My prediction is that Brexit will stall: MPs will go back to the country, which will vote overwhelmingly to remain for a variety of reasons ranging from Europhilia to desperately wishing we could talk about something else. Nobody will ever know exactly what that vote meant – but thank God, nobody will have to. This grim Tory Narnia (always winter, never Christmas) will be vanquished, the green shoots of renewal will grow and the whole episode will be lost in the more important business of Labour rebuilding the social fabric after a decade of what they called austerity, but was actually cruelty. Except for one small thing: I don’t think anyone is going to forget how long MPs’ holidays are.
It has been so unfortunate for them that a Christmas holiday has fallen just when there’s a bomb ticking and a vote pending. OK, so they couldn’t vote last Tuesday. Why couldn’t they have done it this week? Ah … they need five full days of debate. Wait a minute; this is five days. Nope, they break on the 20th. Hang on, even primary schools don’t break till the 21st. How can they be more tired than an eight-year-old?
What’s wrong with the first week of January? That doesn’t count because it’s such a short one, what with the bank holiday and then an extra Wednesday off for absolutely no reason.
They got away with it for so long, through a combination of calling it “recess”, which sounds both traditional and important, and never seeming to do anything that couldn’t wait. Now they have embarked upon something that really won’t wait, convention is dead and all precedent has been thrown to the wolves, except for the one that decrees they need more downtime than a person working nights on an oil rig. I don’t know what our move will be, but the nation will remember.
Another Jordan Peterson tweet, another lot of questions
A Jordan Peterson tweet has emerged from the deep: “Women: if you usurp men, they will rebel and fail and you will have to jail or enslave them.” What counts as usurping? Is it when we take their jobs, or can we do it just by talking? How does he know their rebellion will fail? This sounds like low self-esteem. I worry, now, that we’ve usurped them already. Wait, maybe they have rebelled and failed already, and we’re at the imprisonment stage. Would it be OK to enslave them at home? Because there’s useful work they wouldn’t be able to do from prison. So. Many. Questions. I might have to imprison Peterson himself and keep him for an answer-slave.
