Britain's Citizens Get What They Deserve

I have spent the last week in a rather furious state of disbelief.  My anger spiraled so far out of my own control that, in order to stop myself from shouting obscenities at the radio, television, newspaper and computer, I have had to isolate myself from anything bearing a resemblance to news.  That was until this afternoon, when, for some strange reason, I couldn't stop myself from watching  Question Time on iplayer.  I don't know why I did it.  I knew I would be apoplectic with rage at the end of it.  I couldn't help myself. My name is Campbell; I'm addicted to shouting at idiots who I will never meet, who can't hear me.  

The rage has pretty much subsided now; strangely, the emotion I am left with is admiration.  Not for the pompous, ill-informed fuck-heads who apply to be in the audience of Question Time, not for the smug journalists and commentators who sit in judgement of the week's events, but for the politicians, William Hague and Ben Bradshaw.  I wasn't particularly taken with their comments or answers, the thing that drew my admiration was their apparently endless compassion.  Ben Bradshaw might as well have been the Dalai Lama.  I am baffled as to how these men could sit there and listen to the utter rubbish thrown at them without responding with sarcasm, fury and utter contempt.

I can only think of one instance where an audience member's question illustrated that he had attempted to inform himself, in some vague way, about the nature of our political and legal systems.   For the most part, it appeared as though the entire congregation had pieced together an understanding of recent events by reading one half of a newspaper article in the salon, and the other half of a different article in the queue at Sainsburys.  The audience clapped unanimously when it was suggested that we needed a general election.  They clapped unanimously again when Bradshaw made the point that, in order for the guilty politicians to be held to account and the innocent politicians to be exonerated, we would have to wait until an independent investigation of MPs' expenses was completed.  At the end of the evening, the consensus generated amongst the mob appeared to suggest that the nation would be best served by a government of independents elected by spite.   

At the end of the programme I sat alone and took some deep breaths.  It crossed my mind that the electorate gets the kind of politics it wants and deserves.   Ben Bradshaw was vilified for crimes he does not appear to have committed, by an audience who probably wouldn't have recognised him before the evening had begun.  Maybe he has a safe seat.  But if the Question Time audience has anything to do with it, any member of parliament who speaks in carefully worded sentences, and who doesn't spout emotive rhetoric, will be gone from British politics for good.  The British public will congratulate themselves on a moral victory as intelligent debate and dialogue are permanently erased from the collective memory.

Hopefully, when it all happens I will be alone in my bunker with a bottle of Scotch, where the only thing to do with an op-ed piece from the Telegraph is use it to wipe my arse.