What is the point of writing to your MP? - updated 3/10

Yesterday I wrote to my MP, Bath's Wera Hobhouse, to ask her if there was anything she could do to hold this government (ie crazed dictatorship) to account. What did I get back? A clearly templated response that didn't address a single one of my concerns, but just took pot-shots at 'right wing populism' and Trump. Pretty dismal.
I've pasted the exchanges below.

I wrote:
Dear Mrs Hobhouse
Is there anything you can do to stop this government from destroying the country?
I am in despair. They are taking any joy out of life because of a bug-eyed focus on one virus, they are spreading fear everywhere and making everyday life intolerable, they are making decisions and introducing new laws with zero parliamentary scrutiny.
They are acting like an unelected dictatorship, all the while destroying the health service, destroying education, destroying the high street, destroying the economy and destroying any feeling of commonality that people have towards one another.
Is there anything you can do to stop them? As I say, I am in utter despair.

She replied:

Thank you for your email and I am sorry you are so depressed about this current government that it affects your joy of life.
I don’t want to add to your depression but I can’t honestly give you that much re-assurance in terms of the political situation. We are dealing with a right wing populist government which is increasingly following the textbook of Trump and other populist leaders.
Boris Johnson and his allies got a large parliamentary majority at the last election, although not a majority in the country. It is only our unfair voting system that delivered this distorted result. I believe that the majority of this country believes in progressive politics. It is only that the progressive vote gets split at each election.
At the next election centre left parties need to be better at working together and defeat the Tories to make sure their destructive agenda doesn’t last for a generation. It will be a difficult battle but I never give up and I will work hard to made a progressive alliance work.
Although I have no influence over it I am also holding out for Trump to lose the US election. It will make a huge difference for global politics and the further rise or the beginnings of defeat for the populist right.
While politics is affecting all our lives, don’t make it the thing that overshadows everything. Even I don’t and I hope you can find joy and fulfilment elsewhere while admittedly the political situation is rather depressing.

UPDATE 3/10: I wrote to Wera asking if she would vote against the renewal of the Coronavirus Bill and she replied to say she would, as that was the Lib Dems' chosen course of action. So that was good.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is this the death of cinema?

2023’s Oscars ceremony was significant, as it may well have been the last time we see its kind. Because like the terrible idea to expand the football World Cup to 48 teams next time round, the rules are being changed by the Academy. See the press release here , which presents the most serious assault ever seen on the workings of the film industry.   Read it? Then I’ll continue. (Do please read it. It's horrifying. Yes, the Academy has been dodgy and corrupt for years, but this is a new frontier of awfulness.) It was of course a plan conceived in one of the worst years the civilised world has ever seen, 2020, when not only did the compassion fascists fulfil their dream of controlling people’s behaviour to the Nth degree (because of a disease akin to the seasonal flu), but the race obsessives/warriors/grifters fulfilled their dream of making people bend the knee to the great god of anti-racism (because of the death of a black recidivist), actions which did very little to halt the
Read more

Postcard from Montenegro

Image
Seeing that my country, the UK, has become one where a school teacher is forced to apologise for saying “Good afternoon, girls” to a class of girls, a boy accidentally scuffing a Koran necessitates the need for a press conference involving the police and local ‘faith leaders’, and citizens have their bank accounts closed if their views happen not to align with left-wing dogma, I figure it’s time to go abroad again, this time to Montenegro, one of the seven countries formerly known as Yugoslavia (six, if you don’t count Kosovo). In late July 2023, I go for one week, accompanied by a friend and David Szalay’s magnificent book All That Man Is . The weather is hot and sunny (in summer, in Southern Europe, who knew?) and we stay in the slice-of-heaven Old Town in a nice Airbnb. I fly with easyJet into Tivat airport from Gatwick, my friend from elsewhere. To speedily get the covid crap out of the way first: in terms of finger-wagging signage I see only the very occasional faded sticke
Read more

How Doctor Who became Doctor Woke

Ever since it returned in 2005, Doctor Who has been the perfect vessel for writers and creatives to promote the political and social causes they believe in under the guise of space-fantasy adventures. In recent years the show has become more strident, with each showrunner seemingly determined to outdo his predecessor on the ‘progressive’ politics front. Steven Moffat notably ramped things up during the Peter Capaldi years; his dismal successor Chris Chibnall turbo-charged the messaging in the Jodie Whitaker era; and the returning Russell T Davies will soon be spicing up things further under Ncuti Gatwa.   Over the last decade, as identity politics became the type of politics most fed to the masses, the programme found itself perfectly placed to disseminate ideas that formed in academia from the mid-twentieth-century onwards to a wider population. ‘Identity’ rules nowadays, and in Doctor Who the lead character is someone who can change their identity. When this concept was conceived
Read more