I really must stop starting my morning paper-reading with the Guardian, if only for the sake of my health. I was already feeling a bit nauseous and then I read this gobmackingly crass opinion piece from Joan Smith:
I am sick of my country and this hysteria over MPs
Until now, I have not written a word on this subject.
She had my back up right there. Joan Smith? Who she? How very gracious of her to address us..
Smith‘s a fully-paid up member of the metropolitan politicoliterati. A journalist, dramatist and detective novelist, formerly married to Eustonite and Marx’ biographer Francis Wheen, she’s now the partner of the ex-BBC journo and NUJ activist, Labour MP Dennis McShane.
That would be the Dennis McShane MP who claimed 20 grand a year for the cost of running an office conveniently located at home – in his garage in this scruffy suburban semi?
I’m sure it was all legit, but was it in the spirit of the rules? Who knows:
…one fellow Labour MP privately said he was ‘very surprised’ at the scale of Mr MacShane’s claims given that he does not have to pay to rent an office. ‘I pay £6,000 a year in rent so if he doesn’t have to pay that, it sounds like a lot of money,’ said the MP.
This Denis McShane:
Voted moderately against a transparent Parliament.
Voted moderately for introducing a smoking ban.
Voted strongly for introducing ID cards.
Voted very strongly for introducing foundation hospitals.
Voted strongly for introducing student top-up fees.
Voted strongly for Labour’s anti-terrorism laws.
Voted very strongly for the Iraq war.
Voted very strongly against an investigation into the Iraq war.
McShane’s right there in the vanguard of the New Labour, do as we say, not as we do, war-criminal brigade. Obviously Smith has her own opinions but presumably, as partners, Smith and McShane are sympatico on many things. So we could surmise where she’s coming from, even if she hadn’t already damned herself with her own words:
In this uniquely poisonous atmosphere, years of conscientious public service count for nothing; decent people are being terrorised out of public life and the perverse consequence is likely to be their replacement by a motley collection of minor celebrities, attention-seekers and outright fascists. Democracy itself is under threat, not because a handful of MPs have behaved greedily but because the public reaction has been (and continues to be) hysterical
An hysterical public that can’t be trusted to vote, obviously. Smith says that we, that’s you, me and J. Arthur Blokeuptheroad, are violent, sanctimonious automatons being manipulated by the press. Probably not untrue in certain cases. But when you’re addressing Guardian readers, accusations like that don’t go down very well. It gets worse when she invites us to compare MPs and their expenses to 9/11:
Being “monstered” may mean that you have to leave home for a few days and put up with being the butt of jokes in pubs. Some bounce back or rehabilitate themselves through tragedy, as Goody did when she discovered she had terminal cancer. But when the target is our elected representatives, most of whom have not done anything terrible, the consequences are grave. The sense that we are in the midst of a crisis has been stoked by banner headlines – it is as if 9/11 has happened every single day for the last two and a half weeks…
The coverage and vilification MPs are getting because of their own actions is a tragedy comparable to death from cancer or the news coverage resulting from 3,000 deaths a day for 19 days, she says. There’s spin for you. You understand my nausea.
True to her apparent Labour leaning Smith is not only blind to the moral nuances of life she’s hard of political hearing too :
…one of the weirdest aspects of the witch-hunt (for that is what it is) is that I haven’t heard anyone accuse the vast majority of MPs of doing their jobs badly.
Oh no? HELLO!
There’s a couple of million complaints right there. The public’s been forcefed a lot of crap for a long time by their supposed representatives and corruption’s the waffer-theen mint that’s made them justifiably explode as they have done at Smith in comments.
Lots of people have benefited from the MPs allowances, however indirectly; all she’s doing is using her privileged media platform to whinge ‘you’re all horrible and I hate you’ because she, like many others, sees her cosy life threatened. Fallout from the expenses scandal is inevitable. There is bound to be. Even though some of it may be misplaced, as long as it happens to people like Joan Smith I shan’t be bothered.
