An Abject Failure Of Democracy

The recent debate over the reintroduction of the death penalty was set in motion by the launch of the new HM Government e-petitions website, which encourages members of the public to submit ideas to be discussed by our MPs in Parliament.

However, far from being a grand new feather in the cap of democracy or signalling a bright new era in participation, the initiative represents another abject failure of our political system.

So removed have our political classes become from reality and the daily requirements of the population they seek to govern, that they feel it necessary to spend hundreds of thousands of our money on white elephants designed to cover up their ineptitude.

Furthermore, such petitions act as another distraction to the public, keeping them from the knowledge that the Parliament they look to for salvation is now largely defunct; knowledge that generations of our uncaring politicians have willingly frittered away our right to self rule; knowledge that we no longer run our country; and knowledge that Parliament is largely incapable of legislating on many matters highlighted by petitions, even if eventually debated by MPs.

In much the same way that a crime recorded by police is a failure of the police or policies to prevent it, the creation of a new democratic initiative is a front for the unwillingness of most politicians to reflect public opinion. Thus, the e-petitions ruse, much like its predecessor, represents not only the failure of politicians and political parties to understand and listen to public opinion (rather than, as they would have you believe, a new found desire to actually engage), but their active and contemptuous dismissal of our views and beliefs too.

The sad truth is that the political classes have more in common with each other than they do with the voting electorate. Government and party policy is increasingly formulated by small, closely knit teams of liberal, metropolitan graduates whose views, values and ideas are unrepresentative of the population as a whole. Frustratingly, these parasites remain insulated from reality by the Westminster bubble and from the economic mess they have wrought by the disgusting generosity of the public payroll. In short, the e-petitions will change none of this, nor were they ever meant to.

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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.

Ivory Towers

Writing in the Daily Mail today, Quentin Letts (the paper’s Parliamentary Sketchwriter) discusses yesterday’s weekly episode of PMQs – this time between Harriet Harman and William Hague – and the forthcoming special Speaker’s Conference.

The Speaker’s Conference has been called by the House of Commons Speaker, Michael Martin, to address the growing problem of political disillusionment and distrust of most politicians in Britain, as well as declining electoral turnouts.

On a somewhat similar note, Quentin Letts, observing Prime Minister’s Questions from the gallery in Parliament, wrote that:

Looking down at the poor saps in the Commons yesterday, it was hard to be sure why anyone normal would want to be a Member of Parliament.

He then ponders for just a moment why a supposedly intelligent woman (yes, he is referring to Harriet Harman – who would have thought it?) would submit themself to the braying ordeal of Prime Minister’s Questions, before asking:

Is it worth all the effort? And are ministers truly powerful?

An interesting pair of questions – but does Mr Letts take them any further or even begin to hint at why Ministers in Britain have indeed lost many of their powers? Of course not. The EU elephant in the room goes unmentioned once again, and the Mail’s Parliamentary Sketchwriter blabs on undeterred.

Furthermore, one suspects that Quentin Letts cannot even grasp the reasons why a new breed of men and women are attempting to enter high office. In short it probably has something to do with the fact that MPs are, for the most part, short of ideas and lazy. As such, Ministerial hopefuls yearn for the luxuries of the government gravy train – high salaries, big expenses and huge pensions, plus an almost total absence of responsibility.

That is why people such as Harriet Harman submit themselves to Prime Minister’s Questions; it is not for the power but for the perks and the privileges of office – real or perceived. And it is probably also why that with each passing day ‘normal’ citizens in this country become even more fed up with a political system that they can do very little about.

Democratic Issues

On Friday the BBC published an article outlining some of the comments made by various MPs from the three main parties on the arrest of Damian Green over supposed leaks from the Home Office.

Now, what I have found particularly interesting about the whole Damian Green saga (which I think has been completely blown out of all proportion by our typically hopeless media) is the outcry from the likes of Nick Clegg and an assortment of Liberal Democrat, Labour Party MPs.

Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg told the BBC in an interview that he was deeply shocked by the arrest of Mr Green and claimed the event was a ‘mayday warning’ for democracy in Britain, saying:

This is something you might expect from a tin-pot dictatorship, not in a modern democracy.

The fact is though, like so many of our MPs that aimlessly waft around in Parliament, Nick Clegg only becomes interested in ‘democracy’ when the safety of the increasingly irrelevant Westminster bubble is punctured.

What do the likes of Nick Clegg really know of democracy? Where were he and others when our powers of self-government and democracy were being given away to the EU? Oh yes, that’s right, they were there in Parliament voting to give it away.

Bearing the above in mind, the speed with which our MPs of all parties have rallied to one another’s side and in the process ignored the real issue of our increasingly non-existent democracy betrays the truth that in fact MPs from all parties often have more in common with each other than they do the voting electorate.