WORD is that, after a very long hiatus away from our screens, the Benny Hill Show is coming back.
You’d better not tell Tory MP Caroline Nokes, who last week dredged up a decidedly Benny-Hill-like incident from all of 17 years ago, claiming that Stanley Johnson, father of Boris, touched her inappropriately and made lewd remarks about her derrière. Not to be outdone, Labour feminista Stella Creasy demanded to take her baby into the House of Commons. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-59396801 Most workplaces would rightly give such an idea very short shrift, but Parliament duly promised to review the rules.
Respect towards and security of women is of course a serious matter, so it would be interesting to know what Nokes, Creasy and their sisters have to say about other such incidents. For instance, days before Nokes made her complaint, a thankfully unsuccessful attack at Liverpool Women’s hospital occurred that could have seen women and babies hideously shredded had it been successful. Then we could move on to the incident in Bury where a Muslim woman was found burning to death in the street. Presumably spontaneous combustion is an unusually common form of death in that part of the world, because since then MPs (and the media) seem to have nothing more to say on the matter. We should not forget, of course, the tens of thousands of working-class girls who were groomed by mainly Pakistani Muslim gangs. Except that we do – ancient history, after all. Perhaps if the girls had just had their bums slapped by their molesters, middle-class female MPs would take it more seriously.
To those outside the bubble, the Religion of Peace and the viciously misogynistic, homophobic and freedom-hating subcultures it spawns is perhaps the most existential threat the West faces today. Of course, most Muslims are not to blame for the excesses of Islam, but the fact is that whatever rights we have on paper, they are now shrinking – especially if you are a woman or openly gay – as our demography rapidly changes and nothing serious is done to slow immigration, whether legal or illegal. Talking about these issues is difficult and dangerous, but that is what we pay our representatives to do, after all.
It’s not just Islam. On issue after issue, Parliament has proved itself a fundamentally trivial institution. MPs couldn’t even be bothered to have a formal vote when the Coronavirus Act was extended to March 2022. Even when they do debate the elite-approved big-ticket items, the range of that debate is narrow, as the near-universal support for the lunatic ‘Net Zero’ shows. Mostly, though, it sins by omission: aside from Islam and coronavirus, there is a long and growing list of areas it would rather not touch – immigration, waning demography, family breakdown, long-term secular economic stagnation to name but four. You’ll find plenty of intelligent commentary on these and other first-order issues on the Internet, but precious little from our MPs.
The game was really up in the aftermath of the 2016 Referendum on the European Union – so arrogant, mediocre and cut off from reality are Parliament’s ‘honourable members’ that they could not see that they were drinking in the last-chance saloon, that what was really being decided was not just Brexit but the long-term fate of the Parliament itself. The institution tried to destroy Brexit and destroyed its own moral authority in the process, and there is no going back. Since then, it has slipped into even greater collective denial, wilfully absenting itself from debates on fundamental matters, engaging instead in ever more arcane, usually Woke, displacement activities. Meanwhile, our dazed and confused Prime Minister waffles on about Peppa Pig.
Subconsciously, I think, a great many people sense that Parliament’s role as the cockpit of democracy has already passed into history: note how so many people on the political Right almost instinctively clamoured for a referendum on Net Zero – the first time ever to my knowledge this had occurred on a non-constitutional issue – rather than demanded a better standard of debate from their representatives. It won’t stop now.
Of course, Parliament itself is entirely unaware of its fate: like some great beast shot with a powerful neurotoxin, it lumbers on pathetically, but it is already dead – it just doesn’t know it yet.
