A few days ago I received a photo of the Queen walking with Daniel Craig, the current James Bond. In speech bubbles James is saying “All of Parliament, Ma’am?”, and the Queen replies “Yes 007, the damn lot of them.”
Over recent months many have felt that the House of Commons has led people to conjure up such fantasies as the above. I think I might have felt similarly angered; but is that the sensible response to a completely unprecedented chaos?
For some years now, and in these pages in particular, I have been going on about ‘Ingredientism’. Ingredientism is as simple as it sounds: what are the elements that make up something in particular? I have been looking at the ingredients that made up the First World War, trying to extract what was necessary for this calamitous event to happen. I am sure that what I call ‘ingredientism’ is called something posher in the academies of history and philosophy. But I could not from henceforth look at anything as something, as a thing in itself.
I had experimented with this in the beginning days of The Big Issue. I started describing homelessness as ‘the tip of the social iceberg’; the presenting problem. That what you saw was the homelessness of a person, but underneath it were all of the variegated elements, ingredients that made it up.
If you look at the crisis, the chaos, the inability of MPs to converge into a coherent mass behind a policy or programme, you have to realise that it was a long time coming. That like the First World War, or homelessness, dozens of things had to happen for anything to happen.
The chaos is completely predictable, but probably also avoidable. Looking back to when David Cameron led us into a referendum, absolutely convinced that he would get his ‘remain’ mandate, and could shut up his Eurosceptics, he provided many of the ingredients that make up the kerfuffle of the current House of Commons.