Plane Arseholes

One of my friends once explained to me that he didn't have an inner child, but an inner Scargill. This id would come out raging at such times as he persused the back pages of the Spectator ("the champagne's only £2398473 per glass, and served off tables comprised of the flayed preserved bodies of various poor people who died at Peterloo. Divine, dahling!"), watched BBC documentaries or dramas involving Oxbridge graduates with surnames that sounded suspiciously familiar to those of the producers, or read anything by Henry Porter. Yeah, okay. The last one is me projecting.

Nonetheless, yesterday I knew exactly what he meant as normal service chez Smith was interrupted by the news that a couple of Nathan Barleys (otherwise known as the Plane Stupid pressure group) had managed to get onto the roof of the House of Commons, a tactic which is, like, soooooo 2004 as any fule kno. The aim of this brave act of non-self promotion was to inform us that the proletariat are ruining the environment for everyone by using planes to go on holiday - probably to some god-awful place where they'll just get drunk and sit around with hankerchiefs on their heads all day burping along to "Is This The Way To Amorillo." Disgusting.

Of course, it's different when the likes of these brave protesters go away, as they travel on a carbon neutral yacht that daddy bought them on their 21st. Frankly, it's pure selfishness on the part of the rest of us that we lacked this foresight and we should take our medicine accordingly and holiday in Bognor, leaving the plains of Tuscany unbesmirched by our slightly uncouth presence. Actually, just read Brendan O'Neill on the subject.

The group that popularised the plonkers-on-the-roof motif were, lest we forget, Fathers4Justice (ruh roh, here comes my Inner Andrea Dworkin), so for starters I'd be extremely suspicious of any organisation that sought to emulate the PR strategy of that particular shower of wankers. I'm also deeply sceptical regarding their contention that they managed to march through security with three huge banners with the words "POOR PEOPLE, KNOW YOUR LIMITS" and easily found their way to the roof via a fire escape. Now, I'd worked in the Commons for six and a half years by the time I'd left and even given that my sense of direction is famously bad, there is absolutely no way even now I'd be able to negotiate my way to the roof via Committee Corridor. They had insider help alright.

And lo! as the words "independent review into security" march with bowel-clenching inevitability in the general direction of our political discourse, it is worth remembering that the whole point of allowing anyone into the House of Commons is so that ordinary people (some of whom have never even been to Tuscany) are allowed in to make representations to their Member of Parliament. As tempting as it is to suggest that anybody with a name like "Jeremy" is prohibited from entering the building on the offchance he wants to rip his £500 chinos by clambering all over the roof like an arsehole, in the interests of democracy even I can see that this is not really on.

The moral of this ramble, folks, is: you can never completely remove the risk that this will happen especially if some bag-carrier was assisting them, but given that the only people they were going to hurt were themselves if one of them accidentally did a Mattie Storin, well ... it's a risk that I for one am willing for them to take In The Interests Of Democracy [voice quivers, wipes away a tear].

Better access to politicians for all, and the remote possibility that a couple of chinless wonders are removed from the gene pool: what's not to like?