MPs Holidays

Subject: MPs Holidays

So they are off on holiday again, the parliamentarians who we reward quite handsomely and just at the moment when chaos descends the PM resigns and we are in limbo regarding Brexit off they go on another jolly.

MPs work 145 days per year, they spend 22 week in recess and are paid the magisterial sum of £59 per hour. Looking around the chamber in Westminster the benches are  often empty and those MPs who are in there place play no part, other than rising to their feet trying to catch the speakers eye so they can be called to speak next. What they say may be relevant or not, it's often a comment to support what someone before them has said and rarely pearls of wisdom. It is what most of us would call a waste of time. 
Time is what they seem to have plenty off given that their pontificated answers to most questions are oblique, opec or worse plain misleading. The art of answering a question with a party political platitude or providing an answer to a question which hasn't been asked, is their speciality. 
Parliament provides the theatre for an actor to recite the script which has already been written and anyway is in many cases irrelevant. Like a play it has its heroines and its demons, it provides a platform for men and women to chase causes without actually getting their hands dirty. All the high flown phrases are but words and, as chaff on the wind, the words are scattered amongst many who are the deaf who cannot hear and the blind who cannot see. 
The actual edifice is its self tragic. Purporting to discus and formulate policy, by which we pass laws to govern ourselves but seem more intent on creating a shibboleth, of protecting the outmoded and discussing in retrospect things for which the ship has sailed. 
It's an occupation designed initially for the rich and famous, a talking shop, a meeting place to ensure their own interests were aired and protected. It has only in the last 60 or so years that it has taken on the guise of a place where actual social problems could be remedied. There are members of parliament today who care deeply for some cause or other but the steady ministerial hand on the tiller is not much moved and the ship of state sails on 'steady as she goes'.
Get rid of them all and install a benign dictator is one alternative but the taste of power infects even the most benign.
Power corrupts and the indolence and disdainful power we see enacted in parliament on this national stage could perhaps encourage another series of Jeremy Kyle  where the contestants all come from the House of Commons.