The madness of politicians!

It seems that our parliament has voted by a narrow, very narrow, ONE vote margin, against a no-deal Brexit. But before anybody thinks that is that, it still has to get through the House of Lords.

And so it rumbles on.

Fifty percent of our MPs, however, are prepared to take the nihilistic step of accepting a no-deal situation and stepping into the void of not knowing where we go from here.

In the event of that happening the European Parliament has just voted that UK citizens will still be able to travel visa-free around Europe, provided of course that EU citizens don’t need visas to visit the UK. Whoop de doo! Surely that makes everything easier all round! 81 MEPs voted against the concession (502 voted for it) but some of that is not so much that they don’t like us. It’s more to do with sovereignty of Gibraltar. All I have to say about thatvis Ceuta and Melilla!

We still wait to see what comes of the May-Corbyn alliance. Both parties have members who are screaming that this is not right - accusations of treachery and possible traps for Labour abound - but there are still voters who say they see no difference between any of the parties.

As for me, I think there has been too much emphasis on “The Party” and not enough on getting the job done. Whatever your feelings about the EU, the whole Brexit business would have been a lot better if David Cameron had been man enough to stay around to sort out the mess he had set in motion and if someone had suggested getting all parties, political left and right and middle, leavers and remainers, together to discuss what the best outcome would be before signing article 50.

But that would have been too sensible!

Meanwhile, I am still coming across people obsessed with the idea that you have to be properly working class to be a left winger. (So what about Tony Benn?) A friend of mine recently related his problems with a coffee maker. He was making coffee in the semi-dark and managed to put his cup in the machine upside down, leading to an unplanned coffee fountain. Bang go his claims to be working class! He is by the way, a teacher, not really an occupation demanding manual labour but as the starting salary is below £30,000 some would count him an unskilled worker and, were he foreign, try to deny entry into the UK. Another friend accused him of creeping embourgeoisification and commented: “The proletariat do not have coffee makers, comrade. The revolution will not be liquidised!” Personally, I think he has simply leapt over middle-class and moved directly into dopey, incompetent, machines-are-a-mystery-to-me upper class!

Does this sort of obsession go on other countries?

Across the Atlantic they have other kinds of odd stupidity. POTUS is against renewable energy and recently spoke about wind turbines during a speech he delivered at the National Republican Congressional Committee dinner. And then, apparently, he waved his arm around in what he thought looked like a wind turbine. Later he repeated this claim in a tweet: “If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations your house just went down 75 per cent in value. And they say the noise causes cancer, you tell me that one, OK.”

The Indy, where I picked up this story, added a comment to reassure readers: “To be clear, windmills do not cause cancer. There are other health problems that are blamed on wind turbines, but cancer is not one of them.”

There you go!