Sometimes things are so in front of our eyes that we fail to see them. Hidden perhaps more easily by the weariness of the British press addicted to their own peculiar opioids. The insults thrown around Parliament are neatly and repugnantly laid bare in the way people with special needs have been treated at Whorlton Hall Hospital. It fits with the UN’s special rapporteur Philip Alston, who described the shape of today’s workhouse Britain, where millions of citizens are immiserating as working poor, attending foodbanks and broken hearted over the poverty of their children. Such is the triumph of austerity, neatly promoted by our supplicant press, that we as readers pass by on the other side. The way our country operates, our parliamentary democracy, is not fit for purpose. This house of insult, as parliament is bemusedly called by its own staff, should be unveiled as a revolting place where people who are self-serving and greedy disrespect the few troubadours of truth among their number.
The system is at fault. It attracts the murderous, devious and avaricious. It rewards lick spittle’s and puling ladder climbers: those apologists of empire and loquacious laziness who will cast any insult if you pay them. It makes bold the cowardly back room boys who think the history of our world is the cannon of war. It’s time to change the story-line.
We should recognise that the history of war is primarily the holocaust of innocents and that most people caught in its clutches were unfortunates, dupes or sadists. We should understand that aside from those mad with violence, the major system fault is our acceptance of the insatiable acquisition of material advantage over others: namely greed. This greed produces monsters who tumble for words to eulogise their own polished turds.
If we create institutions like Whorlton Hall and Parliament, then we prolong our misery and trumpet our own extinction.
Democracy will renew itself by making the people sovereign, by giving six year olds the vote, by understanding our nature is intrinsically good when we find the means and methods to allow its flourishing. And we will do this when we intelligently distribute resources and ensure students and citizens enjoy their education, understand that public and private should be for the greater good and leave behind this “carceral mentality” that is so keen on debt and punishment and stamping out joy. A plague on both your houses: parliament and Whorlton Hall. We are looking forward to the time when we can breathe clean air again while walking on our dales and swimming once more in clear plastic free seas.