by John Ward
Rosie Winterton (above) is a Commons Deputy Speaker, and a member of the Labour Party. She is also a smug idiot who thinks that renewing the Coronavirus rule by decree laws without even bothering to have a vote is a subject for amusement. She’s snapped here from yesterday’s Coronavirus Laws Extension Debate giggling about the handful of MPs shouting “No” noisily in asking for a formal vote.
I have two very close friends who attended the protest meeting outside. It’s probably a good job they couldn’t see and hear the disgraceful performance of puerile compliance going on in the Chamber: otherwise, there might have been a riot. A simple motion giving consent to the continued use of the rules was passed without a formal vote after being overwhelmingly supported by MPs in the Chamber. The ‘Noes’ were very few, but noisy. Our Rosie thought this was hilarious, eventually drawling, “Nice try chaps, but the House is not minded to divide on the issue”.
Thus does liberal democracy die not with a bang, but with a whimper. It’s an odd world in which an MP with Winterton’s track-record of troughing gets voted into a Parliamentary position of such (supposedly) crucial objectivity and sound ethics. During the 2009 MPs’ expenses scandal, she had a history that was not so much illustrious as illustrative: £4,690 for “soundproofing of bedroom wall and redecoration to bedroom, bathroom, living room, kitchen, staircase” in February 2007; £2,574 for installing a new television aerial and work on the front and back of the house; £550 at the same time to repair a leak from a lavatory; a landscape gardener’s invoice included decking, 38 bags of gravel and deluxe trellis, £1,700; £298 for linen and curtains from House of Fraser and £96 for towels, as well as £750 a month for mortgage interest.
All up, over four years, she claimed £86,277. Had she been allowed to continue her behaviour at that rate until today, she would’ve cleared around £330,000 of tax-free lifestyle cost reduction…because MPs don’t pay BIK tax. That’s more than most Brits’ post tax take-home pay over such a period.
So people, join the dots about how we got to here…a world in which mendacious, delusionally superior and wannabe privileged hypocrites keep their heads firmly below the parapet while their constituents are being blackmailed into taking poison.
But don’t smear every MP with the same handful of ordures: go to the ever-informative site They work for you (shame about the illusion) and hear the words of The Few….just as brave in their own ways as the 1940 RAF pilots.
David Davis, John Redwood, Richard Fuller, Graham Brady (better late than never), Peter Bone, Andrew Murrison and Desmond Swayne all emerge well from the debate. All of them are Conservatives.
Those simply there to score points on behalf of the Johnson clique, Labour and the SNP included Sajid Javid, Mark Harper, Dawn Butler, Kim Johnson (no relation), Jon Ashworth and of course all the Left heavyweights who simply didn’t turn up. As Stalin remarked, “History is made by those who turn up”. Labour’s bigwigs turned up their toes some time ago: the Party’s Executive is Vichy through and through.
Meanwhile, here’s some first-hand eye-witness reporting about some of those outside risking everything because the legislators dontGAF.
“There was was a 30-year veteran of the emergency services” said one, “a paramedic, whose experience over the last two years duplicates the “Awake Undertaker”: shockingly little death for an “emergency pandemic” last year, where March-April were normally busy, but after May absolutely nothing going on in the hospitals. Then this year growing numbers of odd ailments: heart problems, strokes, lots of weird thrombocytopenia where blood clots in brain happen simultaneous with inability to clot bleedouts elsewhere in the body, resurgent cancers and autoimmune problems that had been in remission. He had just dealt with a 14 yr old girl collapsed with myocarditis, after the jab, of course. He asked if many of her classmates had got the jab “Yes, all of them” she replied. And he confirmed that myocarditis is a permanent condition. He was incredibly interesting.
“He said the emergency services system’s call-outs went from circa 3500 per day to 8400 per day of late. He sees it as fully vaccine-driven and is despairing that colleagues, police, doctors, etc, aren’t registering it. Doctors don’t even know what the Yellow Card system is”.
“It wasn’t a great turn-out” said another, “There was little or no organisation. A few well-meaning people, but nothing at the level we’re seeing in France and Italy. I thought it was all rather Amateur Night. Then lots of police thugs in their fortress vans, ee-awing in all directions in the hope of God Knows what. I left the scene quite soon. I felt a sense of desolation yesterday evening”.
All of this is a learning process for The Resistance. Turning out en masse is a counter-intuitive activity for most of the 1in8, who tend to be mavericks by nature. Equally, the antics inside the Palace of Westminster make it clear that the collective spine therein has been severely damaged by an addiction to the gravy train.
It’s a hitech world out there. Many people in that profession are far from being the majority of blind-eye turners. It’s time to put their skills to better use.
John Ward is rapidly coming round to the view that we need techie radicals to neuter techie totalitarians