Given No Choice

While the Liberal Democrats are highly unlikely to win the next General Election or win more seats than either Labour or the Conservatives, if there is a hung Parliament then they will most likely play a role in helping to form a coalition Government.

The BBC is reporting that the Liberal Democrats are going to drop their pledge to cut the overall level of tax at the next election. This, I think, is significant because it now means that none of three major political parties in Britain will be promising to reduce the increasingly crushing burden of taxation placed upon the British electorate at the election next year.

Our political class from all parties have conspired to remove any semblance of electoral choice over this highly important issue. If you believe that the tax burden should be cut, as millions of British voters do, then you are now left completely unrepresented by any political party that has a chance of forming a Government.

Furthermore, the usual excuses that party spokesman predictably parrot about how cuts in taxation are somehow ‘implausible’ or ‘irrational’ during the current economic climate are left completely uncontested. They never explain why such high levels of taxation are ‘rational’ or why it is right that the Government and state should waste so much of our income on frivolous pursuits and egotistical political projects.

The real reason why none of our political class will advocate any other alternative to what already appears to be the status quo is that they either genuinely support ever higher levels of stifling taxation, or that they have become so intellectually lazy that they have chosen not to make the case for a less expensive state.

When politics has been reduced by the political and media class to being about personalities rather than policies, should we really expect any different? Once again we have been given no choice.

Taxing Our Patience

It is not all that surprising that David Cameron’s Conservatives are now decidedly unenthusiastic about their pledge to raise the threshold for inheritance tax which they made two years ago.

This obvious reluctance is why so much ambiguity surrounds the issue and why the party leadership will not, if they can help it, be pinned down on the matter.

In late 2007 it became clear that Gordon Brown was readying the Labour party for a snap election. At the Conservative conference in Bournemouth there was an atmosphere of worriment and discontent. Opinion polls were consistently showing that the Conservatives were many points behind Labour when they needed to be quite a few points in front, and that as a result they were likely to lose any coming General Election.

Defeat would have condemned the Conservatives to another five years on the opposition benches and made it an unprecedented fourth election defeat in a row for a political party who were once considered the ‘natural party of government’ in Britain.

At that time the Cameron project was still very much a work in progress. In many ways it still is. However, before the party conference in 2007, David Cameron had seen little success in actually attracting the wider electorate to vote Tory. Despite all the hoodie-hugging speeches (okay, so he never actually said that) and pledges that marriage could, in his view, be between a man and a woman, a man and man, and a woman and a woman – the electorate were still not all that interested.

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Undermining Parliament

In a Parliamentary vote held late last night, MPs decided to grant the use of the House of Commons chamber and its green benches to the UK Youth Parliament during the summer recess.

The motion was passed, in the final division, by 205 votes to 17, with the majority of those opposing the measure being from the Conservative backbenches, although there were a few opponents from the other parties.

Unfortunately, leading only rather minor opposition to the motion, Christopher Chope MP reminded those assembled Members of Parliament that, before they voted, they should remember:

The fact is that we have never used this Chamber for anything other than parliamentary debate. We do not even use it for parliamentary meetings or party meetings.

We should not abandon or abandon lightly the traditions of this House, which have meant that this Chamber is the one for those who have the privilege of being elected as Members of the real Parliament, not members of a mock parliament, whether it be a youth parliament, a Muslim parliament or any other parliament.

As Christopher Chope rightly says, traditions should not be lightly abandoned, whether in Parliament or anywhere else. However, this is exactly what we as a nation have been doing, right across the board, for the past sixty years – and to our great cost.

It goes without saying that allowing the Youth Parliament to use the Commons chamber would set a precedent, and demeans the role of Parliament. Having said that, over numerous decades our MPs have been doing a good job of undermining Parliament anyway, so, I suppose, why would they suddenly stop now?

Perhaps, in a few years time, when the Commons have finished the process of passing over our powers of governance to the EU, we could turn the Houses of Parliament into a Museum for Democracy? For a small fee, visitors would be able visit what was once the Mother of all Parliaments, wander its luxuriously panelled corridors and wonder how exactly it came to pass that hundreds of years of freedom and democracy were frittered away so easily and in such a comparatively short period of time.

Treated With Contempt

Particularly galling is the way in which Yousaf Bashir, who was part of a gang that hurled abuse at members of the Royal Anglian Regiment as they marched through Luton last Tuesday, has been given twenty-four hour police protection.

It is, of course, wrong that someone should have attacked Yousaf Bashir’s house on Friday, breaking his ground floor windows and smashing in the front door. If caught, those that committed these crimes should be tried and punished.

However, why should the police give Yousaf Bashir and his family preferential treatment? Millions of British people have had to suffer far worse criminality than Yousaf Bashir, without receiving any semblance of police protection.

But, what else should we really expect by now? As Peter Hitchens observed in his Mail on Sunday column, we should aim our anger not at these misguided individuals but at the liberal Left which has brought us to this point – for it is they rather than Islamic protesters that are the sources of these problems. He observed:

We teach our children to be ashamed of our past. We tell them our sailors at Trafalgar had weevils in their biscuits but not that by astonishing courage and endurance they saved Europe from endless tyranny.

We act ashamed of the Christian religion that formed our laws and institutions. We encourage new arrivals to speak their own languages, to stay in isolated communities.

We never say that there are two sides to hospitality – a concept our Muslim citizens understand very well – and that those who are welcomed are expected to be loyal members of the society they have voluntarily joined. What do we expect these people and their children to think if we treat our own nation with contempt?

Britain is not actually very much like Britain anymore. Culturally, morally and in so many other ways it has changed beyond compare. Like Peter Hitchens I still cling to the idea that it is not too late to stop the disintegration of our society, but, if so, then time is very short indeed.