"It's ok, Prezza did it too!"

Of course, it is difficult to tell exactly what happened here but somehow I don't think it is quite in an MP's job description to wrestle visitors to the Commons to the ground. Still, the MP concerned seems to have an interesting way of justifying his actions:

"It's always regretful to respond to provocation, but actually I think any normal person who is capable of defending themselves would have done exactly as I did.

"It happened to John Prescott a few years ago. It seems to have happened to me now."

Seriously, if your way of justifying your behaviour is to cite John fucking Prescott, you're screwed. You'd be better off saying nothing at all than likening yourself and your behaviour to that thuggish, corpulent cunt.

Whilst I was walking home tonight, past pub after pub half filled with people indulging in the Great British hobby of getting wrecked on a Thursday evening, laughing and grinning their way through the evening, it occurred to me that the easiest thing to do would be to go in and join them. To stop worrying for a while. To stop thinking for a while. To resign myself to apathy, and bury my head in the sand and not think about the country and world around me. After all, it works for other people, so why not me?

Perhaps I'm retarded in some way - I certainly feel like I have Asperger's Syndrome a lot of the time. But I just can't do it. Don't get me wrong, I go out to the pub, I enjoy myself, I live a life. But I just can't bring myself to ignore the wider world around me. I just have to open a newspaper, go online, turn on the TV and I see something else that riles me. Or something that makes me shake my head. Or something that makes me worried about where this country is going and why the increasingly bovine masses fail to see what is happening.

We live in a country fighting two wars against fundamentalists. People are still dying in far off countries, the body bags are still coming home, but the oh so vocal protests that heralded the war have now faded into oblivion - ironically they disappeared at about the same time as the reason for the Iraq War was shown to be based on a sham. Don't get me wrong, I think that if you join the army you have to entertain the possibility that you will go into conflict, and you may not come back from that. But fuck me, couldn't the vast majority of people in this country actually care when the latest kid gets his face blown off by a car bomb in Iraq or murdered by a militant in Afghanistan? Shouldn't that be slightly more of a news story than Strictly Come Dancing?

And what about the economic situation? The economy is royally fucked, and the government is blundering in every way as it tries to help. Yet Brown's nationalising, his clumsy interventions and his idiotic preening are being hailed as a shining examples of what the state can do to help. Why aren't people questioning more, and actually asking where this crisis came from? Because Gordon fucking Brown has just as much responsibility for the meltdown in the financial services sector as those reckless bankers and those careless people who took 125% mortgages.

We live in a society where the cruel murder of a baby is met with point scoring in the House of Commons. We watch mutely as our civil liberties are eroded, placidly accepting the empty rhetoric of a War on Terror that can never be won as it never existed. We let the government come and take our money, to piss away like there is no tomorrow, and we see nothing in return. Our leaders all look the same, and spout the same crass platitudes. There is no progress, just more of the same.

Sometimes I look at this country, and see a broken and muted populace that is content to muddle through, as long as the beer doesn't get too expensive, the TV still shows free form populist shite and there's a KFC at the end of the road. I despair of where this country is going, but cannot understand why the population is stood in front of the Commons, screaming for real change, and screaming for an end to the murky, incompetent consensus ruling this country but offering nothing more than what has gone before.

This is an incoherent, impotent howl of rage from someone who wonders what will happen next and fears the worst. I would love, I would love for people to wake up and start thinking about what is really happening. And then to start protesting it. I would love for people to stop trusting the state that rapes your wallet, that bickers endlessly as people die, that eats away at your freedom at the same time as sending soldiers away to die in unwinnable wars. But tonight, as I look out at this country, I wonder whether it will ever actually happen.

Maybe it is time to turn off my brain, head to the pub, then bury my head in the sand. You know what? If I could, I would. But I can't.

So whilst this endless sorry farrago of political divas and ideological vacuums rules this country through a deceptively bland but actually deeply destructive consensus, there will be one little voice of dissent shouting away here. It may not be a lot, and it may never end up achieving anything. But I'm not going to shut up, and I'm not - as tempting as it may be right here, right now - to give up. It ain't much, but it is what I have to offer.

Why NOT to be an MP.

People occasionally* ask me whether I would like to run for Parliament. Others, such as the Moai when I first got to know him, ask me when I am going to run for Parliament. And those people are often surprised when my reply is extremely fucking negative. And then they ask me why.

Well, this story, via Iain Dale, gives a good reason. The House of Commons, and the local party associations, come across as utterly odious institutions. Reading the article, you actually end up wondering why anyone would ever want to go into Parliament.

I have been involved in local politics, and have campaigned for three Tory candidates for Parliament (two actually got elected). I have seen amount of tedious campaigning and events that they have to attend to get into Parliament. I have first hand experience of the dull, self-important and back-biting people who gain positions of influence in local party associations** – those types who have to be appeased to enable selection and re-selection as a candidate for Parliament. And the whole process just leaves me cold. I would find it dull, frustrating and aggravating.

Once you get into the Commons, what great benefits do you gain? You have to keep on campaigning, keep on answering those constituency issues. But you are now part of a hard drinking, backstabbing, vicious old boy’s club – with cliques, pointless archaic rules and cripplingly anti-social hours. An old boy’s club run by bullying, self important whips.

And if your philanthropy is so strong that you still want to endure the constant headache of heading up a local party association and the odious environment of the Commons, then what, precisely, do you do to get your beliefs into policy? You need to be in a senior position in Parliament. So you need to shed everything that may be even slightly controversial, completely restrict your behaviour and interactions with others, and become a policy vacuum rather than a functioning politician or a real person.

Put simply, why would anyone want to be a politician in this country?

Along with a lot of other guff, Plato wrote in The Republic about Philosopher Kings. Now, the concept of a navel gazing philosopher as king of anything other than pontificating fills me with fear. But there is some merit in his assertion that the people who are capable of running a country are actually the people who run the country. The glaring problem with our political system is that anyone who might be vaguely capable of running the country is put off running***.

So the next time you wonder why our ruling class seems to be populated with the image obsessed ideological vacuums or the utterly inhuman then think about Fiona Jones’s tragic story and think about the hoops MPs have to jump through and the compromises they have to make to get to the top. Those who manage to claw their way to the summit of the political game are those incomplete human beings who are not capable of taking on the responsibilities they gain.

*I was going to write often. But that would make me seem big headed. And I would hate that…
**I am not saying everyone in a local party is like this, but some certainly are.
***I am not saying that I am suitable for running the country simply because I am one of the ones put off doing so. For the record, I could run the country. Just very, very badly.