Another 'thank fuck I left the UK' moment, brought to you in association with the British Parliament.

It's fucked. It really is.

As I mention from time to time I didn't actually leave Britain to escape and in a way I feel kind of saddened that I don't get homesick. In fact, as I mentioned the day I started this blog, I felt a bit guilty for looking out of the window as Heathrow went backwards and downwards and thinking thank fuck for that. My wife wanted to be in Australia for lots of reasons, family among them, so that got me on the plane. But when it came to the actual leaving bit of leaving I just couldn't get worked up about waving good bye to the land of my birth in the same way that it was hard to say good bye to people that I care about. I'm fond of the place, I'd like to go back sometime and I certainly don't want to see it ruined - well, more ruined than the fuckwits in charge have already made it - but I just can't seem to generate any feeling resembling homesickness or regret. Mostly it was and still is thank fuck. And this evening it's thank fuck again because of Westminster blowing the opportunity to reform itself in the wake of the expenses scandal and put oversight back where it belongs - in the hands of the electorate. Instead it's to be moved one stage further away and put in the hands of a supposedly independent regulator.

Yes, it's the sort of stupid, pointless, undemocratic, wank of a solution that anyone with a brain would half expect Gordon Clown to come up with anyway, but what really adds a dash of shit to the swine flu infested ham sandwich is that both Cameron and Clegg agreed to this as well. So, just as with the EU, all main parties are agreed and the British people have no choice in the matter at all, though some say this is by design rather than ineptitude, and I can't think of anything to point to that says they're wrong other than Hanlon's razor. Open primaries, recalls, complete transparency of MPs' expenditure, any chance the House approves? Nah, we'll just have different rules with a different set of boundaries to be pushed and still no thought given to whether the money is a justifiable expense, just whether it's claimable. And this in turn is to be overseen by a different body independent of the House of Commons, which we can be quite confident won't be the Fees Office by another name and staffed with the same people plus assorted party placemen and cronies. Sure, that's sooooo unlikely to happen, isn't it? Bollocks. It's fucked of course, and between resigning Speakers, victorious Gurkhas, the ongoing economic issues and the naming of yet more troughing MPs* the media, with the odd exception, seems to have given no thought about it whatsoever. Did someone say parliamentarians are going to emerge from this even less accountable to the people who employ and fund the, than before... oooooh shiny shiny, what were we saying?

So in short, fucked. Whether irreparably and irredeemably fucked or just temporarily fucked remains to be seen and depends a lot on what the minor parties and which ones can make of it. Some (Greens, BNP) are just as bad or even worse than the fucktards running things now, others are worth a vote in European elections but I probably wouldn't support them when the general election is called, and neither they nor the LPUK, my likely first choice, really have a prayer of forming a government and achieving any real change. A seat or two maybe, and even then I only get that feeling in my more optimistic moments, and if this blog doesn't seem very optimistic it's because right now I'm not. The glass is half empty, and what's been left in it looks and smells suspiciously like piss.

It makes me want to weep, it really does. But more than that it makes me think thank fuck I got on that plane.

*Jim Sheridan, shit that he is for buying a big, fuck off plasma TV, a leather bed and a heap of furniture out of the taxpayers' pockets, marks himself to be so much worse:

Mr Sheridan yesterday said he would vote for a candidate to replace Mr Martin who would ban sketch writers from the Commons.

Yes, I'm sure you'd just love to turn off one more light so that it's a little easier for you to keep your expense claims and any other iffy behaviour in the dark. If you come down with fungal chopper rot it couldn't have happened to a more deserving shit munching freeloading bastard.