Please, Turn Out The Lights, Civilization's Done

It's the little things that are the portents. Forget the witterings about the Islamification of Europe, the proliferation of nuclear bombs, wars and famines across the globe as portents of the Four Horsemen, look instead at the tiny events that show how our civlization is disappearing down the plughole, sucked into a vortex of our own gross stupidity.

The Commons is infested with mice. Fair enough, old, Victorian, building, a thousand or two people wandering around, lots of cafeterias and dining rooms, lots of people using take away trays to eat at their desks and so on: sure, there will be mice around. It's even rumoured that the mice have become immune to poison and the pest control people doubt that they'll be able to eradicate them.

Now, given the accumulated human wisdom that is our inheritance as a civilization, what would be a rational thing to do? Why, for example, does damn near every farm in the country have a few cats sunning themselves on the hay bales (and those that don't usually have a couple of terriers scurrying around the yards)? Yes, well done, we'll control the mice by bringing in a predator or two.

Can we do this in the Commons?

The work appears to have forced the mice out into the open. Requests for a House of Commons cat to do its traditional job of catching vermin have been rejected by the "authorities" on health and safety grounds.

Anne McIntosh, Conservative MP for Vale of York, asked for a cat to be introduced after seeing mice in the Commons Tea Room. "I was told it could not because it would get too near the food. So it's all right for the mice to get near the food, but not the cat."

And these are the people who rule us? Not one of the 645 assembled MPs, none of their assistants,  nor the Ministers, none of the trained experts in matters to do with the economy,  society, the running of the world, has had the gumption to suggest that such rules are idiocy? No one has actually, you know, like, taken action? Nipped round to the animal pound and picked up half a dozen 6 month old cats and released them?

I agree you would have to be slightly careful to makke sure than none of the were related to Humphrey as that would indicate that the Executive was imposing itself on the Legislature but that's not all that much of a problem is it?

So, as we can see, none of these people, our elected representatives, all of whom cost us well north of £100,000 a year each, have the brains that God gave to the most rural of country bumpkins. We know of course that every person in Westminster is a sign of yet another village deprived of its idiot but can it really be true that we are ruled by so many who don't even have the wit to talk to that one of the villagers left behind that does have a brain cell?

We're doomed I tell you, doomed.

Will the last sane person in the country please turn the lights out? Yes, it's only a small sign  but they are the ones that most illuminate a civilization. This one's over, toast.