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I've got a bone to pick with Westminster

Michael Bywater
Sunday 14 December 1997 00:02 GMT
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I Think we are going to have to reach for our weapons. A shot- loaded singletail blacksnake whip is a good idea, or a well-balanced billy- club, although a boiled and varnished beef-bone will do the trick just as well. Whatever you choose, the time for talking is now past. The smug have taken over from the savage, but the result is just the same: we are being treated like children by people who in nature would barely have the right to speak to us without being spoken to first, and we now have to take the law into our own hands.

We missed our chance with the savages. We let them off the hook, and we let their chums off the hook too. Ernest Saunders is still roaming the streets like a second-rank walk-on from a low-budget shudder movie, but we can't be bothered with Ernest now

We have bigger fish to fry, now. Remember how you felt earlier this year, when we kicked the savages out to stumble around the streets, unsteady on their flabby legs, their fishy paunches flapping in their shyster suits? Remember the feeling that a new dawn had broken, that a mini-Camelot had come to Downing Street? It was bollocks, that feeling, a category mistake. We confused schadenfreude with triumph, and now the smug have crept on their low, well-greased bellies under the gap in our defences, and are punishing us, just like they always wanted to do.

I had a warning from God the other day, although I didn't identify it as a warning when it happened. I just thought it was a carnal whim which, like all of its kind, should be acted upon with reckless immediacy. I was in the butcher's, and I saw meat. Big meat. Big, fat-veined, ripe meat on the bone. T-bone steaks. I had gone in for something metropolitan and poncey, suited to my station as a metropolitan ponce: duck breasts, boned quails, andouillettes ... something to be delicately steamed and nibbled at with a char-grilled shitake mushroom and a glass of Ty-Nant.

But then I saw the T-bones. "T-bones!" I shouted, startling a harmless old man blowing his Christmas heating bonus on a pound of bacon and a hip-bone for his dog (or possibly for his arthritic wife). "Give me T- bones! And a jar of Muriel's 'Afterburner' brand pickled onions! And dripping! Do you do dripping? Give me some! And lard!"

It was wonderful. I ate the T-bone dripping with blood (stabbed myself in the chest, sharpening my survival knife naked on a slippery whetstone), crunched up with onions, washed down with onion vinegar, and it did me good. I could feel it going straight to my balls, and by the end of it I was dizzy with testosterone, roaring and shouting, stinking of the rut while I gnawed at the bone. It was like hand-to-hand combat, like a wild slut orgy, like vengeance, like food ...

And the next day the smugs banned T-bone.

This is the end. It's nothing to do with science, of course. We know the sort of people who become "government scientists". We were at school with them. And they know that nobody ever got into trouble for saying no, for not taking the risk, for playing it safe. Nor is it anything to do with our health. A friend of mine had an operation last week to correct a post-surgical problem ... and was left more or less unattended for 36 hours, dehydrating, no drugs, drifting in and out of consciousness, slowly dying. The consultant was in London. The registrar was on holiday. The other registrar was at a conference. The professor was at a conference. The other consultant was unavailable. The house surgeon was ... well, underqualified, just starting out, overworked and anyway this was a casualty ward, not surgical ... and when my friend's husband did finally persuade someone to do something he had to sit there for three hours waiting for a porter to take her to a proper ward. During which time I rang him on his portable phone, to give some moral support, which gave the ward sister an excuse to shout at him. "Turn that phone off! Turn that phone off! This is a hospital! Can't you see that there are people here dying, for lack of care?"

No; it's not for our health. If Tee-Hee Blair and his sniggardly sidekicks gave jack for our health, they would ban all those things that are really killing us, things that they wouldn't permit to be inflicted upon a fox. Above all else, they would ban management. The hospital has a manager who apparently thinks that he justifies his salary by allowing a major surgical unit to remain effectively unstaffed ... and he's not alone in this criminal stupidity. We live under a cult of management, and since that cult took hold, our commercial, cultural, artistic, scientific and education institutions have been rotting down nicely like mushroom-fields beneath a thick rich loam of purest bullshit. People suffer and die like belly-torn foxes under the strictures of "management". Lives are risked and destroyed so that "management" can have its way. The savages believed that business, with its central ethic of getting as much as you can for as little as you can get away with, was the only workable model for our lives; and the smugs show little sign of changing that.

Instead they fanny about with contemptible little laws and reflex panics, like an impotent and useless man wandering the corridors with a piece of paper, trying to look busy. "We care about you," they say; "Look! We banned beef on the bone!"

The worst thing is that it shows what they really think of us, the depth of contempt in which we are held. That's why we should ignore the ban on bones. Instead we should buy them all up. Sharpen them. And then march on Westminster.

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