Juju would be tame in House of Commons

FOR those South Africans who are blushing about the antics of the red berets in parliament, perhaps a little history might help?

Parliament has seldom been a polite place. Especially our “parent parliament”, the British House of Commons. Some of the comments made there over the years make Julius Malema seem tame.

Most abusive seems to be former Labour’s Tony Banks (MP from 1983-2005) who once accused Margaret Thatcher of acting “with the sensitivity of a sex-starved boa-constrictor”. He wasn’t censured.

He also once described with impunity, the former Tory MP Terry Dicks as “living proof that a pig’s bladder on the end of a stick can be elected to parliament”.

Less lucky was John Major, who when Prime Minister, was ordered to withdraw his summing-up of Tony Blair, then Opposition leader, as “a dimwit”.

Accusations of lying against a member almost always mean expulsion from the chamber unless withdrawn or amended. Only Winston Churchill got away with describing a lie as a “terminological inexactitude”.

Labour's Tam Dalyell was twice ejected for calling Margaret Thatcher a liar. On one occasion, after describing her as “a sustained brazen deceiver” he went further, adding: “She is a bounder, a liar, a deceiver, a cheat and a crook.” The two of them did not speak to each other for the next 17 years until they “got on famously” when he escorted her at a formal dinner at the Colombian Embassy.

One Labour MP was called to order for saying that a Tory was a member of the SS.

As he withdrew the term, he pretended he thought the letters stood for “silly sod”.

Even those rowdy Australians get boisterous in government. Christopher Pyne holds the record for the most number of times a member has been ejected from the Australian House of Representatives.

Overall, he has been ejected 45 times which includes two suspensions for 24 hours and 43 ejections for one hour.

With all this democratic disrespect, spare a thought for the speakers of parliament who have to preserve order. There is a tradition in Britain that after being elected, a new speaker is physically dragged by other members to the “woolsack”, the traditional seat.

The reason for the dragging results from the speaker being the one who communicates the decisions of parliament to the monarch.

In less tolerant days, a displeased King was known to behead the speaker who carried news of unpopular decisions. Hence the dragging of the speaker, because who wouldn’t be reluctant to accept such a risky role? Talk about shooting the messenger! We are never satisfied. In the early years of our democracy we complained about the sparsely occupied sea of green leather seats and of the sleeping delegates in them. Now that Juju hollers in the hallowed halls, we see red.