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.

Click here to continue reading the article…

The Bankruptcy Of Harm Reduction

Despite all else that is going on in the world, we once again return to the important issue of illegal drugs, with news that Louise Mensch (formerly Bagshawe) had ‘probably’ taken drugs while working for record company EMI – though rather tellingly she just can’t quite remember.

We were also graced with an article, currently behind the pay-wall of yesterday’s Times newspaper, by Anushka Asthana (who she?) claiming:

The bankruptcy of prohibition is becoming ever more apparent as it fails to keep up with the plethora of ‘legal highs’. As one is banned, ten more emerge. There will be no need to go to dark alleys in Brixton soon: the internet will offer people everything they want. Some form of legalisation – in which users are no longer criminalised but the market is regulated – is inevitable for some substances. So we might as well start thinking about how to do it now.

It doesn’t really seem to matter how many times you point out to the likes of Ms Asthana and fellow travellers that Britain has no such manner of prohibition, they just won’t listen. This is because they are attempting to draw comparison between the perfectly winnable battle (if we were to actually fight it) against drugs in Britain with actual prohibition of alcohol in the United States of the 1920s, which was doomed to failure before it even began.

The divide lies between those of us who wish to see the current laws strengthened and enforced, and those who believe users are somehow able to take these drugs more safely. They call it ‘harm reduction’, though it is anything but. Furthermore, Ms Asthana casually repeats that old lie which claims drug users are criminalised by the law, where in fact it is users who criminalise themselves by taking their poison in the first place.

Click here to continue reading the article…

Private Conversations Among Elites

Writing in the Telegraph, Peter Oborne seeks to develop the argument that, in the wake of the phone hacking scandal, we are moving into a ‘post-Murdoch age’ where British politics may develop genuine substance.

In his article, Oborne suggests that Blair and New Labour reinterpreted the British political tradition as a private conversation among elite groups, of which the most important in Blair’s eyes was Rupert Murdoch’s corporate empire. In that he is not wrong. Yet, says Oborne:

It is this system of government that has been exposed in all of its barbarism and moral horror over the past few weeks. As the Westminster season mercifully draws towards a close, it is extremely important to ponder what comes next – for I am certain that there is a wonderful opportunity here to embark upon a new political era, and a new way of doing things.

Sadly, this fantasy is unlikely to become reality in the foreseeable future. No such real exposure has been given to the ‘private conversations among elite groups’ which Oborne describes in his piece, because the re-emergence of phone hacking was primarily a means by the liberal media to stop News Corp’s BSkyB bid.

While the exposure of Murdoch’s corporate meetings with George Osborne and David Cameron have again exposed Cameron as politically inept (if we needed any further proof), it has not drawn a line under similar meetings occurring in future.

Peter Hitchens used a chapter in his book The Broken Compass (recently re-released as The Cameron Delusion) to describe the relationship between journalist and politician, which is at times very close indeed – and this will always be so. But, as Mr Hitchens more recently described, the relationship between the press and politicians should be identical to that between a dog and a lamp post. The problem arises when, as has recently been more apparent, the press and politicians are of one mind.

Click here to continue reading the article…

Offering False Hope

In recent weeks there has been an increasingly notable and concerted effort by the Conservatives to present their party as ‘eurosceptic’ and conservative when of course it actually isn’t.

At the beginning of the month it was conveniently revealed, on the wink and the nod, that Mr Steve Hilton, the Director of Strategy in Downing Street, and Oliver Letwin MP were privately in favour of EU withdrawal. Yet, as I noted in the case of John Redwood, until individuals make their alleged privately held views public, such speculation is not worth a cursory glance.

This morning it was the turn of the Daily Mail to play willing fool as it dutifully repeated a leak claiming Steve Hilton had suggested:

…the Government should abolish maternity leave and scrap all consumer rights laws to help kick start the economy. [He] also suggested that the Prime Minister should abolish all job centres and ignore all European labour rules.

This afternoon we had Tim Montgomerie recounting the thoughts of the great sage and former MP, Paul Goodman who once described Steve Hilton as ‘Edmund Burke beamed into contemporary San Francisco’. It must be that Mr Goodman was referring to another Edmund Burke, rather than the Whig MP who proved so prophetic in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, because as far as I can determine then there is little in the way of similarity between him and Hilton. To compare the two as equal is to do the memory of the father of conservatism a great dishonour.

If, as David Breaker recently wrote, Steve Hilton is ‘a traditionalist in disguise,’ then I’ll be the first to say that it is an incredibly good one. Hilton had me completely fooled. I, along with many others, honestly thought that he was just another liberal social democrat purporting to be a ‘conservative’. How silly of me.

I recant. Now I see Mr Hilton’s vision of the ‘Big Society’, his pursuit of an ethnicity-based candidate selection process for the Tories, and push to waste more money on the NHS as intrinsically conservative in nature. Truly he is the heir to Edmund Burke!

On a slightly more serious note, all these faux leaks tend to have one real aim, which is to deceive conservative-inclined members of the electorate into voting for the Conservative party. Once again, as Helen Szamuely highlighted, there is a common theme in all this:

…the presentation of the Conservative Party as the one and only truly eurosceptic political organization in this country, for which all ‘true’ eurosceptics should vote.

Much is suggested, without any supporting evidence, that a Conservative Government shod of its Lib Dim partners would be more conservative in its policies and approach. Yet, it is a false hope. A majority Conservative administration would differ little in its policies from the Coalition or indeed New Labour.

With ‘traditionalists’ like David Cameron and Steve Hilton at the helm, who move so freely between the metropolitan classes and the liberal elite, then the Conservative party are run by a group where conservativism is viewed as repellent and the leftist creeds of climate change, equality and diversity are worshiped. This is why Cameron and Hilton are as they are, and shall remain forever so.