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The Crumbling of Parliament

simon gray 2019-04-05, 09:31:10
Read this article aloud — 432 words

So everybody laughed yesterday at the House of Commons being suspended yesterday because of water gushing in through the ceiling. But here's the thing.

The Palace of Westminster is an historic building, part of our nation's heritage. Like all our other historic buildings it's supposed to be held in trust and protected, just like the buildings and monuments from ancient history have been by their civilised custodians.

The occupants of the Palace of Westminster have know for years that the building is literally crumbling around them - not only do all the utilities within a working building need upgrading, the masonry itself is falling apart - on a near-monthly basis a piece of the stonework will fall off and come crashing to the ground. But the elected occupants have for years prevaricated about coming to a decision on what to do about it. Everybody knows what actually needs to happen is they all need to decant to somewhere else entirely for a couple of years whilst a relatively short and relatively cheap complete repair and upgrade job is done, all in one go. But a sizeable number of MPs don't want to do that, they want to instead spend a couple of decades, and considerably more money - your money and my money, which could be spent on the NHS instead - on a bit by bit repair and upgrade programme, closing off sections of the building and re-opening them bit by bit.

So because they've been unable to agree on how the major repair works get done (hell, they only just managed to agree to start the repairs to the Elizabeth Tower in which the clock is kept, and there were plenty of them who opposed even that), they've not done anything beyond the odd urgent patch here and there. Leading to what happened yesterday.

Not only are they pissing about whilst the nation falls apart around them, they're pissing about whilst their own workplace falls apart around them; if they can't even be trusted to fix their workplace, how can they be trusted to fix the nation?

It's not just time for a General Election, it's time for a General Election in which every single sitting MP has to contest an open primary to be selected as their party's candidate. Or not be permitted to stand at all - we need a fundamental restacking of our democracy.

#politics

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