Spread out to my right on the railway bridge: The City, St Paul's and grey Belfast, like a squat bristling sentry at Tower Bridge's approach. On the other side; the London Eye on the South bank and then the Palace over the water.
That mother of all parliaments; that endlessly photogenic clocktower; that one-time beacon of liberty and rectitude (allegedly). But nowadays, that (perhaps imagined) rectitude has been replaced by something else; an almost tangible essence of crime and corruption. And that’s me noticing it coming up from South London mind.
The news today that criminals are at work in the Commons was only surprising because this time, the crimes alleged were the good old fashioned blue collar variety. Larceny was the clear winner in the offences stakes and perhaps my favourite was the case of the two gentlemen attempting to half-inch 10 chairs worth £500 apiece (‘a monkey’ if you know what I mean) from Portcullis House. More front than Southend.
Other notables were more or less discerning in their theft. The filching of a £1,000 candlestick I can understand; it’s a pretty portable piece of swag but the theft of a rug worth £800 from an MP’s office seems more logistically problematic.
Racial assaults behind the Speakers chair; wholesale laptop and sat-nav theft and the possession of hashish; business as usual in the gilded palace of sin apparently. According to judiciously leaked police documents, crime is still on the rise as well.
Nine crimes were reportedly investigated in 2007; 22 in 2008 and then 28 in 2009. The most up-to-date figures for the first nine months of 2010 suggest another good year for Westminster’s criminal fraternity at an already healthy 22 offences including surprisingly, only one death threat against an MP.
And it's not just the Palace that's having a bad hair day journalistically speaking. The London Borough of Westminster was also in the news today when it emerged that there is a 20-year gap between the life expectancies of the rich and the poor in the borough. It seems that the difference between Marylebone and Edgware at one end and Knightsbridge and Belgravia at the other is a brisk fifteen minutes walk or two decades, depending on how you look at it.
It was hard for this Londoner therefore not to feel a little envious of the Egyptians as their news broke on the way home. With Mubarak stepping down; it almost looked as if people power and the whole social networking revolution schtick might finally start making sense for an oppressed nation. In all the world, Tahrir Square was probably the place to be tonight.
Meanwhile, on the evening rush-hour cattle-train to Lewisham, I took cold consolation from imagining that we were on the same line that took Fenian and Trade Unionist Jim Connell home that evening in 1889 when he penned 'The Red Flag'.
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