Yesterday, in parliament, they voted to reject Theresa May’s deal to exit the EU. I’m not surprised. Most won’t have read it to realise that it didn’t rule out negotiating anything new but was an agreement of how to behave while they negotiated. Or maybe they did and had absolutely no confidence in our being able to negotiate. The reasons for voting against it were varied. Some didn’t like the guarantee not to tear Ireland apart in the process, some don’t want Brexit at all, some want a harder Brexit, some want a softer Brexit. But this is all very confusing to those of us that argued that we should at least decide what Brexit means before triggering Article 50. Mrs May told us that Brexit means Brexit. Therefore, there are opportunistic MPs who can now see that she might have made a complete pig’s ear of it and can see their chance to get their grubby little mitts on the power. There are some who are calling for a general election and others who want a people’s vote (however that might be different from any other kind of vote I’m not sure but maybe a dog’s vote would be more sensible at this point). A people’s vote could be on whether to accept the deal and if the people choose to accept it when parliament has rejected it then parliament will have to vote again and we could be stuck in a perpetual loop of disagreement until Brexit Day, which on the positive side is only two months away, when we will be out without any kind of deal (not because anyone is being mean to us but because that’s the agreement we signed). Theresa May had called this vote in parliament The Meaninful Vote but just before the MPs voted Michael Gove suggested that if they rejected it then there could be renegotiations and so it really was a meaningless vote. Forgive me for being sceptical but I can’t believe anyone is capable of renegotiating something in two months that they have worked on for nearly three years.
The Long Suffering Husband’s solution is to wake up in the shower (Bobby Ewing style) and find out that the last few years hadn’t happened. This was briefly appealing to me, as my last few years have
been pretty awful but then the thought of doing them again is worse.
I suspect that this means that we will be leaving the EU without a deal (no wonder Rees Mogg,the disaster capitalist, was drinking champagne. I’m reminded of Caroline Ahern asking Debbie McGee what first attracted her to the billionaire Paul Daniels) because if I were the EU I wouldn’t renegotiate or put anything on hold. You have to let your children learn from their mistakes.
Meanwhile, Nick Gibb, the education secretary, has been sitting round with his mates and decided that all children should be able to read music by the time they leave primary school. This announcement in The Times last Sunday made me snort my tea (hot water actually but it’s not as poetic) through my nose.
“What kind of music,” I ranted at the LSH, “I mean, treble clef, bass clef, do they have to be able to read ledger lines, accurate rhythms? What about drum music, or guitar tab, or chord charts?”
“I have no idea what you're talking about,” he confessed and so I carried on muttering to myself.
Only about 17% of the population self report as being able to read music well or to a professional standard and 50% say they have no idea at all. This is a task similar to getting the whole country literate in 1847. To do this he is going to give the music hubs a little less than they’ve had to use to pay the pension contributions that became their responsibility last year with no emphasis on training or supporting schools or teachers (the people that have to deliver this ideal)
Maybe I shouldn’t worry though because to go with his announcement a little video became the DfE pinned tweet. It had sound to it and the sound didn’t match the music, with at least three major errors that I could spot (started in bass clef, in a different key and a rhythm inaccuracy). It did make me
laugh but maybe not for the right reasons.
These are interesting times and I’m not really enjoying them.
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