Apathy

I have felt apathetic over the past week. There is only so much railing and protesting one can do over the EU. In fact the following, which is taken from a blog by Gerald Warner at the onlne version of the Daily Telegraph, pretty well sums up what I am thinking right now:

I don’t know about you, but I am pretty close to breaking point. What is the maximum dosage of Valium that can safely be
taken? The 10-horse race for the Speaker’s chair caused a tsunami of feverish apathy to sweep over the nation. Like the
rest of the country, I find the outcome is something about which I am passionately indifferent.
Professional comedians will be concerned, however, by the competition posed by so many old lags from the slime-green
benches, while affecting a self-deprecatory mien, giving free range to their narcissism, self regard, ambition and
pomposity. John Bercow, while trying to convey the impression he was not speaking from notes, looked like Barack Obama
operating from a malfunctioning auto-cue. Now that he has won he will be able to stop pretending he is a Conservative –
unlike Dave, who will have to keep on pretending indefinitely.
This earth-shattering contest is being proclaimed (by the scoundrels on the slime-green benches) as the renaissance of
the House of Commons. Let us hope that is as untrue as everything else they tell us. A renascent House of Commons would
be the worst possible news for Britain: a decaying, moribund, marginalised Commons would be infinitely preferable. No
other institution has contributed comparably to the country’s decline.
This chamber was brought out of well-deserved obscurity to rubber-stamp the theft of Church lands by Henry VIII, creating
centuries of poverty-stricken criminality. By 1649 the pygmies had grown big enough to murder the King; in 1688 they
brought in a foreign usurper to rule over Britain; thereafter, enclosures of common land were their chief preoccupation.
The latest generation of MPs has faithfully continued the traditions of rapacious self-interest, money-grubbing at public
expense and arbitrary exercise of unreasonable power established by its predecessors.
The new European parliament, which represents all the worst features of Westminster on a much larger scale, will begin
from this year to take over Westminster’s remaining powers. We should close down the gothic slum on the Thames and try
its denizens for treason worse than that committed by anybody hanged at Tyburn. The present state of Britain suggests the
epitaph of Sir Christopher Wren is also an appropriate panegyric for this dead legislature: si monumentum requiris,
circumspice.
As for the tired hype of the Speaker’s election being promoted by the media, you can hear the public response if you
listen to the pulse of the nation behind the pseudo-excitement: Zzzzz…