An Open Letter To Conservative MPs

 

Dear Conservative MPs, 

Allegations are coming in from a multitude of sources that (no, don’t worry - it’s not another sex scandal!) some of you have been texting each other with comments about the government which suggest that you don’t enjoy watching them torch the country any more than those of us who’ve had to decimate our grocery shopping and daren’t switch the heating on do. 

If that’s true, here’s a way that you can find a place in the history books for helping to save the country from the Government of Zero Talents, instead of being its enablers. 

Make no mistake about it - you are going down in history as one of those two things, so why not choose the selfless one? 

Here’s all you have to do. 

1. Start a WhatsApp group (and we all know that you’re familiar with those!), or join one you’re invited to. 

2. Do not invite any member of the Government Front Bench. There’s no point. They’re complicit in what’s going on. They have to be, or they’d have spoken out by now. 

3. Invite your friends to join, and ask them to invite theirs. The only qualification is that they have at least some semblance of a backbone. 

4. Say publicly that Parliament should be recalled. It’s hardly an unreasonable suggestion when the country’s pension funds were only saved from total wipeout as a direct result of the Government’s own policy by the desperate intervention of the Bank of England, is it? A letter to the PM signed by all of you would be ideal. 

5. When Parliament finally does meet (and I’m assuming that after all this time MPs can still find the Debating Chamber), there are two steps you can take. If the mini-Budget is debated, vote against it. If it’s not, call for a Confidence Vote, then vote against the Government. If you want to make it really dramatic, cross the floor. You don’t need join another party if you don’t want to. Just declare yourself an Independent. 

The beauty of it is that if you co-ordinate your efforts there’s not a lot the Government can do about it. They can’t pick you off one by one. It’s what trade union members might describe as solidarity. 

Yes, you’re going to risk your job, but distancing yourself from the incompetent dogmatists in charge just now may save you at the next election. Otherwise, unless your constituents are mainly millionaires, you could be out for good. 

And with pundits talking last night about a potential Conservative extinction event, I’d suggest your job’s in jeopardy already. 

But I’m going to give you credit for some altruism, and hope it’s even more important to you that you’ll help to save the country. 

Sincerely,

Alix Chaytor. 

A Sense Of Hope Renewed

An exciting sense of change hangs in the air. The Labour Party Conference has voted for a change in the voting system from First Past The Post, which managed to land us with an authoritarian right-wing government with a landslide majority of seats despite getting a paltry 43.6% of the vote. You can call that situation lots of things. Democracy would not be one of them. 

The Liberal Democrats and the Greens already support the alternative, Proportional Representation. In fact, the Tories are the only mainstream party left in England that doesn’t! You don’t think that could be because under PR with 43.6% of the vote they wouldn’t be in power, do you? Because if you do, you’re not alone! 

In itself, of course, it’s far from a sign of hope that recently-appointed Prime Minister Liz Truss is already running neck and neck with Boris Johnson for the title of the worst UK PM ever. 

What is a good sign, though, is that it hasn’t taken people long to see through her. She might have looked much more presentable at Westminster Abbey than her predecessor (and at least she didn’t get sent back by officials for trying to claim more precedence than she was entitled to!), but with the able assistance of her Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, she’s already managed to tank the economy so badly that the country’s pension funds were within hours of going bankrupt. 

This would probably have won her the Worst PM title outright, but mercifully for the rest of the country the Bank of England stepped in with emergency support in time to stop it happening. 

Another sign of hope in this mess is that despite her refusal to recall Parliament to allow this disastrous attempt at a mini-Budget to be debated, local radio came to the country’s rescue, and a number of broadcasters were granted five minutes each to question her. As one listener put it on Twitter afterwards, he’d never known anyone be involved in eight car crashes in one morning before. I’ll post links to the interviews. I think you’ll like them. 

A repeatedly-trending Twitter hashtag says it all. 

#EnoughIsEnough 

We have been patient long enough. 

We have accepted being lied to. 

We have accepted broken promises. 

We have accepted price hikes. 

We have accepted empty supermarket shelves. 

We have accepted seeing queues at food banks, and people in work not having the money to feed and clothe their families. 

We have accepted the NHS being so disastrously under-funded that it’s very clear the plan’s to sell it off and let a US-style commercial insurance model bankrupt anyone unfortunate enough to have an accident or fall sick. 

But we’ve had enough. 

We’re no longer going to stand for being told that if someone’s job’s not paying well enough to let them heat their homes they ought to get a better-paying one (who on earth would stay in that situation if they could do that? And what chance have you on a zero-hours contract? Or if you’ve been fired and rehired at a lower rate of pay for longer hours?). 

We won’t accept that anyone’s entitlement to run a business profitably in this country should depend on whether they belong to a WhatsApp group shared by the Tory élite. 

We’re not accepting being told that tax cuts for the rich and trickle-down economics will benefit the rest of us. Of course they won’t. If Margaret Thatcher couldn’t make that work, how on earth can this lot? 

And even if they could, why should the “many” be expected to content ourselves with just a trickle, while the “few” hang on to the entire reservoir? 

Hope is stirring in the air. People are demanding a recall of Parliament and a General Election. Now. 

For the first time, according to a poll that came out yesterday, 56% of voters want to see some form of Proportional Representation, which will no longer enable a minority share of the vote to triumph over a larger but divided opposition. And for good measure, another poll shows that even without PR there’d be what commentators are describing as a Conservative extinction event if an election were to be held soon! 

The scale of that may well be just a temporary reaction, of course, but it’s the first time it’s happened to any party in this country, so we’re already in uncharted waters. And it seems that no-one trusts this government to navigate them.

So, after years of despair and dread, there are signs of hope. And that’s what this blog’s about, and why it has the name it does. It’s taken from Emily Dickinson’s lovely poem which begins, “Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul.” 

At long, long last, that bird’s song is rising above the clamour of a government that’s treated us too cruelly for far too long. 

And we have hope.