In ‘Milovan Djilas Revenge’ and ‘Obliterating the Political Class’ we touched on the ‘expenses’ scandal currently engulfing the British government and the ‘new class’ that puts its own interests ahead of the great mass of people. And now that same mass of people is seeking revenge – and not in the next election, either. From today’s UK Telegraph, a news piece entitled, ‘Revenge Before Reform’:
It was in Bromsgrove in 1605 that some of the Gunpowder Plotters unsuccessfully sought sanctuary, after their audacious plan to blow up the Houses of Parliament was discovered. Some four centuries later, the usually sedate Worcestershire town is again at the centre of an extraordinary campaign, albeit by more peaceable means, to bring down MPs who have brought the Palace of Westminster into disrepute.
The modern equivalent of a peasants’ revolt is being conducted against Julie Kirkbride, Bromsgrove’s Tory MP, by Louise Marnell, a housewife, from a battered trestle table in the high street.
Local Tories insist that Mrs Marnell is a stooge for the Respect Party, whose best known MP is George Galloway, a charge that she denies. “I have never voted in a general election,” she says. “I’m just an angry housewife.” Mrs Marnell has collected 3,500 signatures in an unprecedented campaign to remove a sitting MP a year before the next general election has to be called.
In the space of a week, Miss Kirkbride, 48, has gone from popular local MP to a pariah figure after the publication in The Daily Telegraph of the evidence that she and her husband, the Tory MP Andrew MacKay, claimed £170,000 between them in second home allowances over four years. He claimed for their joint flat in Westminster, while she claimed for their family home in her constituency.
At the weekend, Mr MacKay was humiliated at a bad-tempered public meeting in his Bracknell constituency, where he was heckled and branded a “thieving toad”, amid demands to “give it all back”. He was humiliated again when David Cameron ordered him to stand down, having heard a recording of the meeting.
Read it all. The scandal cuts across party lines and the blow-back has not been gentle.
To our British friends we offer a helpful hint: on this side of the pond, we use tar, feathers and rails. Or did we learn that from you?
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