendo, safari suits and the endless product placement.

Everyone wanted Lazenby. But he said no. And that’s why he’s the real villain. Because he promised so much, a glimpse of what was possible but was never to be.To make one Bond film and for it to be the best of the entire series, isn’t a really high bar. But I still daydream about how subsequent films might have focused upon Bonds quest, with him only being a secret agent incidentally, and only then when it coincided with his goal. 

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April 24, 2025

34:63 presents “Different but the same.”

The idea that I posited in my last post – namely that Plonkers swift reaction to the death of the pope was best understood when viewed though the prism of self interest in this ceaseless and hyper-critical world of social media – was only half of the intended post. As I wrote then, I was eager to get back to an enjoyable daydream, so really wasn’t keen to spend too long looking at a computer  screen.

The rest concerned my idea that they were both firm believers in trans ideology.

That isn’t to write that the catholic church has rethought some of its less than liberal policies and attitudes, any more than Plonker has retreated from some of his party’s more ‘progressive’ positions, but more that both are firmly of the view that simply by saying something, then that something – no matter how blatantly absurd it is – becomes true.

The showstopper part of a catholic mass is the communion ceremony, whereby thanks to the ringing of some bells, holding up some chalices up and saying a few words, some wafer biscuits and some really awful wine became the body and blood of christ. This is know as transubstantiation.

And don’t go thinking that this was is all some clever allegory or metaphor that depends on someones faith to make it real, or else a practice commonplace in 14th Century Europe, but exists now only in history books. It isn’t, it was and still is. The congregation then form an orderly queue to eat the body of christ and drink his blood as if they were pious cannibals or vampires. Really, I’m not making this up. (Click on this if you don’t believe me – its a handy guide to who says and does what at a catholic mass – and scroll down to ‘Consecration”)

Exactly how is this any different from a man claiming he’s a woman simply by saying so and pitting on a bad wig and expecting everyone else to affirm his delusion? What is the difference between burning women at the stake for being ‘witches’ and the modern day notion of cancellation, aside from 500 years and death, obviously? A fanatical mob demanding strict adherence to its own rigid beliefs has the same effect on society, irrespective of when that is or what those beliefs are.

“99.9% of women don’t have a penis.”

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April 22, 2025

34:63 presents “George Michael.”

This is only going to be a short post, as I’ve got a rather enjoyable daydream to get back to, but it just occurred to me that Plonker cares more about the death of one elderly foreigner than he does for the majority of the citizens he was elected by. 

Or, being cynical, he is more worried about appearing statesman like on the world stage, than he is being actually statesman like in the UK. Actually, there is one part of his behaviour following the death of this particular foreigner that he shares with other world leaders, so in this one instance, he’s being just as shameless as the rest of them. 

I think that he doesn’t much care one way or the other about this man death, but he is worried looking like he cares, looking suitably affected, issuing social media posts how he feels, about this and about, because its less to do with who’s died than the people who are upset this mans death. That’s who he’s trying to impress, to convey that he too understands their pain.

On the same day as elderly man with an increasingly worsening series of health complications succumbed to them, Plonker took to X to say something. He has since said other things, hoping like all politicians in this age of an endless news cycle, that because he says something, other people won’t start saying things about him.

Contrast this with his absence of anything following the Supreme Court ruling confirming that the term women is applies biological women. There’s been nothing. It’s been nearly a week and nothing.

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April 21, 2025

34:63 presents ‘Emotional inflation.’

In my last post I referred to Eddie Izzard as Eddie Izzard.  I’d  ‘deadnamed’ him – the notion that referring to someone by their birth name, as opposed to using a name that better suited their new identity – is as akin a ‘hate crime’ But I think I’m on safe ground here. According to his wikipedia page, he does’t much care. 

Others do, though, and that’s a problem because we now live in an age where how someone feels about something can be land one in hot water. Non-Crime Hate Incidents (NCHI’s) have been in the news recently because of the arrest last year of Daily Telegraph journalist Alison Pearson over a tweet she sent a couple of years earlier in which she mistook some British Pakistani protesters for pro-Hamas protesters and railed against ‘Jew haters’. That Pearson promptly deleted it soon after posting apparently made no difference.

Someone saw that tweet – and for reasons best known to them, waited two years before complaining to the police – and in so doing, set in motion the sort of over-reaction that I thought only happened in former Communist states. It took the combined investigative abilities of three different police forces, including one of them setting up a ‘gold group’– normally reserved for major or terrorist crimes – before concluding that no crime had taken place.

Introduced in 2014, more than 130,000 NCHI’s have been issued. And if you don’t remember a a huge debate about them raging in the press, interminable parliamentary wrangling, all manner of public protest, don’t worry. It was’t like you weren’t paying attention. There wasn’t anything to pay attention to. Because as befits something as nebulous as a NCHI, its very passage into British law is opaque at best and Kafkaesque at worst.

As a result of his inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence,  Sir William MacPherson recommended that the that Police should record both hate crimes and non-criminal “hate incidents”. Exactly how something that is a non crime somehow requires the police to get involved is beyond me. But nonetheless, the result was that without any sort of anything, eventually in 2014, the College of Policing released its Hate Crime Operational Guidance that encouraged reporting non-crime hate incidents. As far as I can make out that’s basically what happened. The police decided it would be handy thing to have should they need it and everyone just went along with it. It was only in 2023 it got any sort of parliamentary attention and that was only limited as to how NCHI’s were recorded and stored, rather than their possible effect on free speech or potential for misuse.

And the threshold for something to be classed as NCHI is worrying low. All someone has to think is that because they possess a particular characteristic – their race, religion, sexuality disability or transgender identity – and that an incident occurred occurred wholly or partially because they perceive it to have been motivated by a prejudice because of that protected characteristic, then that’s enough. Even a third party a third party, who may have just have overheard or seen what it was – as in Alison Pearsons case – can report it.

This gives rise to what I call emotional inflation, the exaggeration of harm or to be more exact, the deliberate and maliciously inflated perception of their own feelings. Someone being a bit brusque or tetchy, terse or just a bit off with you doesn’t leave you feeling irked, miffed, vexed, or slightly irritated, possibly out of sorts for a few minutes or even in a bad mood. With NCHI’s these feelings transform into being triggered, anxious, threatened, fearful, distressed, certainly at risk of self harming, possibly suicidal and many other unprovable, yet sufficiently now conditions that help reinforce victimhood and prove that something needs to be done.

But in so doing, NCHI’s help create the very problem they ostensibly seek to solve. Because as soon as you elevate how someone feels about something above some else’s right to free speech, one legitimizes subjectivity, fosters a grievance culture and allows the law ever more power to police of personal actions. Because as we’ve see over the last few years, some trans-activists have become increasingly aware of the malicious potential that NCHI’s offer and have quite deliberately sought to amplify their feelings into something warranting police intervention. 

Why the police simply don’t tell them to ‘man up’ I’m not sure, but then they’re men that want to be women, aren’t they?

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April 20, 2025

34:63 presents ‘The rules of entitlement according to Eddie Izzard.’

It strikes me that there is a really simple way in which trans – or faux – women might easily regain the rights which they believe that the Supreme Court ruling has taken away from them. All they need do is to get a woman to transfer to them all the rights they have as woman over to them and bingo. Problem solved!

Because according to the twisted logic of trans activists, not only if you were a man but said you were a woman, but also got a piece of paper confirming your delusion – a Gender Recognition Certificate – then you were a woman. It reminds me of that Eddie Izzard sketch, the one in which he suggests that Britain only got her empire because of the cunning use of flags. ‘I claim India on behalf of Queen Victoria.’ ‘ You can’t do that, there are 500 million of us, we live here! ‘But do you have a flag?’ That’s all it took. A delusion, a piece of paper and of course, people validating that delusion. Although seeing as how some of those people would be only validating that delusion because they too share it, it’s not really a valid validation, is it?

But where might one find such staunch supporters of trans rights that they’d be willing to sign over their own rights? Well, a good starting point would’ve been at the demonstration yesterday in Parliament Square by those who think that the best way to get rights is to take them from someone else. Pushing at an open door there with that lot. I mean sure, fine, sign away your own personal rights, rights that are inherently unique to you, that’s your affair, but don’t trade away someone else’s rights in pursuit of some batshit crazy notion of equality. 

And if they still couldn’t find enough women willing to do that – improbable, I know given the amount of supportive press coverage they’ve had over the years – they might ring round those journalists who wrote those pieces to see if the support was still strong. And if there was still more waivers needed, they could try university campuses where ‘no platforming’ gender critical feminists – or rationalists – was a thing for so long. The University of Sussex might be a good place to start. Students there mounted a successful campaign to to to force rationalist Kathleen Stock out her job. It did however cost the University nearly £600,000 but that’s only a detail.

If more supporters were needed I’m sure members of the Labour government would be only too happy to oblige. Take Angela Rayner, for example, who said “Transgender women’s rights are women’s rights.”That was back in 2022, but its not like a politician would ever say something in order to be seen as ‘right thinking’. Rachel Reeves, Yvette Cooper, Anneliese Dodds and Lisa Nandy have also expressed some equally pandering nonsense. The Greens would only be too happy to sign on the dotted line, given how their 2024 election manifesto fully supported trans rights. With 4 MP’s and over 800 local councillors what better time to stand up for what they claim to stand for? And what about the Scottish Greens? They were so in favour of trans rights that they pulled out of a coalition with the SNP in Scotland, bringing down the Scottish government.  

I mean, I haven’t quite worked out all the details of how such a waiver would work in practice, but hey, all humans have rights, only some humans are more deserving of rights than others.

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April 19, 2025

33:64 presents ” Not so much ‘Where’s Wally?’, but more ‘Where’s Plonker?'”

Imagine if you can, the nightmare scenario in which the Supreme Court ruled that trans-women were women. Terrifying I know, but thankfully common sense prevailed, some semblance of normality was restored to the universe and we could all breathe that much easier as as a result.

But if it had ruled that reality was nothing more than a combination of wish fulfilment, dressing up and getting others to affirm your fantasy, then Plonker would never have been off the airwaves. You think him endlessly repeating that his dad was a toolmaker throughout the election campaign was irritating? He’d be banging on about how trans women were women, and that even though women can have penises there was nothing wrong with them using women’s toilets and that to suggest otherwise was now a matter for the police to investigate and for the courts to prosecute.

To no-one’s surprise however, because the verdict was the very worst outcome for this government, Plonker has been conspicuously absent from our screens. There have been no tributes praising the long battle that women have had to fight to get here, no glowing admiration for them overcoming the death threats, the career ending abuse, the violence and cancellations they endured. No admission that he, along with the vast majority of the political elite were wrong and that the work of correcting that wrong, of undoing the procedures and policies that were eroding the rights of biological women was starting immediately.

There was only absence. Missing was any comparable response to matching that followed last summers riots in Stockport. Then the full power of the state was unleashed. Then there was an urgency. Then there was a will, and the resources needed to make that will a very visible reality, to confront the threat to our society that some localised rioting and few ill-advised tweets presented. 

Has Plonker announced that all trans women prisoners have been returned to male prisons and are now housed in high security wings for their own protection? Has anyone told the NHS that single sex wards now need to operate on the basis of biological sex and that this needs to happen as swiftly as possible? Are the police now going to record crime statistics properly so we no longer have the abomination of a ‘female rapist’ being housed in a women’s prison? Will the be a directive issued whereby all schools should enforce single sex toilets, sex based segregation of sports and usher in a return to normality and to do this before schools return after Easter? Will these and the many, many other panderings’ to a dangerous nonsense be rectified quickly?

No, because successive governments’ have effectively ceded power to a lunatic cult and now this one has no idea as to how to get it back. 

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April 18, 2025

34:63 presents “The Supreme Court ruling was outrageous”

For many reasons, the unanimous verdict of the Supreme Court that women are biological women and that trans-women are not, was outrageous. Not outrageous because of the ruling itself, but because such a ruling was needed in the first place; that notionally sensible adults needed to be told by a court something that I knew to be true when I was four. 

Its outrageous that this case need to be bought before the Supreme Court because Scottish Courts had upheld the delusion that trans women were women, and as such could be counted as such when attempting to redress sex inequality in public sector boardrooms.

There are so many parts of this trumpery moonshine that I find so outrageous that to detail them all would be exhausting. But for now, here are a couple. 

It’s outrageous the way in which the most of the broadcast media – the BBC, ITV and Channel Four – have treated the ruling as if it were a decision upon the merits of two equally valid yet opposing opinions and giving airtime to delusional men with nonsensical beliefs. The main evening news bulletins on each channel carried a piece about the ruling, the jubilant scenes outside the court before all of them seemed bizarrely fixated upon what it meant for trans women, as if they were the most affected group. Each bulletin devoted no more than fifteen minutes on it. 

There is essentially no difference between them and the newspapers of the 19th Century who defended fairy tale of creationists against the evidence of evolution. It’s also outrageous the way in which when belief in one delusion is proven to be a delusion, more delusions spring up to replace them, like a linguistic Hydra of overblown hysteria, and equally outrageous that the broadcast and print media act as enablers in legitimising such ridiculousness.

If one didn’t know any better, one might think that even as you read this marauding gangs of pitchfork wielding lesbians were rounding up chicks with dicks and sending them to extermination camps, rather than simply wanting women only spaces to be for women only. And for the rights of women not to be constantly be eroded by men, in the service of other men, who despite not wanting to be men, still expect to be treated differently to women.

Its also an outrageous notion of equality that negatively impacts the majority of the UK population at the expense of a minority of a minority. According to the 2021 census, women – the ones with vagina’s and not delusions – made up 51% of the UK population, whereas all transgender people – both trans-men and trans-women – and people who identify as non-binary made up 0.5% of it. 

Like I wrote, outrageous.

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November 30, 2024

34:63 presents “Simplifying parliamentary procedure using ‘Life of Brian'”

The juvenile in me can’t resist stating the obvious that House of Commons, in having voted to progress the assisted dying bill onto its next parliamentary stage really put the black into Black Friday. You know, because black is the colour most people associate with death, wear when mourning and at funerals. No other reason. I just felt the need to point that out, because of times we live in. I’m not sure what’s worse; either feeling that you have to explain it in case deliberately people misconstrue it for reasons of their own, or going ahead and doing it anyway, just to be on the safe side.

Anyway, the theme of this post isn’t to discuss the merits or otherwise of yesterdays vote, as long overdue as the outcome was welcome was. Its to make the rather obvious point that rather than showing parliament at its best, which seems to the prevailing opinion, pronounced upon by MP’s themselves and slavishly reported on and amplified by the media, it showed it at its worst, and as MP’s as the self-aggrandising blowhards I’ve always suspected most of them are.

Consider this. Yesterday the chamber was packed. There was barely enough standing room. The debate lasted hours. MP’s on both sides of the argument made impassioned, intelligent speeches. Lots of them admitted they had changed their minds after speaking to their constituents. Some even shared those stories. The mood was of calm solemnity, befitting the occasion. 

Now try and think back of the last time you can think of that happening. Difficult isn’t it? Those seemingly never ending Brexit votes don’t count. They were to calm and reason what death is to life. No, its only when a decision to go to war is being debated that the chamber is like it was yesterday. The one that sticks out in my mind was the debate on the eve of the Iraq war and that was in 2003!  Possibly there been a few more since, but only a handful, and a newborn baby’s hand at that.

Normally the chamber is hardly ever close to being full. Only for Prime Ministers Questions (PMQ’s) is it full and that’s only because MP’s hope that they’ll get the chance to ask the Prime Minister a question, which’ll hopefully get them on national or regional TV news and remind their constituents who they are. They can then put a clip of it on their website. PMQ’s lasts for half an hour once a week and as soon as it’s over MP’s vanish as fast as a virgin on prom night. So far from yesterdays debate showing Parliament at its best, it in fact showed what it could be, but very rarely is, the exception that proves the rule..

That’s my first problem with all this. The second concerns what happens next. Because if you only based your conclusions on TV news footage from outside Parliament as the result of the vote filtered out, you’d be forgiven for thinking that by the end of next week there’d be disabled people in wheelchairs screaming as they were being propelled by unscrupulous relatives to death centres and it would all be perfectly legal. 

The problem with a properly functioning democracy is one of its inherent flaws; that unless the electorate knows how it functions – at least have a have a basic understanding of how it all works – it isn’t a properly functioning one. Not in my book anyway.

Whilst the bill passed the second reading in Parliament yesterday, there are still loads more stages for it to go through if it is ever to become law. Many MP’s appeared on TV stressing their unease about the bill as it is currently drafted, but were at pains to point out that they’d only voted for it to progress through its many Parliamentary stages precisely because they wanted the time to scrutinise it, to suggest amendments and have more debates. The haggle scene in ‘Life Of Brian’ is the clearest example of what all this means in practice; the earliest it’ll become a law that people can make use of is early 2026 at best.

And having a right to do something doesn’t mean you’ll actually ever do it, but that if you wanted to, you could. As far as I’m concerned, the sort of people who are wilfully misinterpreting what happened yesterday in parliament are not too dissimilar to anyone who detects an ‘ist’ at the start of this post. 

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