Ending the Undead: Time to Bury the ‘Zombie Parliament’

The Mother of Parliaments: Now paralysed because Tories and Lib Dems hate each other so much.

One of the questions put to the panel on last night’s Have I Got News For You was about the strange state of the British parliament. Like Schrodinger’s Cat, it is apparently neither alive nor dead. Unlike the great quantum physicist’s moggy, this apparently has nothing to do with the collapse of probability wave functions to determine the result of a physics experiment. No, this is more about chemistry – particularly, the composition of the present Coalition. Just as certain elements don’t mix, so the period of harmony between the Tories and the Lib Dems when they both worked together to wreck the nation, grind the poor, the unemployed and the disabled even further into the dirty and make themselves and their corporate paymasters even more obscenely rich has come to an end. The two parties now have so little in common, that they have effectively run out of legislation to pass. They thus have nothing to do for the next year before the elections in 2015, except for minor pieces of legislation. Hence the description of the current administration as a ‘zombie parliament’.

This is extraordinary, as it appears to mean that the government has effectively broken down.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, the son of William Rees-Mogg, aristo and Times columnist, as a Conservative MP tried to put a positive face on it. he stated that the Belgium had gone without a government for 40 months and nobody noticed. This is not quite true. The country had gone through a period of nearly four years without a government, but this was very definitely noticed. While law and order carried on being observed as before, and the country didn’t dissolve into anarchy, the result was a serious backlog in legislation. Moreover, the public sector suffered as budgets were not set. At first Belgian students celebrated their country’s political mess by partying in the streets, but then turned to a sit-down protest to force the parties in the parliament to work together to form a governing coalition.

As the opposite has happened over here, I’m surprised that the Queen has taken the obvious step of dissolving parliament and called for new elections. This is, after all, what I thought was supposed to happen with the government of the day shows itself unable to govern, as when the Prime Minister loses a vote of confidence. But not in the Coalition’s Britain, which seems determined to hang on to power, even when manifestly unfit and unable to govern.

Tags: 'Zombie Parliament', Aristocracy, Coalition, Conservatives, Have I Got News for You, Lib-Dems, Quantum Physics, Schrodinger's Cat, The Queen, William Rees-Mogg