Blackwashed, or how stupid does one have to be to be a member of the British Parliament?

Do you know the answer? I most certainly don’t. Is there a specific qualification in stupidity, a standard one has to attain before being considered for elevation to our benighted legislature? Is it the fault of the party machine, the leadership, or is it a local problem, attributable to constituency associations? Oh, there are so many questions and no answers.

I suppose we have come to live with their stupidity, to accept it as yet another irksome fact of life. But what I object to is when Members of Parliament assume that the rest of us are as stupid as they are. How else does one explain the whole expenses mess, the outrageous claims made on the taxpayer, in the first place? I suppose they thought they had got away with that, assuming that we would never find out that they were making criminally fraudulent claims for non-existent mortgages, as well as for kit-kats, porno, church collections and duck houses. But now they have compounded the offence by their new commitment to ‘openness’, publishing their claims online. Indeed, they are so ‘open’ that most of the details, the kind of information that would enable one to make the appropriate links, have been blacked out, or redacted, to use the favoured jargon word.

I suppose whoever is responsible for this was mindful of the words of Joker Brown, ‘The Best Man for the Job’, when he said that “Transparency to the public is the foundation of properly policing this system.” Black, it seems, is the new transparency. To have learned nothing and to have forgotten everything: now, that really is the measure of true stupidity!

Speaking of transparency isn’t it wonderful that the ‘Best Man for the Job’ decided that the Iraq inquiry should be held in secret? After all, what better way to get people to trust the objectivity of the final report on the lies, half-truths and dissimulation that took us into England’s worst foreign policy disaster since Suez? Oh, but it seems that he has already had second thoughts on that particular point, at least in the limited and half-hearted way that we have come to expect from this wretched man. Better the full truth than yet another whitewash…or should that be blackwash? :-))