They are not all as bad as each other.
They really aren't. That makes me furious.
There are plenty of people, Tories, Labour, or otherwise, who have ethics, principles, and a desire to shape the country into something better. I might not agree with their vision of better.
But they are good and decent people. I have known a fair share of MPs in my time. Some of them are shits. But the vast majority of them have been ambitious but good.
Pretending that they're "all as bad," pretending that it's all corrupt, and that nothing matters, and that we can't expect anything more: that's how democracy dies.
It doesn't die dramatically, with a palace coup, not in a country with such a long tradition. It dies with cynicism and hopelessness and apathy.
That gives the space for the real charlatans and shits to make their way to power. That's when they hollow out the rules and enrich themselves and make us weaker and poorer as a country.
You can't give in. You have to insist on more and on better. You have to stand up and say, "I like what this man is doing, but he isn't the man to be doing it." You have to be willing to sacrifice what you want and demand accountability and standards as a baseline.
If you don't, you undermine our country. And you won't know what you've done until it's too late. British democracy will die not with a bang but with a whimper. If the rules and the laws and the norms don't matter in Parliament, they won't matter anywhere else.
And we'll be left with a hollowed out country, founded on the shrug of "they're all as bad as each other."