No Tears for Blears

Guys, before you read this, I feel obliged to insist that however pissed off we are at our politicians, it's still hugely important to vote tomorrow. Meanwhile, though, is anyone else completely sodding disgusted with the filibustering going on down on the Westminster farm today?

In case you’ve been living in a bag eating candles, Hazel Blears and Jacqui Smith have just resigned, leaving us without two quite important cabinet ministers, with Blears giving a statement timed to do maximum damage to Brown just before Question Time today. 'Rebel' Labourites are calling for his resignation and they just might get it. Guardianistas are rubbing their hands and cackling armchair anarchy into their cappucinos whilst the government crumbles around them. Brilliant. Thanks, Hazel, that's absolutely what we needed to get us back to what's important in politics, like that grassroots unrest you keep talking about despite the fact that you wouldn't know community organisation if it jumped out of your tiny designer handbag and hit you on the head.

I'm not about to disagree with anyone who believes that Brown should be gone, and soon. Far from it. But this isn't a measured process of leadership challenge, it's not even a response to public pressure: it's a playground pile-on born of panic over the woeful expenses fiasco, and it is STUPID. It's stupid, it's so stupid and so childish and so far from what politics should be about that it even makes bits of Blair's government look good by comparison.

To explain what I mean, let's take by means of comparison another Labour resignation speech by another shamelessly goblinesque gingerite: Robin Cook. Here is the text of the speech; even as a 16-year-old with no faith in mainstream politics I remember being roused. The idea that politicians of principle could challenge their government so nobly and with such knife-twisting decorum, in protest at a military offensive which the people of Britain and the world were desperate to halt in its tracks, was exciting. It was magnificent.

It was magnificent and they went ahead and invaded Iraq anyway. They didn't listen to parliament, they didn't listen to two million people on the streets of London, they didn't listen to international opinion. They went ahead and did it anyway, to the cost of many thousands of Iraqi lives, hundreds of British lives, billions of pounds poured into the defence budget and a permanent soiling of this Labour party in government.

Labour 'rebellion' from the backbenches actually used to mean something, before it was stained with futility and disillusionment. Now, as Nick Clegg (the only person talking any sense today) declared at Question Time, 'The country doesn't have a government; it has a void'.

I'm not impressed by this 'rebellion'. I'm more impressed by the weary loyalty of Alan Johnson as he - please gods - prepares for potential leadership than I am by Blears' smirking, scruffy attempt to play rebel-without-a-cabinet-portfolio, even if she does have that very shiny motorbike. I don't think it's responsible to knock over the cabinet from within, not unless your prime minister has just declared martial law. Which Brown, for all his shambling clampdowns on Habeas Corpus, hasn't.

What depresses me is that this 'rebellion' is not a matter of principle for any of the ministers and MPs involved. It's a cowardly, schoolyard attempt to kick an unpopular prime minister when he's finally down, just like the weedier gang-running kids who yell 'we never liked him anyway!' when their school bully is dethroned, and it's come far, far too late. It's not about the politics: it's about their own jobs, a sorry attempt to cool down public and press indignation at an expenses scandal in which they are all culpable by attacking the man who, for better or worse, they chose to lead them (313 Labour MPs nominated Brown over the fantastic John McDonnell, with only 29 nominations, in 2007). I am disgusted with all of them. And what's worst of all is that they're probably doing the right thing, for the party and for the country - finally.

Sod this. I've already sent in my postal vote. I voted Lib Dem in Haringey, because they're the only party I have any respect for at all right now, since the turncoat bloody anti-science backstabbing technophobitch Greens came out against stem cell research. To hell with all of them and their terrible lying faces. I'm going to get mashed on some cheap cider and read Jean Rhys. Bye.

The blusher-brush of righteous rage!

"It is catastrophically bad for politics, but it is disproportionately catastrophically bad for us," was the verdict of one cabinet minister as he returned to his constituency in mourning to mark the week in which the last vestiges of a form of parliamentary democracy died. The initial postmortem is death by suicide - Patrick Wintour, The Guardian, 15.05.2009

Oh my, this just keeps getting bigger and bigger, doesn't it? I've been holding back on MPs' expenses, because I already laid most of it out for you guys right at the beginning when the snowball started rolling with McNulty, and because others have been saying it far better than I possibly could, including the worthy men and women at the Torygraph. But the MPs' expenses 'scandal' has now gone way beyond party politics, way beyond any individual fable of greed, curmudgeonliness and comeuppance. This public- and press response is something new. It's not just another minor yet symbolic piece of political theatre that the left-wing press are desperately trying to drum up some attention for. This rage is real, it's informed, and it's infecting everyone.

I've heard people discussing the minutiae of those Tory claims for moat maintenance at the bus-stop. I've heard muttering and kvetching over Andrew Mackay's dual-home scam whilst rummaging through the coffee-and-biscuits aisle at Sainsbury's. Yesterday I took a trip to my old stomping grounds in Brighton, and whilst I was meandering around Boots a nice lady pounced on me (steady on) and asked if I wanted my make-up done for free. She then proceeded to cheerily and somewhat absent-mindedly streak my face with pink slap whilst telling me in laborious detail about Elliot Morley MP's claim of £16,000 per year for his mortgage. 'And guess what his mortgage cost?'

I murmur my ignorance through a mouthful of alien lipstick.

'Nothing - he didn't have a mortgage!'

Upon learning that I have claims to political webcommentating, Louise (for 'twas her name) informed me that 'If you see that Mr Morley, you tell him from me never to come into this shop, unless he wants a make-up brush in his eye!'

All the parties have been quick to offer up sacrificial lambs - Shahid Malik for Labour, Andrew Mackay for the Tories. But I'm not the only one who suspects that that won't cut it, not this time, and nor will party leaders' bland, vacillating apologies. This is not a one-off gaffe. It isn't even really illegal. This has been going on for decades, over the span of countless administrations and governments, and nobody is exempt. This rage is nothing less than a reaction against the hypocrisy at the heart of our political system itself.

Not so long ago, it was an accepted fact that our political representatives would live like kings, and that our kings would live live emperors, a wide and specific hierarchial gulf between the men and women at the top of the heap and your average working stiff. Now, this week, we're questioning that. Now, this month, in this unique socio-economic atmosphere, the citizens of Britain are muttering daggers about the unfairness of it all. Muttering against hierarchy itself, as activist Tom Ogg explains in his hilarious account of doorstepping this week:

'One voter said upon seeing the rosette, "sorry, I've not got any 800 pound TVs here, no gardeners to put on expenses, and definitely no pornography". I don't get any expenses either, I reply. Do you have any problems in the area, anything we can help with, I ask? "Well," he said, "you could start by stringing up a few MPs up the lamposts". Slam.'

It's brilliant, it's invigorating, and it's slightly frightening. So instead of rehashing what everybody's saying, I'm going to ask the specific question that a lot of people are wondering. If we're this angry, this stutteringly and suddenly outraged about the unfairness of the Westminster remuneration system, when is the great and terrible finger of public opinion going to swing round to the one politician who claims more from the public purse, gratuity free and without a murmur of discontent so far, than any of the others put together? When are they going to go after the Queen? The Queen receives a great many millions from the public purse and the civil list every year. She's allowed to, but so are the politicians. She's less explicitly a public servant, but since 1649 it's been pretty damn clear that our hereditary monarchs are here on our sufferance. If anyone thought any different deep down, there's a chance that the Queen might have once, ever, in her 57 year reign, have intervened in affairs of state or expressed her personal political opinion in a public forum. Will the press go so far as to extend the dissent to the very top?

Where's it going to end? Sunny has some worthy suggestions for cleaning up politics, but the critics are right to suggest that the rage of the make-up-counter-lady on the street is more nebulous than that: most people are not sure what they want to see happen now, and you can count me amongst them in the certain knowledge that I'm not going to get my benevolent revolution of the people before teatime. But equally, the naysayers are wrong to suggest that just because public anger is vague, that means that it's not powerful. On the contrary.

Much as I hate to sound like a hacky hack hack, whatever his shortcomings, Barack Obama acheived something monumental in November, and he did it by harnessing and soundbiting and t-shirting a nation's desire for change. Sometimes, when things have got bad enough and people are frightened enough of where their leaders might take them, any change is enough. Anything, anyone, as long as they behave more decently and nobly than the old order. The mood on the streets of Britain is that same universal dissatisfaction, that same hunger for a new way of life, that allowed the remarkable to unfold across the pond.

And I think we're starting to want it here, too. We're starting to understand that something at the heart of Westminster is rotten enough that it cannot be purged by a simple game of New-Cameronite Switcheroo. I don't doubt that His Pink and Shininess will be in the hotseat by 2011, but we know, now, that there's more to it than that. The pressure is mounting in England's green and garish land; a storm's coming. And when it breaks, the left will need to be ready with answers. There's work to do.

(pic: Elliot Morley orders the veal, courtesy of The Torygraph).