You know the hard hand of reality is catching up with the poltroons at Westminster when they suddenly abandon the meaningless verbiage they are addicted to spouting, and start using something like plain English.
It happened during a Commons debate on crime and London buses last Tuesday.
“One of our distinguished parliamentary colleagues,” said Labour MP for Ealing North Stephen Pound, “wishes me to draw the House’s attention to the fact that he had his camera stolen on the N29 bus. The police and Arriva, the contractor, were incapable of retrieving the closed circuit television footage, because he could not give them the registration number of the bus on which he was robbed.”
Oh dear. Another blow to that great totalitarian panacea of the Blair years, the spy camera. So remember folks, always take down the number plate of the bus you’re on, just in case…
In attempting to describe antisocial behaviour on London buses, Mr Pound spoke of a “darker dystopian world,” where “schoolchildren talk about being jacked, shanked, taxed and peeled.”
Where “…many young people feel that to enter the back of a bus is like entering a piranha pool where the threat is all around them.”
Blimey. Of course, doublethink had to creep in eventually: While Mr Pound defended unlimited free travel for teens as a “golden opportunity to unlock the secrets of our city”, he went on shortly afterwards to observe: “In many cases, we have created an adventure playground for ‘gang-bangers’ or a street corner on wheels. Before, people would mark their territory in the manner of feral rodents micturating, but now they engrave their gang signs by etching on the windows.”
That was all good. Then it was rather spoiled by Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Transport Gillian Merron, who extolled the virtues of CCTV (perhaps she hadn’t heard Mr Pound’s anecdote about the stolen camera) and said: “We are clearly talking about a small number of allegations, much of which relates to petty robberies rather than to more serious crimes.”
I don’t know about you, but if anyone robs me, I think it’s pretty serious.
Ms Merron didn’t seem interested in the opinion put forward by Mr Pound that a large amount of petty crime and antisocial behaviour went unreported.
Just four days after the debate, 15-year-old Adam Regis became the latest victim of “the street corner on wheels” when he died after, police suspect, he was chased off a bus in east London.
They are examining CCTV footage – lucky for them it could be found.