Thursday, 7 January 2016

Parochial MPs turn blind eye to global flash points

Iwatched PMQs at home yesterday while mending a hole in my trouser pocket, not the one created by George Osborne’s tax hikes. For what it’s worth in troubled times I thought Jeremy Corbyn did what he’s paid to do by puttingDavid Cameron on the back wellie over faulty flood management.
But what appalled me – I have just reread Hansard to be sure – was how horribly parochial the occasion was and usually is nowadays. Yes, I know, floods were the session’s dominant theme and floods are pretty serious even if your home has not been inundated.
So are housing shortages, climate change, the threat to care homes and to Channel 4, Isis/Daesh’s terrorist bravado and Emily Thornberry’s links with Iraqi ambulance-chasing lawyers before she was promoted to be Islington’s defence spokesman.
But they will all pale into insignificance or become a great deal worse if Wednesday morning’s reports are confirmed: that North Korea has successfully tested an H-bomb. It led next day’s edition of the Guardian – as it should – but was inside-page news in all the other papers I take at home, even the FT. What does it take to scare some people? A five-year-old in a jihadi kit?
So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised there was not a word about it at PMQs, not even from any of the dwindling numbers of outward-looking MPs who realise that care homes, better flood defences and certainly anti-warming policies all depend on basic stability in the world’s economic and political order. That must be why Dave made one such talented MP, Rory Stewart, floods minister. Oh dear.

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