Sunday, October 26, 2008

Give them a stick …

… and they will unfailingly grab the wrong end of it.

"Where have all the parliamentary orators gone?" asks Andrew Roberts in The Sunday Telegraph, complaining that: "Parliament used to be the best show in the West End," but was "No longer." In a lengthy dissertation, he then notes:

The fact that so many of our day-to-day laws come from Brussels today, rather than being originated at Westminster, has also impoverished political discourse. There is less of substance over which to argue, when the regulations by which we live cannot genuinely be affected by the outcome of our debates. As the Westminster parliament moves seemingly inexorably towards what the EU always intended it to be, a county council with Pugin architectural embellishments, so the quality of the debates held there declines.
To be brutally frank, who gives a flying tinker's %&*£<”$ about the oratory? What about the power?

As so often, we did it earlier, and better.

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