Parliament ain’t working ….

 

The Nation mourns as the MSM are making certain that nobody forgets. There’s not one paper without the black banner. There’s not one commercial website which hasn’t followed suite. While I understand that charities and institutions are showing their respect whose patron our late Queen was, it escapes me why for example Amazon had a black banner this weekend. As far as I understand, our cousins across the Big Pond are not precisely enamoured of monarchies, kings and queens. 

Yesterday the Queen’s coffin was transported from Balmoral to Edinburgh. The whole journey was televised. I dipped in and out of the DT’s Live programme: watching the beautiful landscape through which the hearse and convoy travelled was evocative and sad.

However, according to irate comments below the DT’s Live programme the BBC and their commenters were beyond the pale, displaying a level of ignorance which showed that the babbling reporters were even incapable of using the ‘search’ function on their smartphones. If one doesn’t know what flag covered the coffin then surely a modern reporter knows how to look it up rather than blab, for all the world to hear, that they haven’t a clue? 

The papers this morning have only this one theme: the journey of the hearse with our Queen’s coffin. All used the photo of the coffin, carried by soldiers of the Royal Regiment of Scotland from Balmoral castle to the hearse. Still, the BBC could not resist to put ‘Russia’s Revenge Attack’ into the headline of their usual compilation of the morning papers (link), even though two papers only – the FT and the Guardian – have a secondary report on yon issue.

Meanwhile, the BBC turned into full-on ‘auntie mode’, with a ‘helpful’ article under the title “What’s a state funeral? Will shops close? And other questions” (link). Yes, that’s how dumbed-down they think their licence payers are. Obviously, Auntie believes that everybody is too stupid to use the search function of their preferred browsers, to find out for themselves. Clearly, Auntie believes that ‘Generation Smartphone’ can only digest what scrolls down their screens. That ought not to surprise us much though, given the abysmal commentary their own reporters produced yesterday.

However, there are some national news items which ought to have raised some eyebrows. After all, if some papers are so keen to provide space for yon war in the Ukraine, then surely the news that Parliament has been adjourned – not just for the days of mourning is important? In his diary today John Redwood wrote (my emphasis):

“Parliament rightly has adjourned to pay respects to our late Queen and to allow the use of the Palace of Westminster for the solemn proceedings before the funeral around the lying in state. On current plans the House of Commons will not meet again until October 17th.“ (link)

So the ‘Cost of Living Crisis’, the looming energy disaster, apparently don’t matter. After all, it’s the season of Party junkets, a.k.a. AGMs, so our overworked MPs need to balance their duties to us with their duties to their party, don’t they!

The LibDems have cancelled their Conference – it would have taken place from the 17th to the 20th of this month. The Trades Union Congress has also postponed their AGM which would have started on Sunday. The two arms of the United LabCon Party will however go ahead with their AGMs (link).

Can someone explain to me why Parliament must be adjourned until mid October when these get-togethers are only taking a few days? Obviously our MPs are not used to working. In the entry for yesterday, Sunday 11th September, John Redwood hinted at his dissatisfaction:

“Behind the closed office doors it is important that work goes on to complete the plans for the energy package and for the promised Financial Statement later this month to follow the period of mourning. Parliament should  return earlier from the planned Conference break to scrutinise and approve measures commensurate with the scale of the challenge to business and families posed by the prices of gas and electricity. Business is suffering now with no protection in place against the surges in energy prices.” (link)

Does this mean the mandarins are working? Are they preparing papers and proposals for government to present to the HoC, to be nodded through? Or is Whitehall in well-hidden turmoil because Mr Kwarteng sacked the Treasury top mandarin – on Thursday (link), a day to hide shock news? The DM published their report yesterday afternoon, after Queen Elizabeth’s coffin had arrived in Edinburgh (link), with the BBC publishing the outrage by former top mandarins a few hours later (link). Perhaps their ‘senior sources’ were unavailable as well as MPs.

What else has been taking place behind closed doors? Are our MPs being informed or are they kept in ignorance during Parliament’s adjournment? Obviously, we peasants don’t need to know, not when ministers and the PM are abusing the period of mourning, making decisions en coulisse which affect us all. 

I leave you with quotes from opinion pieces written for the weekend just past because these writers have homed in on one point: History. In The Sunday Times, Matthew Syed concluded: 

“She was for millions — republicans and monarchists, black and white, rich and poor — a rock amid the shifting sands of history, the mortar of our national life.” (link, paywalled).

 Interesting, isn’t it, how we are seen as helplessly drifting, needing ‘a rock’. Meanwhile Brendan O’Neill, also evoking History in his weekend essay in spiked-online, concluded:

“She was arguably this country’s final thread to its past. […] Post-Elizabeth, I fear we will lose our connection with the past, and I fear people have not yet clocked just how socially destructive such a development would be.” (link)

I find it extraordinary that those writers evoke History, connecting it only to the death of Queen Elizabeth. Have these clever people not noticed that, thanks to ‘education’, at least the younger generations doesn’t have a clue about History anyway? That this foundation of our Nation has been crumbling because History is now only taught according to ‘the current thing’, be it slavery, be it ‘colonialism’? That generations have been taught to despise our history and our historical figures? Have the vile comments by ‘academics’ from across the Big Pond not demonstrated this? 

The people are mourning but also showing their support to the new sovereign. It remains to be seen how soon the Westminster swamp dwellers will start trampling this national consensus into the dust, ‘educating’ us helpless peasants. Perhaps though we have understood far better than the Westminster intelligentsia that the death of our Queen means there’ll be a new monarch to support.

Is it too much to hope that the Westminster denizens stop paying lip service to our mourning and refrain from explaining to us what we should think and feel?