The talk today is whether Lindsay Hoyle will survive. That is so wrong, as is the fact that MPs’ safety fears now cloud our politics
A squalid day in parliament. The most important of debates was the most pointless and dishonest. It preached on the high ground and played politics in the mud of the lowest turf. Too many crocodile tears fell for the more than 29,000 people killed in Gaza and the babies’ bodies we are decorously shielded from. The loftier the sentiment, often the sharper the stiletto under the cloak.
Pause a minute, before we plunge headlong into the skulduggery of Westminster protocol, debating apparently tiny verbal differences that would save not one of the many Gazan lives lost yesterday. In another parliament, the Knesset, they were also sitting and voting, and Benjamin Netanyahu was referring to “an overwhelming majority against the attempt to impose on us the establishment of a Palestinian state”. Pause and consider that in the face of the obduracy, the two-state solution desired by most of the world will require united diplomacy and muscle. Now consider how here, this horror was exploited by those jockeying for position at the next election.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
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