Rebel without a cause
The House of Commons rebel, in name at least, doesn’t care much for rebellion it seems – not when it involves him. The House of Commons rebel is a man of custom, sedentary custom. This rebel is not in the vanguard against the British establishment, no this rebel is none other than Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs or the Great and Powerful Oz – for this week the curtain was drawn back exposing him to be a puny yet ardent stickler for convention in the tradition of the most obsequious envoy of the British empire proudly planting the Union flag on some piece of foreign territory in the name of the monarch and the Empire by God.
The man who once terrified the establishment is now a compliant part of it, albeit the circus act. He is less firebrand than damp squib. Socialist? up to a point Lord Copper, up to a point.
If socialism extends to pushing others out of the way, he’s a socialist. If being a socialist is insisting a public bench belongs to him by rights or custom, he is a socialist. If being a socialist comes down entirely to age then he is a socialist. If socialism is about common ownership he is not a socialist. If socialism is about sharing the means of production then his jibes about Scots (SNP) and their Barnett Formula suggest he is not a socialist. At best the rebel champions not socialism but localism.
When the great rebel accuses the people of Scotland of living off his constituents you have to question the extent of his socialism..so much for sharing the burdens placed on us by capitalism. If the establishment’s rebel really cared he would not be carping on about what monies Scotland has but demanding his constituents should match them, instead of grousing that the Scots have too much. That we should all wallow in equal levels of poverty seems to be the ambition of Labour, rebel or not.
His comment about North Sea Oil lacks a punch line so I don’t know what he meant other than another apparent disparaging aside aimed at us in Scotland which again doesn’t sound too socialist to me. Certainly not internationalist which is what so many self-proclaimed Labour lefties say they stand for. His remarks seem grudging and bitter and divisive, not at all what you might expect from a socialist or even anyone in the Labour party.
The rebel believes he has traditional rights no different from an 18th century English country squire or absentee Highland laird wielding their power to evict their tenants from their (tenants) land by any means available to them.
The rebel who is happy to sit for 45 years issuing the occasional humorous one-liner is not a threat to the system he claims to despise. What exactly is he rebelling against? At the moment it looks like the audacity of the new intake of Scots to demand equality with old-timers in the Commons. They are public benches and unless he is advocating privatisation of them then he ought to practise what he preaches.
Labour lefties come in a range of shades; espoused socialists who retire from the Commons or public life straight into that most undemocratic house of cronyism, the House of Lords; wealthy Chelsea and Kensington deluded types who talk the talk but take a taxi or limo in preference to walking the walk; hoary-handed salt-of-the-earth types who live off reputations carefully nurtured and preserved but amounting to very little in the grand scheme of things. And they don’t like it when someone comes along and exposes them to be none other than Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs instead of the rebel whose socialism amounts to nothing more than sporting a red tie.
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