Leaking Birds, Crossing Fingers, Lying Lips

The new Scottish Nationalist MP for Arbroath and Broughty Ferry, Lara Bird, thought she was being clever or radical during her induction into the House of Commons last month. Required by law to swear the Oath of Allegiance to His Majesty the King (which is good and proper), she made a trite observation that her real loyalty was to her constituents, while apparently crossing her fingers during the oath itself. While I am a staunch royalist, I concede that a case can be made for republican government, but crossing one’s fingers during a promise strikes me as childish. Lara Bird, whose real name is Pyla Lara Bird-Leakey, is an English barrister and has also been accused of exaggerating a Scottish accent in order to impress her constituents. Ms Bird-Leakey presumably thinks it’s okay to break an oath if one’s fingers are crossed, or to make a promise and not really mean it. I suspect that her childishness and level of honesty will make her feel very much at home at Westminster, despite nationalist sympathies. Afterward the finger-crossing, she may have run outside to have a much deserved game or tig or hopscotch.

The quality of our parliamentary representatives seems woefully poor, and our legislators’ supplies of common sense depressingly low. Bird-Leakey is just one more in a long and depressing roll call of the ignorant, the impious, incompetent and inexperienced who mismanage our national decline. Whatever our views on Bird-Leakey’s republicanism or attitudes to keeping one’s word, a far greater proportion of Members have even less loyalty and reverence for the Greater King, Jesus Christ, to whom each one shall be held to account for the evils committed on their watch.

Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us. He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision. Ps 2:1-4

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