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.

The Return Of Barking Cat Syndrome

Well, I suppose it would be fair to say that this is not strictly a ‘return’ of Barking Cat Syndrome since the condition never really went away in the first place. However, it has most definitely re-manifested itself in the form of Libertas.

In 1973, Milton Friedman wrote a column in the American magazine Newsweek entitled, Barking Cats, which attacked the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its bureaucratic control of pharmaceutical drugs, and acted as a follow-up to previous works that he had co-written with his wife calling for the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration.

In his column, Friedman addressed his critics who had argued that the FDA should not be abolished but that instead its powers should be changed in various different ways. Friedman wrote:

What would you think of someone who said, ‘I would like to have a cat, provided it barked’? Yet your statement that you favor an FDA provided it behaves as you believe desirable is precisely equivalent. The biological laws that specify the characteristics of cats are no more rigid than the political laws that specify the behavior of governmental agencies once they are established. The way the FDA now behaves, and the adverse consequences are not an accident, not a result of some easily corrected human mistake, but a consequence of its constitution in precisely the same way that a meow is related to the constitution of a cat.

In his memoirs fifteen years later, Milton Friedman remarked that the column was one of the best he’d ever authored, both in substance and form. Furthermore, such an argument directly relates to the proposed aims of Declan Ganley’s new trans-European political party, Libertas.

Ever since his involvement in the Irish No Vote to the Lisbon Treaty back in June last year, Mr Ganley has consistently stressed that he is in favour of the European Union – it’s just that he wants it to reform and become more democratic. Ganley said:

It sends a very clear message to those unelected elites and bureaucrats, who seek to daily interfere in our lives more closely, that this cannot go on without proper accountability. The EU needs to change. Libertas believes in a strong Europe but also believes unless democracy is at the heart of that we’ll never be able to deliver.

Yet, like a cat that cannot bark, the European Union cannot be democratic because that is not the way it was designed to be. At its heart the EU’s institutions were deliberately created with the intention of being able to make decisions without public approval.

Thus, the EU is democratically unreformable and as such you are left with only two choices: either remain in it and submit yourself to being undemocratically run by it, or leave and forge your own destiny. There is no in between.