 Jacob Rees Mogg has some pretty reaction reviews from climate skepticism to opposition to abortion, but his latest political intervention is not so much right wing as downright stupid. So the context, since the coronavirus lockdown, MPs have for the first time been able to intervene in debates and vote remotely from home. The system worked well. MPs didn't need to traverse the country potentially spreading the virus and MPs in vulnerable categories would be able to shield. But there was a problem. Boris Johnson didn't like standing up at PMQs without a jeering crowd behind him. When the room was silent, all of his personal inadequacies were far more on show. So in order to reintroduce the public school jeering that makes him feel so good, so comfortable, so big in himself, Rees Mogg has called for Parliament to be convened in person once again. That happened this week. And we saw some pretty ridiculous scenes as MPs were forced to queue at a two metre distance in a line which was over one kilometre long. Let's look at some of the images from that moment here. There was a 90 minute queue. These are people, these are quite well paid people. So their time is somewhat valuable. This is what the queue looked like. So it's kind of like an airport. They've turned that huge historic building into one big queue. It goes everywhere. We can see people queuing in the next image, I think. So that's it. That's it for the people. And that's them standing outside. They had to use every single part of the parliamentary estate. And unfortunately, it didn't seem like they were able to socially distance. Let's look here at the MPs, not quite managing to keep two metres apart. Now, this is already ridiculous. It means that MPs have to traverse across the country. And obviously MPs have two homes, one in their constituents and one in London. If we don't want coronavirus to be spreading from low infection places to high infection places, it's probably better to avoid huge travels from across the whole nation. Also, you're going to get quite a lot of people, often older people, in a small space. Ridiculous. But it got even worse, in fact, when a local Sharma, the business secretary, stood up in parliament on Wednesday and showed a certain set of symptoms. We'll have retrospective effect, so as to provide as much relief to businesses as possible. And where this is the case, we have already announced dates from which the measures will start. So let me turn to corporate restructurings. This is the permanent corporate restructuring package of measures, which have previously been consulted on. As colleagues will know, these measures were consulted on back in 2016. The government advice is to self-isolate as soon as you get any kind of symptoms. So, a look at Sharma, the business secretary, he often leads the Downing Street Briefings, is standing there in the Commons Chamber with a bunch of MPs, often very old, all of them supposedly travelling to their constituencies on the weekend. And he's there wiping his brow, sweating. The guy looks really ill. And he looks really ill with a fever, which is what you're supposed to self-isolate for. So once that image went out, Alok Sharma had to go into self-isolation. The whole of Westminster completely freaked out. It turned out that Alok Sharma hadn't got coronavirus. He tested negative. Apparently he'd just eaten some dodgy salmon. But this shows how vulnerable they all are now, and how the central institution of our state is ready to collapse the moment someone gets a fever, because Jacob Rees-Mogg wanted some people cheering in the background when Boris Johnson has to face Keir Starma at PMQs. Aaron, you couldn't make it up. No, it's like, you know, there's sort of like action films and they're like the president and the vice president can never be on the same plane. That's also actually true, because obviously you need a commander in chief if one of them dies, well, if the president dies, the vice president's somewhere else, and there's an element of continuity with the running of the state. What basically Jacob Rees-Mogg has done here is voluntarily put the entire legislature in a particular area and subject them to potentially the equivalent of a low-grade biological weapon. People were worried 15 years ago about anthrax attacks and anthrax going through, justifiably, through people's letterbox and so on in the aftermath of 9-11. Honestly, this is no different. Like, an MP could die because of this. An MP could be hospitalised. I mean, statistically, it's quite likely that a staffer will be hospitalised as a result of this. And for what? And like you said, it's for a few cheers. That's what we know, isn't it? People say it will play well with the Daily Mail. No, if people start going to hospital, it won't. And I think here's a few things. Firstly, if you've got an MP and you've made a complaint or you're trying to get help from them, you've not heard from them, and you see them wasting their time for two, three hours doing nothing, you're thinking, wow, I mean, that is such a gift for Labour at the next general election on the doorstep. You have a Tory MP, because they care more about queuing and virtue signalling to the Daily Mail than to helping you out. That's the first thing. And secondly, we've often been saying, as has much the British media, well, Britain's GDP per capita per hour, because productivity hasn't moved for around 12 years. We've called this the productivity puzzle. Why can't Britain produce more working the same? Basically, the same amount of work has produced the same amount of output for about 12 years. That's not meant to happen normally with capitalism. It's not really happened for like 200 years. And when you see Jacob Rees-Mogg making people line up like Lemmings in Westminster to form a mile long queue, you probably then begin to suspect the reason why we haven't had increased productivity for the last 12 years is because these idiots are running the country. Is it any surprise we've got flatlining productivity when the political imperative here is to make people stand in the heat doing nothing and be subject to the equivalent of a low-grade biological weapon? Just so you get maybe a good page three in the Daily Mail. That's the people around this country. That's why Britain increasingly, in many aspects, including coronavirus, resembles a developing country. I don't like to say it, but that's because that's explicable because people like Jacob Rees-Mogg have these political priorities. And you have to wonder how far will it go? I mean, you also, I mean, the thing to note is you said it like a hypothetical, you know, an MP could be hospitalized or could die. I mean, this isn't a wild thing to speculate about because the Prime Minister nearly died. He got coronavirus. He had to go to ICU. The guy nearly died. And now all of these people from the same demographic as him are being forced to go into really old building, you know, small corridors. I doubt it's particularly well ventilated just because Boris Johnson wants some people behind him to make some positive noises. Bizarre. And it is also, it's not just their health that is at risk. It is their constituents because you are having people who are coming into to London. They're travelling into the House of the Parliament. They're standing quite close to people in those queues, as you saw in that image. And then they're going to be going back to their constituencies. Maybe they're driving, maybe they're taking the train. We don't we don't know. But presumably for an MP to do their job, they're going to end up meeting quite a lot of people out and about. And I mean, the serious point here, because I do think this is partly about Boris Johnson wanting people in the background when he faces Keir Starmer. But it is also and probably more fundamentally that what the conservatives want to do is to force people back into their workplaces, even if it's unsafe. So the whole point of easing the lockdown, the way that Boris Johnson wanted to do it, the way he has done it, is he saying, look, even if you feel a bit unsafe going into work, even if you can't keep the two meter rule, even if it feels a bit dangerous, you should do it anyway. And also, even even if you think you might be able to work from home, even if it seems completely unreasonable for your boss to demand you come in potentially because he wants to oversee you working because he doesn't think that you're disciplined enough working from home. If your boss wants to do it, even if it's a crazy, ridiculous idea, you should still do it. So I mean, they are leading by example in a way because the example they want to set is even if it seems completely irrational and completely dangerous to go into work, you should do it anyway. That's the message they're sending out. And Boris Johnson, he's already immune. Matt Hancock, he's already immune. So they are willing to, they're safe. So what they're willing to do is risk the health of all the MPs in parliament and all their constituents purely to prove a point, which is that even if you don't want to go to work, feeling unsafe, you should do it. They want you to do that to help businesses begin to make profits again and so that they can reduce the cost of the furlough, et cetera, et cetera. But it's bad for public health. It's bad for MPs health. And the reason they're doing it is, I mean, disgraceful.