The government relaunched it’s fabulously exciting and with-it “e-petition” initiative in late July. This is the political equivalent of those recorded messages you get when you phone a company which has screwed you over in some way: “Thank you for your patience. Your call is important to us.”
Instead of the government of the day doing anything they promised to do, they allow voters to post a petition online. Those which receive over 100,000 votes might be selected for debate in the House of Commons.
Wow! Thanks! Just like The X-Factor. Or something. I’m sorry I ever suspected I was living in a pseudo-democracy run by unaccountable bureaucrats in Brussells. Now I know better. Dave and Nick and Ed really care what I think after all.
Well, fair enough. It isn’t an entirely politicised subject (even though right-wing males tend to be overwhelmingly in favour). I know several staunch Conservatives who are opposed for a variety of reasons. I’m not going to bother arguing the case today – you’ll have made up your mind long ago, no doubt – but I will point out that it’s in the interest of left-liberals everywhere to militate for its restoration. Not because it will gain them votes (although it would) but because it would give them endless opportunities afterwards to do all the things that give their life meaning.
1. It would allow them to misapply the words “barbaric” and “obscene” to their heart’s content.
2. They could hold candlelit, photo-op vigils outside grim Victorian prisons, their faces shining with self-righteous anger and compassion.
3. It would furnish television documentary makers with exciting, BAFTA-winning projects for years to come – including (a) heart-rending accounts of how our bourgeois, capitalist society turned essentially harmless psychopaths into killers, and (b) searing exposés of the terrible shock and loss suffered by the families and friends of the murderers (unless, of course, the murderer happens to have inadvertently slaughtered his nearest and dearest).
4. Any number of unemployable narcissists could abandon their families and set up squalid “Say No to Death” camps in tourist sites around the capital and appear on TV news a lot and get their photos in the papers being visited by the likes Tony Benn, Ed Miliband and Ken Livingstone.
5. It would bring Britain into line with the sort of extremist Islamist tyrannies the educated urban left absolutely adore, and allow liberals to attack their own country – “What gives us the right to condemn (fill in name of brutal dictatorship) for stoning to death female adulterers and gays, when we are capable of condemning to death a man just because his alternative lifestyle involves torturing and killing children?”
6. It would allow a host of smug tossers to drag out – yet again – Ghandi’s response to the question “What do you think of Western civilisation?”
7. It would allow the whole of liberal Europe to unite in condemnation of Britain in a way it hasn’t been able to since Mrs Thatcher was PM.
8. It would allow liberals to create yet another mascot group of thoroughly undeserving pseudo-victims, while displaying breathtaking callousness towards the feelings of the families and friends of the genuine victims.
9. It would allow Nick Clegg to get himself out of a terrible hole by flouncing out of the Coalition in a state of high moral dudgeon (of the supporters of the three main parties, Lib Dems are inevitably the most opposed).
10. It would allow the Today Programme to ask Tory ministers “How does it feel to be a murderer?” It would also allow its editors to fill at least half of its running order with a single subject for months on end, thus replacing “The Cuts”, with which everyone’s getting bored.
11. It would allow hundreds of thousands of students and public sector employees to bunk off work in order to disrupt the lives of those who actually work for a living.
12. It would provide myriad opportunities for attacking America in general and Republicans in particular.
Go on, you lefties – what are you waiting for?
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