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Remoaner MPs

They dislike the treaty but fear a clean Brexit,
They hope that – in more ways than one – they can fix it.
Too statist to say, even at their most livid,
“Take back control? Look at us, to whom you’ll give it!”,
Instead, as the fast-nearing date makes them manic,
Their failed Project Fear has become Project Panic.
Campaigning, they pledged they would honour the hour.
Elected, and climbing the greased pole of power,
They cling in death-grip to their fear-calming view,
We’re the wise – VoteLeave’s win showed the folly of you.”
In parliament’s past, you at many times find,
It avoids doing wrong by not being of one mind.
So if “House fulfils pledge” seems a doubtful prediction,
Let’s hope for “House deadlocked in fierce contradiction”.

“Have you considered masterly inactivity?”, replied Sir Humphrey Appleby when newly-appointed Prime Minister Jim Hacker asked what he should now do. Alas, so polarised is politics today that even – indeed, especially – Sir Humphrey would likely oppose inactivity in this case. We hope parliament will in fact do nothing supremely stupid during the next two months, but my most confident prediction is that whatever they do or don’t do will not appear masterly.

10 comments to Remoaner MPs

  • Runcie Balspune

    When the Remainers said that Brexit would be a disaster, the Leavers were easily able to contradict their argument with facts.

    But the Remainers did not issue this as a warning – it was a threat. It would be a disaster precisely because the Remainers would make it one, if they did not get their way.

    What Bercow and others are doing is nothing short of treason.

    It is wretched our parliament has come to this.

    Inaction is what Corbyn is doing, as a life-long pro-democracy Bennite he should be standing up to this mockery of parliamentary process, but he probably thinks he’ll still be PM before enforced retirement from politics, the spineless worm.

  • terence patrick hewett

    When Britain really ruled the waves,
    In good Queen Bess’s time,
    The House of Peers made no pretense,
    To intellectual eminence,
    Or scholarship sublime;
    Yet Britain won her proudest bays,
    In good Queen Bess’s glorious days.

    When Wellington thrashed Bonaparte,
    As every child can tell,
    The House of Peers, throughout the war,
    Did nothing in particular,
    And did it very well:
    Yet Britain set the world ablaze,
    In good King George’s glorious days.

    And while the House of Peers withholds,
    Its legislative hand,
    And noble statesmen do not itch,
    To interfere with matters which,
    They do not understand,
    As bright will shine Great Britain’s rays,
    As in King George’s glorious days.

  • bobby b

    Remoaner MPs
    Niall Kilmartin (Stirling) · Hippos

    “They dislike the treaty but fear a clean Brexit,
    They hope that – in more ways than one – they can fix it.”

    Bravo.

    Just . . . bravo.

  • Thanks, bobby b (January 28, 2019 at 3:08 pm).

    I thought of leaving ‘Hippos’ as the tag, but decided most people would think it was just there by accident (as, at first, it was 🙂 ), or else offensive to compare poor innocent hippos with remoaner MPs.

  • 80’s music fan

    Appleby. Dragged into Hogwarts? Savory poetry, thanks!

    What I mean is that pop culture is, regrettably, considered a philosophical foundation.

    “Spare me,” Dr. Zachary Smith.

  • Albion's Blue Front Door

    Ah, the joys of ‘Yes Minister’ and ‘Yes Prime Minister.’ We thought, naive that we were in the ‘good old days’ that this was all nothing more than a joke, to be enjoyed while real politicians solved problems and did great things.

    Alas now we realise that the programmes were in fact not funny, but true. Politicians like Hacker and civil servants like Appleby were exactly what they have always been, and maybe will be as long as the system we so espouse as being the best of all possible worlds carries on the way it is.

  • We thought, naive that we were in the ‘good old days’ that this was all nothing more than a joke, to be enjoyed while real politicians solved problems and did great things.(Albion’s Blue Front Door, January 29, 2019 at 12:10 pm)

    Not me. A secretary to a head of department during WWII (i.e. she was to Sir Humphrey what Bernard was to Jim Hacker) told me that, while there was comic exaggeration, the programme’s basic idea of managing your minister, while defending him against outside threats, e.g. from the other departments, was spot on. She said that the only fundamental inaccuracy was the plot device of Bernard’s naivity. In real life, Bernard would be made the minister’s secretary precisely because he already knew well the things that, in the programme, Sir Humphrey has to explain to him – and so to us, the viewers.

    Dominic Cummings once said he’d had experiences in Whitehall that were too extreme for a ‘Yes, Minister’ episode. He also wrote the following:

    My first day in the department was in January 2011. Between 8ish and 11ish, roughly every half hour officials knocked on the spad office door and explained a new cockup – we had accidentally closed an institution because we’d forgotten to renew a contract, the latest capital figures briefed to the media were out by miles, a procurement process had blown up, letters had gone out with all the wrong numbers in them (this happened maybe monthly over the three years I was there), and so on – meanwhile people were trying to organise the launch of the National Curriculum Review in documents full of typos and umpteen other things were going wrong simultaneously. It seemed extraordinary at the time but soon it was normal.

    It was often impossible to distinguish between institutionalised incompetence and hostile action … For all of these problems, …. regardless of how incompetently they had been handled – nobody was ever fired.

    The department’s lifts were knackered from the start and still are. There were dozens of attempts to have them fixed. All failed. At one point the Permanent Secretary [i.e. the Sir Humphrey of the department] himself took on the task of fixing the lifts, so infuriated had he become. He retired licking his wounds. ‘It’s impossible, impossible!’ It turned out that fixing an appointment is much easier than fixing a lift.

  • bobby b

    Long ago, I worked for a Senator.

    Years later, I saw my first episode of “Yes, Minister”, and thought “they got it exactly right!” Except for the funny accents, of course.

  • Paul Marks

    Let us see how it goes Niall – I doubt the United Kingdom will really get independence, my nerves are worn down now.

    However, if we do get independence (fishing grounds and all), I will stand you a drink.

    Now I can not say fairer than that.