Limbo or Purgatory? The only game in town...

Apparently after the last round of bizarre Gilbertian and Sullivanian debates in the Commons, the Speaker remarked that we were ‘in limbo’ regarding Brexit. Jacob Rees-Mugg, the class sneak of the Tory Party, corrected this, saying that limbo was abolished by the Pope some time ago, and he should know, after all? The Pope, I mean. So now all the repentant sinner has to look forward to is purgatory.

I thought I might look these terms up as a matter of attempting to cudgel some kind of brain activity after years of the dumbing down of following British politics. Like all the English language, those words that began as belonging to a given genre, like religion, soon become incorporated into daily speak and we use them regardless, as concepts that clearly exist for us, except we don’t feel obliged to attach them to any given hierarchy any more.

Hence we now think of ‘limbo as “an uncertain period of awaiting a decision or resolution; an intermediate state or condition”  Whereas purgatory is felt to “have the quality of cleansing or purifying”.

In other words, the Catholics did not want sinners to get the idea that they only had to endure a rather long, possibly boring, period of waiting, before a decision would be made to allow them into heaven. So, they changed the rules to include an idea of a pretty tough, painful period in which all your sins have to be purged before they let you in. Readers of this blog will however be delighted to know that, whichever turns out to be correct, they do let you in in the end! What I think the church missed in all this theologising is that it doesn’t happen after death! Oh no, no such luck! Both purgatory and limbo are here with us right now. For populists, it is simply a long and boring wait. A wait that they would prefer to usefully employ by watching back episodes of ‘Strictly’. While for the anti-populist crowd, it is more of a painful purging of whatever lingering hopes of governmental sanity they had left. Choose your position! Choose your weapons. The final dual is only just round the corner: pistols at dawn, and don’t forget to bring a second and a surgeon in case you need your brain lancing at the end!   

As G&S pointed out in ‘Iolanthe’

When in that House M.P.'s divide,

  If they've a brain and cerebellum, too,

They've got to leave that brain outside,

  And vote just as their leaders tell 'em to.

But then the prospect of a lot

  Of dull M. P.'s in close proximity,

  All thinking for themselves, is what

    No man can face with equanimity.

Let's rejoice with loud Fal la--Fal la la!

That Nature always does contrive--Fal lal la!

  That every boy and every gal

  That's born into the world alive

    Is either a little Liberal

    Or else a little Conservative!

      Fal lal la!

Believe it or not, Private Willis’s lament, above, was first performed in 1882. And nothing, it seems, has changed! We are still following the well-trodden ways of our ancestors, knowing which tribe we have been born into, and voting just as our leaders tell us to! G & S obviously had doubts about whether we could cope with a load of MPs thinking for themselves! It would, indeed, be extraordinary. The equivalent of having no more opiates for the people to amuse themselves with! And we can’t have that, can we?