No question about the big story in London today. Some idiots seeking to draw attention to their cause (which – oh dear oh deary me – I seem to have quite forgotten although I was told) by chucking some contraceptives full of chalk dust at the Prime Minister during Prime Minister’s Questions.
If this dust had been scarily biological – anthrax or some such thing – then the subsequent behaviour of the assembled MPs was the exact opposite of what it should have been. Instead of remaining in situ to be cleansed by the cleansing squads, they immediately fled the chamber, which would have spread the contagion to the rest of us. There has to be a political metaphor there somewhere.
But fair play to them, our real ‘security system’ is not what we all do to prevent a disaster being disastrous; it is that once things have calmed down a bit, we chase after whoever did it and make life hell for them, and damn the expense. (Compare: 9/11.)
The usual protestations erupted today to the effect that “this must never be allowed to happen again”, thus proving that when stressed, MPs are just as foolish as Trailor Trash on the Jerry Springer show when facing similar mishaps, and just as keen on Total Safety as anybody else and just as doomed not to get it as everybody else. These things happen. The stupid people who did this will be chased down and made to wish that they had refrained. They will not be punished nearly as severely as they would have been if it really had been anthrax, but it will still be pretty frightening for them. If they did not see this coming, they are very stupid and deserve to be badly frightened anyway.
The idea that disasters are, on the whole, deterred rather than straightforwardly prevented, is, I think, a very fruitful one, with applications (again: 9/11) way beyond this one rather farcical episode.
None of which means that there will not now be a frighteningly expensive security panic centred on the House of Commons. New barriers will be erected. New badge systems to restrict access to the place will be devised, at a huge cost in muddle and frayed nerves as well as money. All kinds of restrictions to the manner in which members of the House of Lords invite people to the House of Commons (the problem today apparently) will be conjured up. Again: these things happen. One could no more stop such a process now than stop an earthquake from … quaking. But at the end of it, the world will still be a place in which malevolent or merely mischievous and unimaginative people (today’s culprits) will be able to create havoc if they are of a mind to. They will just have to find a slightly different way to do it.
Oh bugger. I have to go to the Commons for business from time to time, and the security checks take long enough as it is.
Better idea: just close the Commons, and send the politicos home, for 11 months of the year.
That would limit their exposure to similar (and perhaps more deadly) attacks in the future.
They’d be less able to bugger around with their little statist games, then.
Oh, and reduce their salaries and benefits by the concomitant proportion so that they have to work, just like the rest of us.
If this keeps up the whole government will spend all its time on security and never get any governing done. Hmm. That’s not a bad thing, is it?
Kim du Toit: “They’d be less able to bugger around with their little statist games, then.”
I fear not. The way those games are played in Britain, the politicians have too little say (and too little to say) in the matter of legislation. Sending them home would just further encourage the impression that they are employed as constituency social workers and give more leverage to the already overpowerful executive for legislation by decree.
Ah, but did anyone see the delightful spectacle of Blunkett shoving his way past hordes of the great unwashed Labour backbenchers in the desperate scramble to escape. One can almost imagine the shouts of “Women and visually impaired authoritarians first please!”
When Islamists attack, the Guardian and the Indy urge us to “understand” their anger.
When a Father’s rights group does a stupid but harmless stunt, the very same people condemn it with a moral solidity that is conspicuously absent in their views on Islamofascist terrorism.
Re Julian’s comment on Big Blunkett.
According to today’s BBC news website, Big Blunkett wasn’t at Westminster at the time.
Still, it makes for an interesting mental image.