Category Archives: Politics

Making fun of the House of Lords: an appreciation

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One of the joys of living in Britain is that you get to make fun of the House of Lords, and I’ve had at least my share of fun with that and probably used up someone else’s portion as well, but a recent (okay, not so recent; it’s taken me a while to get around to this) article in the Guardian’s weekend magazine made me wonder if the chamber may serve some genuine purpose.

But let’s go for the ridiculous first. I learned from the article that the House of Lords has a blue carpet that you can only walk on silently. If you stop and stand on it, you get told off. I’m not sure how you walk on a carpet noisily—maybe you need spurs—but you can’t do that either. The house’s senior official is called Black Rod, but his full title is the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod. He comes to work in pantaloons and wears a ruffle where a twenty-first century male would wear a tie. Or—well, he probably wears street clothes until he gets to work and then changes. Absurd as the get-up is in the House of Lords, wearing it on the bus would be worse. (I’d love a photo, though. Rush hour. People hanging on the poles. Frilly tie. Pantaloons. I don’t know what kind of shoes you wear with that.)

Irrelevant photo: Minnie the Moocher and Fast Eddie, in a moment of bliss.

Irrelevant photo: Minnie the Moocher and Fast Eddie, in a moment of bliss.

When the lords vote, they line up in corridors, one for Content (adjective, not verb, with the accent on the last syllable) and one for Not Content. Their names are ruled off a list and they’re then counted off by a peer holding a drumstick (“musical, not chicken,” added the lord who described the procedure). When women first joined the Lords, they weren’t allowed to address the doorkeepers.

Why not?

Because.

In case anyone’s interested, I’m capitalizing Lords when it stands in for House of Lords but not when it applies to members of the house, unless the name’s included, in which case it becomes a title and is capped. Is that baroque or what? Normal usage is probably to capitalize it both times but it just seems too damn worshipful and, good (L)lord, I can’t do it. Besides, a lot of Brits capitalize all sorts of words that I’d leave lower case. I suspect they’re overdoing it not just according to American usage but to British as well, but it’s so widely done that it must mean something. Maybe that they’re closer to the German roots of English than Americans are. Or maybe capital letters are on sale and no one’s told me.

I should rush out and Buy and half Dozen.

But back to the Lords: The speaker sits on a woolsack (the current speaker is, apparently, short enough that her feet dangle) and the clerks are equipped with both white wigs and iPads. Is that a great combination or what?

The lords meet in a room built to seat 240 members and there are now 859. Of those, 92 are hereditary. Under Tony Blair, there was a massive cull of hereditary peers; they’re what’s left. Why them instead of some of the others? Haven’t a clue. Other peers are appointed for life and the theory is that they’re experts in one thing or another—science, history, law, medicine, chutney, building blocks—but they also include party hacks and donors, former civil servants, a cheese maker, a children’s TV presenter, a rock star or two (or seven, but who’s counting?), former MPs, 26 bishops (whose bench is the only one that has arms), and the occasional stray novelist.

Peers are nominated by political parties and can be nominated by the public as well. Good luck with that, public. If anyone wants to nominate Wild Thing, go ahead. It’ll be interesting. The governing party gets to make more appointments than the parties that aren’t governing. Are you surprised? Then the appointees have to be approved by an independent commission (exactly how independent it is I’m couldn’t say, although I could take a reckless guess or two), which can make its own nominations, and the list is then approved by the prime minister. I don’t know if he gets to do any final tinkering or not. After all that, the queen waves her magic feather over it. Of 45 appointments in August 2015, 26 belonged to the party currently in office, the Conservatives. One of them is a former MP (that’s Member of Parliament, in case you don’t speak British) who stepped down in 2010 after the public learned that he’d claimed the £2,200 he spent for cleaning his moat on his expenses.

So yes, the system’s working perfectly. They don’t seem to have appointed the guy who got caught claiming the cost of a floating duck island for his country house.

The average age is 69, but the lone Green peer is quoted as saying “You can’t die in parliament. You’re not allowed.” I’d put that down to comic overstatement, but since we’re dealing with the House of Lords it’s probably not.

When the Lords were considering a bill that many people thought would have a disastrous effect on the National Health Service (it passed, and we were right: it has), several friends and I divided up the list of lords who we thought might be swing votes and wrote to all of them. I learned from this that some of them are elderly or ill and don’t show up anymore. They’re not required to, although they’re paid only for days they show up. Last I heard it was £300 a day.

A person could live on that.

I also learned that the peers aren’t provided with a clerical staff. They answer their own mail or they don’t. Mostly they don’t, but one member, Baroness (that’s what the women are called; the men are called Lord) Someone or Other, emailed back. And I emailed her back and she wrote back again and we argued the bill endlessly and purposelessly, since it quickly became clear that neither of us was going to change the other one’s position. It was all I could do to keep from asking, “Why are you writing me? Don’t you have a country to run or something?”

Anyway, she assured me that the bill would work to the benefit of the entire universe and that the sun would shine twenty-five hours a day and Britain would bask in eternal summer. I later saw her name on a list of peers who had investments that should have barred them from voting on the bill (but didn’t), since they were conflicts of interest.

I comfort myself with the thought that when she was writing to me she wasn’t accomplishing anything else.

But. Some of the peers interviewed in the Guardian article made a good case for the Lords having a use.

“A lot of bills are not debated at all in the House of Commons,” one said. “They fall to the House of Lords.”

A lot of the MPs barely even read them.

In the Lords, a certain number of members will actually read the damn things, line by line by dreary line, instead of just voting as their party tells them to. For one thing, they have the commitment and time. For another, since they’re appointed for life they can, if they want to, be independent of their party.

Still, the Lords is an unelected body, and that’s a dangerous way to govern.

The Lords has less power than the Commons (don’t ask; it’s as complicated as the rules governing carpets), but it can in some situations slow legislation down and in others amend or kill it. Since the British system gives a hell of a lot of power to the party that holds a majority in the Commons, the Lords is the only brake the system has. The current gridlock in the U.S. has made me understand what’s wrong with the checks and balances system the U.S. Constitution created. All it takes is one party dedicated to stopping the other for everything to grind to a halt—as long as that party is large enough and ruthless enough. But the British system has made me understand what’s wrong with efficiency. The governing party has a huge amount of power, which can be equally destructive if the governing party’s ruthless enough. The Lords is the one place it may (emphasis on may) not entirely control. Unless it’s in office long enough to stuff it with donors and hacks.

I don’t know what the answer is. But as long as the senior official wears a frilly tie and you can’t stand still on a blue rug, at least we get to laugh about it.

Fighting gay marriage with nuclear weapons, and other fun stuff

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I’ve been unfair to my homeland. Here I’ve been writing about the spidery corners of British politics (I could add other links, but enough) and ignoring the ones in the good ol’ U.S. of A..

I have an excuse. For the past almost ten years I’ve been living in Britain, and it can be hard to spot the spiders when you’re ten years and an ocean away. On top of which, British politics dresses up some (but sadly not all) of its political insanity in ermine and ruffles and wigs, which are always good for a laugh, and what can the U.S. do to rival that? But fair’s fair. Let’s talk about Amurrican spiders. Because if I want something to make fun of, holy batshit, have people in my country ever been getting up to some strange stuff lately.

Strangely relevant photo (just keep reading; it'll almost make sense): Minnie the Moocher and Fast Eddie

Strangely relevant photo (just keep reading; it’ll almost make sense): Minnie the Moocher and Fast Eddie

Let’s start with Ted Cruz, who’s running for president in the Republican primary. In August 2015 he told a crowd of cheering supporters that the Southern states should build a nuclear bomb to protect their Christian beliefs. Or maybe it was their right to those beliefs. Subtle difference. Either way, it seems an odd way to wage the battle of beliefs. But it seems gays, lesbians, transsexuals, and bisexuals are persecuting Christians by, you know, getting married and having sex (or more likely the other way around) and then making toast together in the morning and instead of being all lovey dovey like people who are just going out, the married ones are all rumply over their toast and if they talk at all it’s about the cat. If they’re lesbians. Lesbians are known for having cats. There. Now I’ve let you in on our big secret (if, of course, you’re not already lesbian; if you are, you know). Wild Thing and I also have two dogs, so I’m not sure if we’re busting a stereotype or falling right into it. I also don’t know what gay men or transsexuals do to parallel that, so I won’t speculate on what they talk about in the morning. I will say that I personally made toast just yesterday—not for myself but for Wild Thing. I ate oatmeal. With fruit. I’m not sure if Mr. Cruz understands the subtleties this indicates in our relationship or if he cares, but believe me, this is important information.

For the record, we’re not married but we do have a civil partnership. And we’re usually quite civil, even if we don’t always eat the same breakfast. All relationships have these little hiccups now and then.

Okay, full disclosure: I wrote “yesterday” in the last paragraph, but what I really mean is that it was yesterday when I wrote the sentence. It’s now long past. And I’m in Britain, where my toaster and I don’t threaten Mr. Cruz quite as directly as we did when we lived in Minneapolis. But still, our toast is a sign of how seriously civic morality has deteriorated. I have no doubt that some Christian lost his or her faith as I was spreading the butter. As a direct result of what I did.

Damn, I’m powerful.

Cruz also said Christians were being lynched. Presumably by gays, although his wording leaves it ambiguous. Does he understand what the word lynched means? That it’s a real thing that was done to real people of the black persuasion by god-fearing Christian people of the white persuasion? That it was done to terrify an entire community and maintain power? Or does he just think it’s a powerful word and he wants it on his side?

It’s not easy to make fun of this stuff. He’s already gone past exaggeration. He’s gone past absurdity. He’d make a great humor writer if only he had a sense of humor, but as far as I can tell he doesn’t.

Cruz, by the way, has promised that if he’s elected president he’ll ban gluten-free MREs (meals ready to eat—the prepacked stuff soldiers eat in the field) in the military, because they’re politically correct nonsense. That’ll pose a serious problem if he gets elected, because but the military doesn’t offer gluten-free MREs.

Be careful what you promise, Ted, because they’ll be hard to ban.

Personally, if I’m elected president I’m going to keep the army from using frilly pink uniforms. They’re undignified. Besides, I never did like pink. I don’t see why the army can’t humor me on this.

In the meantime, either the good senator himself or his campaign hired an “adult film” actress (as the news story delicately puts it) for a campaign video.

But I don’t want to pick on Cruz alone. Those just happen to be the stories that rose to the top of the cess pool. So let’s consider Texas pastor Rick Scarborough who announced he’d be willing to be burned to death to fight gay marriage. If he said how that would help, I missed it. The same article also mentions a couple who said they’d get a divorce if gay marriage was legalized.

That’ll show ‘em.

None of them said anything about toast. It may be too perverse for their tender sensibilities.

And then there’s Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who’s so fired up about the threat gay marriage poses to the Great State that he’s trying to get the word spouse taken off the death certificate of a man who married his partner in a different state but died in Texas. I’m glad to know he hasn’t lost his perspective on what matters in life. And death.

Mr. Paxton himself is under indictment of securities fraud.

So there you have it: my random round-up of American political insanity. It lacks wigs and ruffles, and sometimes it’s hard to read it and keep laughing, but I do my best. Hope I haven’t put you off your toast.

The war on imaginary drugs, U.K. style

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What catches a politician’s attention even more than drugs? Why, the chance to appear in public pontificating about drugs, that’s what. And that’s how a Member of Parliament got scammed into publicly condemning an imaginary drug.

You can’t make this stuff up. Or—well, yes, somebody did, but I couldn’t. The best I can do is look on in amazement. The human imagination is endless. Not to mention bizarre.

Back in 1997, David Amess, a Conservative MP representing Basildon, filmed a video condemning a drug called Cake. Which does not now and never has existed. That left him so impressed with his own expertise that he got up in Parliament to ask what the government planned to do about the stuff.

Irrelevant Photo: Sometimes I feel like I'm being watched. That's Moose on the left and Minnie the Moocher on the right. And no, they can't come in.

Irrelevant Photo: Sometimes I feel like I’m being watched. That’s Moose on the left and Minnie the Moocher on the right. And no, they can’t come in.

Cake was invented—if an imaginary substance can be invented—by a TV show, Brass Eye, which among other things satirized moral panics. You made your point there, folks. It doesn’t take much to start one. The drug was also supposed to give users a bloated neck because they retained water and to distort the user’s perception of time by affecting a part of the brain called Shatner’s bassoon. Now, at that point some of us might feel a slight tug on one leg and think, Someone’s pulling that. We might do a bit of research or plug Shatner’s bassoon into Google or, y’know, ask a relative or neighbor who has some first- (or at least third-) hand knowledge of drugs if they’d ever heard of the stuff. But not the intrepid (I think that should technically be the Hono[u]rable) Mr. Amess. He just got up and condemned it as “a big yellow death bullet” and he mentioned that unhappy users were called custard gannets.

Excuse me for a minute. I’m laughing too hard to type. Custard gannets? Can’t you imagine the scene in the Brass Eye writers’ room where someone says, “Let’s call them custard gannets,” and the only sensible (or at least momentarily sober) person in the room says, “Oh, come on, you can’t call them that. Nobody’ll believe it.” But then the sensible person goes out for a cup of tea or—who knows—a shot of much-needed vodka and they quick put it to a vote and custard gannet it is. And poor Mr. Amess not only believes it, he talks about them on video and in the House of Commons.

Of such stuff are great political careers made.

His great moment came in October 2015 (which is why this admittedly old story re-surfaced), when he has appointed to co-chair a committee to shape the government’s new drug policy—the Bill Committee on Psychoactive Drugs. The bill they were considering has since passed and is expected to be signed by the Queen—also, I’m sure, an expert on drugs—in April. It makes formerly legal highs illegal and has been much criticized for being too broad. The substances that will become illegal include including laughing gas and poppers, and one brave soul got up in the House of Lords to say he uses poppers, which have a reputation for giving the user a sexual rush. A fair number of gay men do use them. I’m not sure how many, but enough that even I know about them, and being female and all I don’t hang out where I assume they’re used. For all I know even—gasp, wheeze—straight people use them. I also have no idea what, if anything, they do for women. Remember, I’m 603 years old and can’t be expected to do first-hand research on the subject. If you want to find out, you’ll have to do your own. What I can say is that sexual chemistry works differently in women than in men, as the makers of Viagra could explain. They’d have a second profitable drug if only it were that simple. So I’m guessing they don’t do much for women, but if I’m wrong do let me know.

Where were we?

The bill is so broad that according to the Independent it may accidentally ban marker pens, some glues, pheromone products, and lots of other fun stuff. It has to specifically exclude a few safe psychoactive substances like alcohol, and tobacco. And caffeine. Mind you, I won’t quibble about excluding caffeine. It’s not good for you but I know for a fact that it’s good for me, especially first thing in the morning, and it needs to stay legal. I don’t like breaking laws before noon. But proving that alcohol or tobacco do less damage than poppers or laughing gas—or cake—is going to take some fancy footwork.

So there you have it. Another great moment in politics. My thanks to P., who sent me the links. Without his high-minded civic action I’d have lived out the rest of my days not knowing how easy it is to start a moral panic. And how much fun.

Updates on tea and medical bureaucracy

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I get some fantastic comments on this blog and a few of them just have to break out of the comment section. So I’m going to pick up on four of them, two about tea and two about medical bureaucracy.

Tea

If you’re American, you think I already wrote more about tea than is either intellectually or physically possible. But I live in Britain. Tea is the binding force that holds the nation together, and let me tell you it’s looking a little shaky lately, what with Scotland having held a referendum on whether to leave the union and, far more shockingly, so many kids these days getting their caffeine from energy drinks instead of a respectable source like tea. Not to mention the number of tea drinkers allowing themselves to be seduced by fancy coffee and if that isn’t enough the possibility that Scotland will hold another referendum in the (less than immediate) future.

Screamingly irrelevant photo: fall berries. I'm not even sure what they are.

Screamingly irrelevant photo: Fall berries. I’m not sure what they are but I don’t recommend tasting them.

And I’m not sure how the Welsh feel about referendums and secession. Or even whether some purist is going to tell me that the plural is referenda.

So, yeah. We need our tea. And we need to make it right. Which brings me to the point—and yes, there is one. Or two actually. You only had to wait.

J. tells me (and this was in person, not in a blog comment, which is why she’s going by an initial; the tradition may be silly but at least I’m consistent) that I ignored the role of teapots in my last tea post. Sure, I mentioned them, but you can’t make a nice cup of tea, J. says, unless you make it in a pot. Actually, she probably said “a proper cup of tea,” but I was listening to the sense, not the words, sadly. The sense was this: Make it in a cup and it just doesn’t come out right. Even if you only make a single cup, you need to make it in the pot and then pour it into the cup.

Why? Because it’s not a proper cup of tea otherwise, and if it’s not a proper cup of tea it’s not a nice cup of tea. And if it’s not a nice cup of tea, Scotland might just spin out into the North Sea, leaving the northern edge of England a ragged tear (pronounced tare; people may or may not weep about this, but it’s not what we’re talking about) across the land.

That’s not intended, by the way, as a comment on whether Scottish independence is a good idea. I could argue both sides of the proposition with equal passion. But the spinning into the North Sea? That’s just, you know, a fact.

Oh, and the pot has to be warm. Because the tea will brew better.

J.’s of the bone china school of tea drinking. Because it tastes better that way. It doesn’t have to be a fussy little cup and saucer—a mug’s fine—but for her it has to be made of china. Me? I like a heavier mug, but I try not to argue religion with friends.

So that’s one point. And then in the comment section, helenwood wrote about a job she had long ago, working for a tea importer, pouring water over the leaves so the tasters could sip and spit. But that wasn’t what grossed her out—it was that the tea leaves scattered on the warehouse floor, and presumably walked through by one and all, ended up in teabags.

If anything’s going to convert me to leaf tea, that would do it.

Medical bureaucracies

Moving on, then, from a serious topic to the trivia of our lives, we come to what I wrote about medicine in the U.K.

Ianbcross, a doctor who’s worked in the National Health System, commented that the Choose and Book system gives patients a code so they can make an appointment with a specialist online or by phone. “If there are no appointments available,” he writes, “it is up to the hospital to find one for you. You decide whether to accept it or not. This is for routine stuff. If your doc thinks you might have cancer, you get a two week wait appointment from the hospital. Less choice for you, but as soon as they can, they fit you in. Emergencies go directly to hospital, without passing GO, of course.”

Well, this is a guy who knows the system, and his comment made me wonder if I’d misremembered my experiences and Wild Thing’s. So I did what any sane blogger would do: I took a small and unscientific survey (I’ve stolen that phrase; it’s nice, isn’t it?) and came up with the following revelation: Our local surgery (that’s a doctor’s office if you’re American) is all set up so you can use the Click and Book system, but they don’t tell you about it. If you ask to use it, they’re happy to let you use it. But if you don’t already know about it, you can’t ask. So you sit around waiting for that letter.

Unless—as happened to me recently—you get a phone call. From the wrong hospital. But never mind, it was a phone call and it came quickly.

When I acted as an advocate for our neighbor, it wasn’t about getting an appointment but about shaking loose the report from an appointment she’d already had so she could (a) find out what was wrong and (b) do something about it. The doctor had dictated the letter and there it sat, waiting to be typed. And as far as I could tell there it was going to sit and wait until pine trees grew in hell.

The practice manager and I had a leave-it-with-me conversation, and I left it with her until the end of the day, when I called back. Which reminds me to mention that the NHS has a wonderful service called PALS, which stands for Patient Advocacy SomethingWithAnL SomethingWithAnS, not (as it did when I was a kid in New York) the Police Athletic League. I called PALS just after I talked with the practice manager. I suspect it’s owed the credit for getting that letter in the mail. I heard a rumor the service’s funding is going to be cut. I hope it’s not true, because the idea that within an inevitably bureaucratic system are people whose job is to make a nuisance of themselves when things aren’t working for the patient? That’s inspired.

In another comment, Dan Antion reminded me that in the U.S. the first questions anyone medical asks are about your coverage. If you’re not American, you may need that translated: Do you have insurance? Who’s your provider? What plan are you on (secondary translation: does your insurance plan cover this procedure)? And so on. In other words, everyone talks money while you bleed onto the floor, because money is what matters. (Note to the current U.K. government: Are you sure you don’t want to rethink that whole privatization of the NHS thing?)

And if anyone in Britain thinks it’s just the NHS that has unacceptable delays, he tells the story of a friend with a life-threatening condition who needed surgery and was told she couldn’t be seen for six to eight weeks.

The thing about the NHS is that until the current round of disorganizations were introduced, it’s been a unified system, so people talk about unacceptable delays, and newspapers write about them, and word generally gets passed around and everyone’s outraged and wants something done about it, which creates pressure to actually do something. When emergency rooms keep people waiting for more than four hours, it’s considered unacceptable. In the U.S., my father was left waiting in the emergency room for, if I remember right, seventeen hours. With meningitis. At the age of ninety. And he had good insurance. We were furious, but it was business as usual and didn’t tarnish the hospital’s reputation, or the U.S. medical system’s.

A very British sex scandal

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I wasn’t going to write about this. Notes isn’t a political blog. And it isn’t a sex blog. But then it occurred to me that what we have here is a particularly British political scandal and—well, I’ve talked myself out of posting this several times, and then talked myself back into it. But it looks like I am going to post it, so I’ll paste an, um, awkward position warning on it and leave it up to you whether to read on.

C’mon, how many of you are really going to stop there?

Since we're on a tacky subject, I thought I'd toss in a photo of tacky stuff on sale in Swannage last summer. Do you really want to read on?

Since we’re on a tacky subject, I thought I’d toss in a photo of tacky stuff on sale in Swannage last summer.

Our story begins before the British 2010 election, when Lord Ashcroft—who probably has a first name but doesn’t need to use it because, good lord, he’s a lord—gave some money to the Conservative Party. And when I say “some,” I mean something in the neighborhood of £8 million. (“As you do,” as people here like to say when you couldn’t even remotely.) But when the Conservatives came close enough to winning the election to form a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, the new Prime Minister, David Cameron, didn’t offer Ashcroft the kind of post he (that’s Ashcroft) believed he (that’s Cameron) had promised him (that’s Ashcroft again).

Well, the good lord isn’t a good enemy to have, because he started work on a biography of Cameron, and bits and pieces are now being leaked to the press. I’m coming late to this story, so when I say “now” I mean last week, but that’s close enough between friends, right? One of them claims that Cameron had sex with a pig.

Well, simulated sex. And the pig was dead at the time, for which I’m grateful. I’m sure the pig would have been as well if it had been in any condition to register an opinion. The exact description is that he put “a private part of his anatomy” in the pig’s mouth.

And then ran for office? Well, yes but not right away. This happened when he was still a student at Oxford, a university that as far as I can tell gathers up not only the most brilliant students but also the hopelessly over-privileged ones, and the folks in that second category apparently can’t find anything better to do with themselves than join bizarre clubs that—well, put it this way: If daddy and mommy didn’t have so much money they’d find their asses in jail for carrying on that way but since daddy and mommy do they not only get away with it, they think it’s their right.

That business about jail? That’s not about the pig, it’s about the vandalism one of the clubs is known for.

Then they go on to run the country and look smug on television. And lecture the rest of us on how to behave.

Now that this is leaking out, #piggate is all over Twitter. I mean, who can resist? The real scandals in our lives—the financial shenanigans, the political dittos, the backroom deals that bring the two categories together? Most of us can’t make heads or tails of them, even when they bring down the economy or bankrupt a country or two. But a sex scandal? Oh, hell yes. We’ll read every inch of type about that.

I’ve given you one link to a newspaper article, but they’re endless. If you want more, you’re on your own. In the U.K., all you have to do is google Cameron and pig. In other countries, you may need to add U.K.

Now I’m not claiming that no American politician ever got up to some kind of antics, sexual or otherwise, in college or afterward, but I’m guessing they never joined a (n allegedly) secret society whose initiation ceremony involved simulated sex with a dead pig. It puts the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal to shame for its lack of imagination. The adage in American politics used to be that you never wanted to get caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy. Which tells you (a) how much times have changed and (b) how boring American sex scandals are.

Please tell me if I’m wrong about that. Or tell me anything else that seems appropriate. Or, given the topic here, inappropriate. The world’s a far stranger place than most of us imagine.