Number of MPs who listen to the public is the same as the number of drivers caught smoking… none
It's not too much to ask that our politicians stop being obsessed by themselves and start listening
A YEAR ago, our esteemed leaders had some meetings and decided to ban adults from smoking in cars if there was a child on board.
Unless it was a convertible.
Or unless the child was 17 and actually doing the driving.
It was a messy law but it was passed, and afterwards the MPs responsible went out for dinner with some other MPs and perhaps a few Westminster journalists and reckoned they’d done a good day’s work.
Well, figures have just revealed that since the law was passed, the police — who are busy trying to catch terrorists most of the time, and paedophiles from the Seventies — have issued not one single ticket to anyone for a smoking-related driving crime. Not one.
Which is one tiny example of the problem we have with our system of government these days: The nation’s 650 MPs are completely disconnected from what normal people think, want or are.
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been told that the Tories pay no attention to ordinary people, and that’s true.
They don’t.
The police — who are busy trying to catch terrorists most of the time, and paedophiles from the Seventies — have issued not one single ticket to anyone for a smoking-related driving crime
But they do at least listen to their big-business paymasters, which is therefore good for the economy and jobs.
Whereas today, the Labour Party is listening to no one at all.
Not even itself.
Almost all of its MPs wanted to remain in Europe even though almost all of the people who put them in power wanted to leave.
Then there was the Gordon Brown issue.
When a voter raised the question of immigration, he called her a “bigot” and sped away.
They’re still at it today, labelling the millions and millions of Labour voters who worry about immigration as “racists”.
And now we have this Corbyn issue.
Thousands of grassroots activists want him to stay but most Labour MPs don’t care about that and want him to go.
As I write, the poor man is stuck.
He barely has enough supporters at Westminster to form a Shadow Cabinet but out there, in the saloon bars of Northern England and student union halls of all the red-brick universities, he is revered as highly as the other great JC.
Er, John Cleese, obviously.
We cannot allow ourselves to be ruled any more by people who huddle round their private bars listening only to one another
People are saying that this split will kill the Labour Party but actually, and hopefully, it will kill something far more important . . .
When the Brexit crisis is over and Westminster takes over the wheel of government from Brussels, we cannot allow ourselves to be ruled any more by people who huddle round their private bars listening only to one another, their advisers and specialist journalists.
They actually care about who said what on Newsnight, even though they’re the only ones watching.
They pore for hours over Page 26 stories in The Guardian, even though no one else is reading them.
And they still believe the polls, even though those have called the last two elections wrong.
I don’t care if an MP is rich or poor. I don’t care if he or she is gay or straight or whether they were born with a silver spoon in their mouth or down a mine
Yes, they are forced by convention to sit through their surgeries, but all they ever hear in those is little old ladies moaning about their neighbour’s yew hedge and busybody lunatics demanding lower speed limits.
I don’t care if an MP is rich or poor.
I don’t care if he or she is gay or straight or whether they were born with a silver spoon in their mouth or down a mine.
But they MUST start to listen.
They must stop doing what they want to do — banning smoking in cars for example — and do what the voters want them to do.
It’s not a big ask.
Surely.
Lets try players with a passion
ENGLAND’S football statistics make for grim reading.
We haven’t won a qualifying match in any tournament since 1437.
We haven’t won a knockout game since we played the Trex Wanderers and the match was interrupted by the arrival of a giant asteroid, and we haven’t won a tournament since players smoked on the pitch.
This time round we were kicked out by Iceland, a country where the manager is a part-time dentist and the players don’t even have any tattoos
This time round we were kicked out by Iceland, a country where the manager is a part-time dentist and the players don’t even have any tattoos.
And ever since, everyone’s been running about saying our boys had too much pressure and the manager made too many changes and Joe Hart is rubbish and so on and so on.
But the problem is bigger: We fielded a team of footballers.
Footballers are not bright.
Harry Kane, above, looked permanently bewildered.
As though he couldn’t understand why he was made to sing a song before the match began and why he wasn’t wearing blue shorts.
They’re told by their agents that they are playing for something called England but they have no real idea what that is, or why it matters.
“But Ernie, I wanted to take my missus to Dubai that week.”
This is the problem we have.
It’s the problem we always have.
And the only solution is to stop using footballers and start using people who belt out the national anthem before the game begins and play like their lives depend on it.
Firemen.
Doctors.
Fighter pilots.
I don’t care.
Just so long as they do.
T-Swift off the menu
WENT to Pizza Express in the Midlands town of Rugby this week and was amazed to note that Tom Hiddleston and Taylor Swift were not in there, holding hands.
Because they’re every-bloody-where else these days.
—IT’S possible, in the wake of Brexit, that to save money, trains on the HS2 high-speed rail link will be limited to 185mph, rather than 200.
Which means we will be spending billions to shave eight seconds off the journey time from London to the North West.
It’s also possible there will be no third runway at Heathrow, which means that for a flight in November, you’ll need to check in by June.
And worst of all, the proposed nuclear power station in Somerset is under threat, which means that as more and more morons buy electric cars, we simply won’t have enough capacity to run our hospitals and everyone will die.
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Not that after the vote I’m a sore loser or anything.
A bunch of shunts
LAST week I told you how I nearly missed the opportunity to vote in the Referendum because the highway Wombles had closed the M40.
This week I nearly missed my daughter’s school play because they had shut half the M25 after an accident that was nothing more than a parking scrape.
And then, on the way back to London, the M1 was shut completely.
Can someone tell these people that their job is to keep the bloody motorway open.
Not shut it just because someone’s effing door mirror has fallen off.
— WE all know how it goes.
Top Gun, where the best of the best strive to become better than the best of the best by having big hair and terrible underpants.
Well now it’s all over.
Because the best of the best of the best, a man called Colonel Gene Lee, has just been beaten in a dogfight by a plane that was being flown by a computer.
He said afterwards that it seemed to be aware of his intentions and reacted instantly to his changes in flight and his “missile deployment”.
Oo-er missus.
Except I don’t think he was talking about Kelly McGillis at this point.