Losing Faith

Charlotte Leslie, the aspiring Conservative MP for Bristol North West has recently moved from her previous blog on the Guardian’s Comment is free website and now has a new blog at the Daily Mail.

In her third post entitled ‘A mace-wielding stand for democracy?’ she alludes to the increasingly undemocratic system in Britain over which, domestically at least, our Labour Government presides, and how she has had direct experience of the electorate losing faith with the political system.

In her article Charlotte decides to pick up on the quangocracy that our largely useless, Labour-led Westminster administration has helped create, saying:

Under New Labour, the ‘machine’ of politics has ballooned, and it has meant that it has become more and more difficult for the public to influence what goes on in politics.

While it is true that the Labour Government have dramatically increased spending and employment in public services and state institutions, and handed over political power to unaccountable quangos, this current state of affairs cannot be entirely attributed to the Labour party. British political history did not begin in 1997.

For example, it was under the Conservative party that local government was reorganised and ‘reformed’ in 1973 and vast powers were taken away from democratically elected councillors and given to an immense array of unelected and often unaccountable chief executives and town hall bureaucrats.

It was also under the Conservatives that this country was taken into the European Economic Community, which later developed into the European Union – an organisation that has become one of the greatest threats to liberty and democracy facing Britain since the Second World War.

What’s more, previous Conservative Governments, including those of Margaret Thatcher and John Major did very little to decrease the size of the civil service or the state, and more often than not allowed it to continue expanding.

Still, despite not choosing to acknowledge these points in her article, Charlotte moves on to make an observation of interest, commenting that:

Labour have built a quangocracy of unelected bodies which rule our communities and make decisions for us, and in silent and stealthy ways, parliamentary procedure has been tweaked and changed to dis-empower the democratic parliament and empower the Government.

Now, exchange the word ‘Labour’ for ‘the EU and previous Labour and Conservative administrations’ and you have a far more accurate description of what has really been taking place in Britain and Europe over the past three decades.

So, when Charlotte ends her article by remarking that the only way politicians can begin to restore the faith lost in our political system is by being prepared to speak out and act, then I suggest that now is as good a time as any for the Conservative party to do just that.

David Cameron really needs to stop fiddling around at the edges of the debate and instead speak out strongly against the malign influence the European Union’s undemocratic institutions have over our system of government and the British people. He and the likes of Charlotte Leslie need to acknowledge these facts and promise that if they formed a government they would restore local accountability, sovereignty and parliamentary democracy – not just abolish a few quangos and hope that is enough.

There are literally millions of people out there yearning for the Conservatives to make such a bold statement of intent – but despite that, (and you may call me a cynic) I somehow don’t see them being made any time soon.

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