Disastrous farce of politics today

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BRIAN ADCOCK, The Independent


ALAN FRAME despairs of Britain’s feeble and incompetent Government and yearns for the politics of old

Has politics in the UK ever been so broken? This is not a Daily Mail headline-type question to which there is never an answer. The answer is an emphatic No. 

Consider this: The Government is led by a woman who is clearly incompetent and is now in such a hole that she cannot sack members of the Cabinet even more hopeless than her. Why else are Chris Grayling, Gavin Williamson and Karen Bradley still employed? 

Failing Grayling (never was a moniker so justified) has cost us an estimated £600 million with his ‘reforms’ when Justice Secretary and the couldn’t-make-it-up deal with a ferry company that had no ships and whose contractual small print was cut and pasted from its local Chinese takeaway.

Private Pike Williamson, the former fireplace salesman permanently on manoeuvres had such a nice line in gunboat diplomacy that the Chinese cancelled what might have been much-needed lucrative trade talks with Philip Hammond.

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As for Bradley, pictured right, she is so out of her depth as Northern Ireland Secretary (or indeed any job I suspect), that she had to admit that she had no idea why Nationalists and Republicans didn’t vote Unionist. 

Now she has really has taken the whole bumper-size tin of biscuits by saying that all killings by the police and Army during the Troubles were done in a ‘dignified and appropriate way’ and were not crimes. Not just offensive to the families of those unarmed men killed on Bloody Sunday but seemingly pre-judging verdicts in several cases still ongoing. And for which a sub-editor would have lost his job had he let that through.

Brexit has been a disastrous farce, the Cabinet is at war with itself over knife crime instead of addressing this appalling problem and the only member of it you wouldn’t mind lunching with is that old ham Geoffrey Cox, the Donald Sinden-soundalike Attorney General. 

Where are the Thatchers, Heseltines, Hailshams, Whitelaws, Hurds and Clarkes? Good God, I’d even settle for a Portillo… 

And then there is Labour who should be 20 points clear in the polls were it not for the fact that they are unelectable. And bordering on evil. Mad Marxist anti-Semites, faceless career politicians, all  sociology degrees and compulsory Mancunian accents. 

Advisors like the odious teenager Owen Jones and the sinister Seamus Milne. And the star turn…I give you the innumerate and simpering Diane Abbott. This week Amber Rudd was saying —  sympathetically — how appalling it was that Abbott had been subjected to so much abuse. During the interview she spoke of the shadow home secretary as ‘coloured’, whereupon Abbott erupted that the choice of the word is ‘outdated, offensive and revealing’. 

Your question for a million pounds: Why is ‘coloured woman’ offensive and ‘woman of colour’ absolutely fine? I don’t know Jeremy, I’ll take the £500,000 please, final answer.

Come back Clem Attlee, Harold Wilson, Richard Crossman, Jack Straw, Barbara Castle, Shirley Williams and John Smith. Your country has never needed you so much. 


    

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