Round Fourteen – Flogging a dead horse
Every week I write about PMQs and I set out the questions asked and the answers (if there are any) given.
This week I want to do this differently because I can’t continue regurgitating the same verbal diarrhea and I don’t know how the PM manages to do it every week without throwing up in her mouth a little bit.
Once again Jeremy Corbyn asked our Prime Minister questions regarding Brexit and once again our Prime Minister, the Leader of the Government avoided, deflected and mocked each and every question.
Anyone that reads my work will be aware I am supportive of a Jeremy Corbyn led Labour Party but that I remain balanced in my approach and base anything I write on factual information that I can use to back up my position.
This week I’m disappointed in Jeremy Corbyn… Not because he isn’t doing his job right or even well but because Theresa May is not doing her job right and he above all knows that. He goes into PMQs every week and asks the PM the questions that the nation wants to know, be it Brexit, poverty, fair working conditions, housing, NHS, Windrush, Grenfell et al. The insult is that our Prime Minister stands at the dispatch box every week and mocks every one of the United Kingdom citizens by not answering.
It is an insult to the nation that on one of the only chances that we can hear the answers that matter to us, the taxpayers and the voters, she laughs at the injustices raised, mocks the suffering and deflects the blame.
The conclusion is she is massively ignorant or massively callous, either way, it makes her a poor leader.
This week instead of asking questions that Jeremy Corbyn knew would not be answered he should have led with the questions that would show her and her Government’s incompetence the most. To his credit, he did briefly mention the Seabourne Freight fiasco but he did not pose it as a question merely stated that millions of public money had been given to a shipping firm with no ships, on a route that doesn’t exist. He should have been asking why the publics money was being wasted on a firm with no ships and only a paltry £66 in their company bank account and that further money had been given to foreign ferry providers instead of supporting British jobs and businesses?
He should have highlighted the farce of paying for an 89 lorry traffic jam training day yesterday in preparation of no deal. when 10,000 lorries cross into the UK through Dover from the EU every day, 89 lorries will be a walk in the park to the reality of what a no deal Brexit represents. With a PM that is intent on running down the clock with a sub-par deal and the threat of voting for that sub-par deal or no deal is an absolute mockery.
To be fair to Jeremy Corbyn, if he had not asked the questions regarding Brexit this week, the press would have trashed him as incompetent despite the fact that every week he attempts to highlight the injustices and important issues that face this country, but every week his attempts fall on uncaring ears. Even as he spoke about safe spaces for all political debate, the Government benches heckled and shouted him down with insults and abuse. This is the obscene mockery that is our democratic system in full swing. It has become a joke on repeat that isn’t funny and no one is laughing except the same people telling the joke.
This should anger everyone, left, centre, right-leaning or even the apathetic that don’t have a political leaning at all. The job of the opposition is to hold the Government to account and ask the questions that matter to ensure the country is being run efficiently. If he is being undermined then that affects the whole nation. Whether you like Jeremy Corbyn or not, doesn’t matter. He stands at the dispatch box every week and he does his job, when he is questioned by the media, he answers the question, he is doing what he is supposed to do. This is our democracy that is being undermined. We are the ones affected by every policy, law and decision implemented in Parliament. We are the guinea pigs they test on daily and everything they do affects our lives.
Nearly a decade of austerity has perhaps been the cruelest of experiments on us test subjects in a lifetime. Even those that once had comfortable lives are feeling the strain and the Government deflects and pushes the blame on everybody but themselves. Yet whilst we are backed in corners, finding times tougher the rich have become richer and no one is demanding why the majority of a population are suffering whilst the rich seem to be toasting to our misery, their offshore bank accounts continuing to bulge.
Our press seems to be complicit in this they don’t challenge our Government or ask the tough questions. The number of apathetic people I speak to that say MPs are all the same, nothing changes… You are the reason that nothing changes.
You vote for these people and you have the power to make them change their ways. You have to start listening and taking notice, write to them and point out how they are failing you, their voters. The press won’t do it when it does occasionally happen, we all applaud it and say this is how it should be done but then it is all forgotten and the status quo continues. Why is the press not challenging the Government officials when they avoid answering direct questions?
We should keep repeating the same question until we get an answer this is so important, how can we have a democracy when we are blindly just accepting that these people will speak for us when they won’t even give a straight answer to our questions? No matter whose mouth those questions come from we want to know the answer and it is right that whatever we feel about politics we deserve to have the answers. The avoidance and deflection just show contempt for all of us by the very members of our society that are supposedly there to serve us.
My disappointment in the Labour leader isn’t fair because he is doing all he can and I can see that. Its a disappointment in the system that allows this to continue week in and week out. A disappointment that not more people see this happening every week and question the system and our Government on why this is allowed? A nation that seems to passively accept that this is just how it is and we just have to get on with it the best we can. This stance is just so very British but perhaps we should be looking at our European neighbours and taking a leaf out of their book because as Jeremy says we are the many and they are the few.
We have the real power and when a system is so terribly broken and so terribly corrupt we need to take that power and show those who abuse power who it is they are supposed to be representing.
