Today MPs will gather in Westminster for the beginning of a new parliament. Let’s hope the cleaners have taken the opportunity to fumigate the place.
A deep clean, however, will not have been enough to purify the Palace of Westminster. Although it thinks of itself as the ‘mother of Parliaments’, it is anything but.
From those green benches, decisions were taken which allowed the world to be despoiled, nations to be made subservient, and people – at home and abroad – to be subjugated. And let us not fool ourselves that these injustices belong to history, as people here well know.
To take one example: British democracy has made paupers of its own people. In Britain today, more than one in five are living in poverty. Of those, eight million are working-age adults, four million children, and two million pensioners.
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In the north of Ireland, the figures show that almost 350,000 people are living in ‘relative’ poverty. More than 270,000 are living in ‘absolute’ poverty. And one in four of our children here is living in........