Monday Moan 51

Bring me sunshine

This week sees the long-awaited visit of the Ecuadorean Minister to the UK in order to ‘discuss’ with the British Government what to do with the alleged whistle-blower and sexual offender Julian Assange (See Moan 49).
 

 

Apparently, the Ecuadorean Minister will be asking the British Government to allow Assange to sunbathe and enjoy the warm weather and sunshine because apparently, he hasn't been able to do so for a year.

 

Now I don’t know if this story is true, but I hope it is.  The absurdity of the whole affair would be summarised by a Government Minister travelling 17,000 km to make a serious claim like this.  My mind is now picturing the androgynous and albino-like figure of Assange being given an armed escort to lie on the grass in Green Park in order to get a bit of a tan.

 

But quite why this self-confessed law-breaker should be allowed to see the sun when most of us in the UK are still searching for it ourselves in this most miserable of summers  is beyond me. He and his Ecuadorean minders will have to be quick to spot the day when there is enough sunshine to warrant getting out the sun lotion.

 

 

Scandal in every action

The British press wants to be taken seriously. It wants us all to believe that it is engaged in investigations into matters of real importance – that it is the defender of our freedoms and interests.

 

Really?  Then it will have to do better than its renewed obsession with ‘scandal’ in every action of our politicians. 

 

Following the ‘revelations’ about the House of Commons Energy Committee’s Chairman Tim Yeo, which forced him to step-aside whilst his actions were investigated (see Moan 50), his deputy Sir Robert Smith stepped into the spotlight.  Bad luck for him.

 

In a piece designed to make something out of nothing, he found himself the subject of a typical Daily Mail piece which ‘revealed’ that he held some shares in Shell and had received some hospitality from BP.

 

Throwing into the report words and phrases such as ‘scandal-hit committee’, ‘potential conflicts of interest’ and that staple of nonsense reporting – ‘sleaze’, you might have imagined that this was a damaging revelation of secret information that had been withheld from the public until the Daily Mail stepped in to save us all.

 

But no, the article then acknowledged that all this activity had been fully declared in the register of interests, as required by Parliamentary rules, and that “there is no suggestion of any wrongdoing”. Which begs the question – why write this article in the first place?

 

Get a sense of proportion, please.

 

 

 

Questioning time

I usually avoid watching Question Time these days because it so often simply allows politicians to parade their well-rehearsed views, with no pretence of being open to consider alternative viewpoints or engaging in serious debate.  However, for some reason I failed to move quickly enough to switch channels this week and so caught an extract of the programme from Edinburgh.

 

What a scary programme it was.  The audience contained only 16 and 17-year olds, looking for all the world like a crack team of Sandmen from the film Logan’sRun .  It must be that I am getting old, but they seemed remarkably self-assured, articulate and passionate in whatever they said – unlike many a Question Time audience I have seen in the past.

 

And then we had Angus Robertson, SNP leader in the House of Commons.  I didn’t see the whole programme, so I don’t know if he was carrying the full Scottish chip on his shoulder or just a portion of it, but he was gratifyingly surly and full of the anger and resentment of the caricature downtrodden-Scot in the small section I saw. 

 

 

If the SNP really want independence then they have missed a trick by not campaigning for the whole of the UK to be given a vote on the subject. A few weeks of Angus and those like him would have the rest of the UK voting almost unanimously to cut the tie-line and wave goodbye.

 

 

All in a day's work

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