Choosing the recipient of this week’s Hall of Shame award was our most difficult challenge yet, there were so many worthy candidates. But in the end there can be only one.
Or can there?
Proving that here at CoN Towers we have no more idea of the rules or what we’re doing than Brexit Secretary David Davis, this week we’re awarding the Hall of Shame chequebook and pen jointly to Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn.
Theresa May
Theresa May is still relatively new to the post of PM. But her strong pedigree – years of paying her dues as the most authoritarian Home Secretary since ever, with her playful fabrication of stories about immigrants’ cats and deportation of thousands of students on trumped-up evidence – made her eventual appearance at these awards an inevitability.
This week, Theresa has been telling Scotland they can’t have a second independence referendum. After denying Scotland protections in the EU referendum bill that would have prevented them being taken out of the EU against their will, on the grounds that the referendum was only “advisory” and wouldn’t force them to do anything, the Government is now forcing Scotland out of the EU against their will. This has prompted suggestions that, if they’re not allowed a proper referendum, maybe they should have an “advisory” one instead, since those are now treated as “the will of the people.” All the while, No.10 is issuing press releases saying that allowing Scotland to have an independence referendum would be unfair, because they couldn’t know what the new partnership with the EU would look like. Given what the Government is doing to the UK as a whole, Scotland included, this takes either enormous chutzpah or a clanging lack of self-awareness. Either way, Theresa May joins the Hall of Shame this week.
Jeremy Corbyn
Jeremy Corbyn: that Geography teacher you had who could drone for hours about glaciation, yet still inexplicably used to get lost on the way to the staff room. You know the one, the teacher who thought that Hawkwind poster on his classroom wall made him look “cool”? Jeremy Corbyn seems to have got lost on his way to the job of leader of the opposition.
“Real fight starts now” tweeted Mr Corbyn of the passage Article 50 Bill, mere hours after the Commons had finished the fight and gone home, leaving him sadly trailing chalk dust around the empty corridors, trying to find the biscuits.
This week, with the Government in disarray over budget u-turns, David Davis’ woeful therapy session at the Exiting the EU Committee, the passing of the Article 50 Bill, and Scottish, Northern Irish and even Welsh independence being openly discussed, Chopper Corbyn was faced with unmissable opportunities to Hold The Government To Account.
Miss them he did. Pausing only to tweet how disappointed he was that the Article 50 Bill didn’t protect EU citizens already living in the UK, he then decided to lead a rally outside Parliament to protest for those rights. A rally to which he didn’t turn up, having had it pointed out to him that he’d helped the Government ram through the Bill he was now protesting against.
If only he could have been allowed into Parliament to, I don’t know, lead some sort of opposition to the Bill and vote against it instead of for it, things could have been so different. But I suppose that’s just wishful thinking.
Jeremy Corbyn: F-. Bad work. See me.
Artwork by Alexis Taylor
