"Thou hast destroyed me, thou, my love of old"

"Unless like swallows she doth use some strange barbarian tongue"

(Clytemnestra, speaking of Cassandra the prophetess, in Agamemnon by Aeschylus)

What better demonstration of the corruption of our democracy is there?

What better demonstration of the abject learned helplessness of our commentators and our media is there than their utter inability to interrogate and hold to account the individuals elected to high office on the very points that compelled them to quit? And of our politicians than their inability to oppose them on those points?

Our "opposition" MPs abstain or endorse a series of measures they know to be motivated by nothing more than toxic tory ideology, measures which drive poor and disabled people to despair and mass suicide in a grotesque voluntary holocaust that unburdens the rich of their maintenance, rather than "rock the boat", rather than appear "unelectable" to the corporate interests of the wealthy whose malign antidemocratic influence constrains their every deliberation.

And then the chief architect of the very measures they endorsed declares them mistaken, and resigns from the government! How slavish those MPs are revealed to be! What malleable, unprincipled creatures they now seem!

And he is lauded! He is carried aloft on the shoulders of those he liberates, jostled as those shoulders heave because of the joyful weeping of those that carry him! His hands still red and wet with blood as he joins them with the hands of others in new fellowship! It appears that all that is required to be the hero is to kill one less victim than the villain.

We are hostage to the epiphanies of great men.

That is not democracy.

And as for the media, who failed to interrogate the holders of high office and left them to interrogate themselves? Our votes do not confer conscience! Our constant vigilance is the conscience of the great! You have failed in that respect. You only talk of the fallacies of austerity now that they are admitted by its own ministers. You are animals unwittingly waiting for the knife who only notice the slaughter that surrounds you when the butchers argue among themselves and disrupt the familiar routine.

And so those the media reviled and failed to comprehend, those who spoke with tongues of swallows, are vindicated at last, but in accordance with their curse, in the least acceptable way. To be proven right by a confession that exculpates the criminal! Sturgeon and Corbyn share the curse of Cassandra in the gift of knowledge that does not profit them.

Each knows a freedom awaits that is not in the gift of great men, and which will be withheld while the great are allowed to arrogate all beneficence.