The Humming Chorus

Despite the title of this blog it has nothing to do with Puccini or opera - unless you regard the long-running saga of the Brown administration as a soap opera in itself. Personally, I am more inclined to regard it as a cross between a Farce and a Tragedy.

The Humming Chorus refers to those old stagers on the Labour Front Bench - Straw, Harman, Brown, Browne, darling et al - who really, really know the game is up but stubbornly refuse to accept the fact. Every time they get caught in a lie or face a difficult situation,they behave like children; hugging their knees and humming loudly to shut out an awkward parent or teacher. Yesterday, for instance, a group of fairly savvy Peers with not inconsiderable experience of running companies and countries, delivered its verdict on the net effect of immigration on the UK. They did so having studied the subject in some depth for the previous six months and taken evidence from various groups, officials and academics who specialise in immigration. Their considered view was that immigration has zero beneficial effect on the economy of this country; that, indeed, for many working people it has a negative impact because it is their jobs and small businesses that the flood of cheap labour threatens. And that, contrary to the government's claims that immigrants contribute £6 billion to the economy, once the cost of housing,educating and caring for them is factored in, we are probably paying them for the privilege of their being allowed to live and work here.
Guess what. No sooner had the report been published than up popped Liam Byrne on the radio to provide the government's answer. He did so in the now time-honoured fashion of any Labour minister caught out being economical with the truth - he put his hands over his ears, refused to answer any direct questions and then repeated the self-same £6 billion claim that their Lordships had so comprehensively demolished in their report.

Little Liam was followed by Hummer Number 2; that venerable bass baritone Jack Straw, of whom it has frequently been said that no man was more appositely named. Straw was there to put the government's position on law'n'order. A stream of callers made it clear that they were both frightened and bemused by the levels of violent crime in this country. Straw's response was - you guessed it - to clamp his hands firmly over his ears and start humming a string of statistics that proved the complete opposite. It didn't matter which part of the country the caller was from, Straw had the statistics to prove that their town, parish, borough, manor, demesne or county had never been so crime-free;its citizens able to walk the streets in perfect safety, leave their front doors unlocked and their children unguarded.

That this was utter bollocks was proven most effectively next day by pictures of Harriet Harman (or should that be Harperson?) walking the streets of Peckham, accompanied by a set of beautifully diverse police officers, but still sufficiently frit to be attired in a Kevlar stab vest. This act, surprisingly enough, did not have the reassuring effect her advisers had told her it would. In fact, many Peckham residents probaly wondered where they could obtain their own police escort and stab vest so that they could stroll just as insouciantly through their native borough. Of course, once the idiocy of this stunt had been explained to the dim-witted Ms Harman - presumably by another adviser with more than just pea-soup for brains - she hurriedly did the rounds of the radio talk shows to explain her actions. When it became obvious that she had made a prat of herself and no one was going to be persuaded otherwise, she did the hand over ear thing and started humming somewhere in the register between alto and tenor.
By the end of the day,there was such a hum coming from my radio that it had started to sound more like an old crystal set than a state-of-the-art DAB digital. Fortunately, the whine disappeared altogether once the last politician had gone about their business.