Picture shows House of Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle and former Newsreader Angela Rippon engage in some frivolity whilst the country falls apart.
If you are British and you look around you what do you see? For many Britons it’s to see a country in disarray, a place with a dismal economy, rising prices, growing inter-communal and inter-religious strife, the threat and reality of terrorism, crime and hopelessness. The keen eye can see that many Britons if not the majority are living from hand to mouth from week to week in an economy that could discard them at any moment and a society that is not equipped to properly help them should their situation take a turn for the worse.
You don’t have to be that observant to realise that in Britain there is a massive gulf between those who govern and those who are governed. Those who govern may feign concern about those who they govern but given a choice between helping say working class Britons or virtue signalling about what is ever the latest elite concern such as climate change or ‘refugees’, then they would most likely choose the elite concern instead of the British working classes. The values and their mores of our Establishment are often not the same as those whom they are governing and they too often despise the values and mores of those whom they govern. There is a further entrenchment of the divorce between the governed and those who govern as those who govern have access to resources and opportunities that are not available or available with great difficulty to those who are governed.
The separation between those who govern Britons and the Britons themselves is one of those niggling things about Britain. The State is woefully unresponsive to the needs of the majority of the population. This unresponsiveness increasingly rankles the public as it’s annoying to be ruled by politicians who don’t have the smallest idea of the pressures and fears that the public live under.
However, every now and again comes an event that starkly and clearly illustrates the divide in Britain between those who govern and the governed. An event that seems to show the Establishment and its concerns completely divorced from the things that concern the bulk of the population.
One of those events was a recent ‘Dance For Health’ dance event at I believe Portcullis House in Westminster which saw the Speaker of the House of Commons Sir Lindsay Hoyle along with lots of other MP’s dance themselves dizzy as part of this promotion. It was all smiles for the participants taking part in this and it can be taken to be just a bit of fun. But, this ‘bit of fun’ needs to be seen in context.
That context is that this might not be the most right or appropriate time for Britain’s politicians to indulge in this sort of thing. We have a collapsing economy, wars and rumours of wars, ruinous levels of taxation to pay for services that are unserviceable, rampant crime, terrorism and a migration crisis. Many Britons are really on their uppers and it is distasteful to see Britain’s politicians disporting themselves in this frivolous way. It makes a stark contrast it does to see these politicians larking around without a care in the world when those who they are governing are either up shit creek or being dragged by circumstances into it.
As others have said, and which I agree with, is that this event has the odour of the last days of the French Monarchy about it. In pre-Revolutionary France the wealthy and the aristocratic were completely separated from the bulk of the population and their concerns. The French elite partied away and engaged in courtly scheming unaware of what was festering outside the glittering halls of the Palace of Versailles. The French elite did not see and did not heed the concerns of the peasant or the small trader or the artisan or those cast off into deadly poverty by the vicissitudes of life. They were aloof from the concerns of the ordinary man and woman, until one day the revolutionaries faced them with the reality of the stark divisions in French society.
Just as the aristocrats in pre-revolutionary France danced at balls unheeding of the needs of the French people so do British politicians dance without thought or concern about what the average British person might be going through. In the context of the dire state of Britain to take part in this dancing event looks crass and unfeeling.
Worse than merely being crass and unfeeling this sort of display doesn’t put over an image of seriousness when we live in a time when political seriousness is sorely needed. It doesn’t send any positive message about Britain to those who may be our adversaries or signal strength whether of character or anything else. The only message this sort of thing sends out is that our politicians are a nest of shallow fools who are too easily distracted by baubles such as this. This is one of these bad optics things again. It looks bad because it shows just how divorced from the reality of life in Britain these politicians really are.
A sensible and thoughtful political class might have shied away from something like this knowing just how bad it would look to be fart arsing around at a dance event whilst the country teeters on the edge of immense troubles. The problem is Britain does not have such a thoughtful and sensible political class, instead we have a group of people who really do not give a toss what the rest of us think and so they just party on as if the rest of us do not matter. They are waving their aloofness from the rest of us in front of our eyes. They party whilst the country crumbles and geopolitics rumbles into war and conflict.
We deserve better as governors than these shallow fools. We are not hating our political classes enough for not taking seriously that which they should be taking seriously and indulging in displays like this. I don’t expect those who govern us to be saints or heroes or paragons of marital virtue, but I do expect them to look as if they are giving a shit about the terrible and worsening situation Britain is in.
As I close this piece I find I have the words of an old Music Hall song wafting into my head and its message about how divorced are the elite from the problems of the ordinary person, is as clear today as when it was written sometime in the 19th century. ‘It’s the same the whole world over, it’s the rich that get the pleasure and the poor they get the blame, ain’t it all a bloody shame’.
Here’s some links to videos on the X platform showing Britain’s politicians in a carefree mood as the country runs aground in the current political storms.
https://x.com/kateferguson4/status/2029152603007787324
https://x.com/aquitainexox/status/2029253959462834497
https://x.com/LBC/status/2029250519756370030
The ‘It’s the same the whole world over’ song.
