IS THAT a dead cat on the table?

While our government boos and guffaws, giggles and smirks on the green benches of the House of Commons, while our current PM Boris Johnson says ‘sorry’ but is unclear what he is sorry for, people round this country are facing steep rises in the cost of the basics of daily living.

They are facing desperate choices of eating or heating.

The time and focus on the covid rule-breaking at the heart of our government is taking ‘air- time’ away from issues that are matters of life and death. The focus on Number 10’s boozy parties is classic political ‘dead cat on the table’ distraction. Everybody’s looking one way at the cat while over their shoulders prices rise, lorry queues transporting essential supplies lengthen and inflation soars.

Yes, heads must roll over the gut-wrenching fact that Boris Johnson and his braying servile courtiers set rules for the rest of us that they see no need to follow. But, actually, his behaviour is no surprise. He has form. What more evidence do those who supported him actually need to upgrade to a PM who knows the difference between truth and lies?

I’m more focussed on the revelation in Senior Civil Servant Sue Gray’s official ‘update’ that untold numbers of employees at Number 10 are working in a threatening and bullying atmosphere that demands their complicity and their silence.

This is a form of oppression that takes us back to the middle-ages. Gray’s update describes employees being afraid to challenge behaviours which are now the subject of a police investigation.

In Gray’s report she uses the term ‘lessons learned’ as though this were a complex bewildering situation that would have floored any Prime Minister. Her forgiving phrase mutes the facts. There is nothing complicated about the covid rules at the time which, after all, the government wrote. As beautifully exposed by our former PM Theresa May, the rules were clear and Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his ‘court’ simply did not consider they applied to them.

While they were passing the port to the left around their crowded tables, the public were being told not to visit the dying. Not to hug the bereaved. It’s do as I say not as I do.

Boris Johnson has broken his own rules, he’s undermined the office of Prime Minister and he has flagrantly demanded blind loyalty from Conservative MPs many of whom have shown their allegiance is not to truth but to their own jobs.

I don’t think that people in this country are happy to be treated with contempt, to be patronised, to be lied to, to be disposed of. But our voting system deprives many of us of a voice. So what’s my solution?

A change in our electoral voting system would achieve a more accurate mirror of the opinions of the people of this country.

We would have more than one Green MP for example. The system we have where you only need one more vote than the next candidate to win is what leaves so many people without representation in this country.

I’d much rather vote for something I believe in than attempt to vote tactically to stop the worse option winning. If a fairer voting system means we get the odd extremist, so what!

That’s democracy and it might be rather fun to have an openly ‘monster raving loony’ on the benches...