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El Corazón De Madera

On Friday May 22 in his diary column in the Guardian Hugh Muir wrote. • The world stands transfixed as the trouser-gate virus continues to afflict the mother of parliaments. Expense abuse scandal hurts UK parties, says Germany’s Die Welt publication. Gravy train crashes for UK lawmakers, reports the Associated Press. But there’s less interest […]

On Friday May 22 in his diary column in the Guardian Hugh Muir wrote.

• The world stands transfixed as the trouser-gate virus continues to afflict the mother of parliaments. Expense abuse scandal hurts UK parties, says Germany’s Die Welt publication. Gravy train crashes for UK lawmakers, reports the Associated Press. But there’s less interest in Croatia, understandable given the recent election there of Josko Risa, the mayor of Prolozac, whose slogan “All for Me – Nothing for You” struck such a chord with the voters. “I just told them the truth. This town will be like my family business. If I get a little something, so do they,” was his rationale. Local resident Ivan Vjisnic appears sanguine: “We’re going to get ripped off no matter who takes over. At least he is being honest and up front about it.” Sometimes it pays to have this international perspective.”

Is this the way forward for our politicians? I should hope not. But ripples of fear are beginning to shake the Great and the Good outside parliament. Our Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, not to be confused with  St.Thomas  Becket, has said about our political Pinocchios.

“Many will now be wondering whether the point has not been adequately made: the continuing systematic humiliation of politicians itself threatens to carry a heavy price in terms of our ability to salvage some confidence in our democracy.”

The point will not have been adequately made until Parliament reforms itself. The danger is that we let up too soon for fear of something worse. Geoffrey Wheatcroft in an excellent article in the Guardian explains  how Parliament had already lost its mojo  before the lamentable expenses fiasco. It had been systematically ignored by Blair. Policy was no longer being debated in the chamber, and fine tuned there, but made on the hoof and in front of the camera. No wonder m.ps lost their hearts and started treating the weighty moral task of guiding our country’s fortunes as a workaday job from which they might hope to extract as much money as possible. But now their poor little corazones de madera ( spanish for wooden hearts) need to be thoroughly shaken up, swallowed into the belly of the whale and regurgitated at the very least, for them to rediscover their humanity.

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