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.

Likewise, our continued membership of the great European club has led to our politicians abdicating their responsibility and the power of decision-making, in return for future comfort, wealth and delusions of international grandeur. Even if we as a nation wished to redeploy the death penalty, we could not due to the binding agreement in the Lisbon Treaty’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, which forbids that any person ‘shall be condemned to the death penalty, or executed’.

In a representative parliamentary democracy, those we elect to hold office should represent our views, but they are not our proxy. As such, referendums and e-petitions are a symptom of a failure of Government to accurately understand or reflect the wishes of the populace, and are themselves an abdication of responsibility and decision making. This sentiment was neatly summed up by Edmund Burke in his speech of 1774 to electors in Bristol:

Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

As we know all too well, the system is failing us. But the breakdown between MP and constituent is as much our fault as it is theirs. Our own failing was in the falsely shared belief that once freedom and democratic rule have been acquired, they are ours forever. Yet, one must always fight to maintain democracy and freedom, since these are but artificial creations and not natural states for mankind. It is all too easy, as we have regularly seen, for democratic ideals to fall back into authoritarianism and repression.

As someone once accurately observed, democracy is not a spectator sport. Equally, one cannot truly be free unless one can govern their own heart and stay their desires. In this, as a nation, we have been found sorely lacking. As numbers receding from the public sphere and political participation (beyond voting in elections) have grown, the grip of the elite on candidate selection and the apparatus of power has strengthened. We have greatly erred in our selection of parliamentary representatives, and now we are paying a high price.

No longer do the representatives we elect hold our views with ‘great weight’ as Edmund Burke suggested they should; no longer is there the ‘strictest union’ or ‘the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication’ between the public and our Members of Parliament. Instead, while MPs have abdicated their responsibilities, we have also largely abdicated our own – and subsequently we are getting the Governments we deserve.

If we really wish to make a difference to the political debate, we can do little better than ignore e-petitions and other manifestations of political contempt. We must seek to rebuild Parliament as the check against the power of Government rather than its accomplice in our repression. In doing so we must not vote for any of the three main political parties. They do not represent our interests and opinions, nor do they intend to in the foreseeable future. Therefore, we must withhold giving legitimacy through the ballot box to a system which has been fundamentally corrupted. It is only once we destroy the old parties and build them afresh that we shall have a renewal.

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.

Louise Mensch is one of those rather airily vacant MPs who would be as comfortable in the New Labour party as she is in Cameron’s modern, liberal Conservatives. In fact, in 1996 she was a member of the Labour party, with Peter Hitchens remarking:

No surprise there. Miss Bagshawe has the political grasp of a Teletubby and was – like so many other Cameron fans – a supporter of the Labour Party in 1996.

Having had the unfortunate pleasure of meeting Mrs Mensch in Bournemouth in 2006 (when she was but a mere Bagshawe), I think the description of her by Peter Hitchens, writing on another occasion, rings wonderfully true:

The irresistibly charming thing about Miss Bagshawe, now prospective Conservative candidate for Corby in Northamptonshire, is that – like David Cameron himself, only with less pretence about it – she is clearly only slightly interested in politics, and has a marvellously limited understanding of what it involves. She will, I fear, go very far. A sweet vagueness swirls round all she does, the kind of vagueness that often conceals weapons-grade ambition.

Her extracted partial confession in The Daily Express on her use of banned substances comes as little of surprise. Like David Cameron and the liberal circles that both moved in, taking drugs was seen as just a little bit of harmless, giggly fun. She said:

Although I do not remember the specific incident, this sounds highly probable. Additionally, since I was in my twenties, I’m sure it was not the only incident of the kind; we all do idiotic things when young. I am not a very good dancer and must apologise to any and all journalists who were forced to watch me dance that night at Ronnie Scott’s.

Note the rather obvious lack of an actual apology for taking the drugs. Notable too was hold fellow Commons Culture Select Committee member, Tom Watson, was quick to defend her on Newsnight saying he didn’t much care about what she ‘did in nightclubs in the 1990s’.

Interestingly, when I first read the accompanying BBC article last night, I recalled the Watson creature being quoted as claiming to ‘admire her for what she has done’. According to the News Sniffer archives this comment was silently edited out. Now, I wonder why that may have been…

If we were to allow Tom Watson to have his own way then he would try and bring everything back to his precious phone hacking scandal, saying as he did:

What she has effectively done today is give a very big finger to a… journalist who is trying to dig up dirt on her from many years ago, probably because she is involved in exposing the truth about hacking and what went on on our committee.

As is so often the case with modern British politics, the political class can be seen to close ranks to protect one of their own, revealing the truth that they have more in common with one another than the voting public. That little bit of giggly, harmless fun they enjoyed when younger may have done them no harm (or so they like to believe), but in weakening our laws and undermining their enforcement, they condemn thousands of others to suffer an unpleasant, but avoidable fate.

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.

This threat has arisen from the narrowing proximity between British politicians and the media. They share places of work and residence; they have the same friends; they meet, relax and enjoy similar establishments; they come to know one another intimately. Thus, the old distinctions between Fleet Street and Westminster have fallen. The media and political class have increasingly merged to form a single elite – liberal in nature, absorbed by their own theatre and largely uninterested in politics as the implementation of policy. Adam Smith observed similar in The Wealth of Nations:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty or justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.

The same is as true of our political and media establishment as it was of business and trade in 1776. The cosier the relationship between politician and media, the greater the threat to our democracy, the electorate and the public purse.

How one goes about preventing such convergence though is another matter. It is often so easy to identify the problem; not so simple to find a solution. But when Peter Oborne claims we have a wonderful opportunity to embark on a new political era, then at the moment he is wrong – we do not, or at least not yet. The exposé of Cameron’s close links with News Corporation are not entirely surprising and, on their own, do not create the conditions for the ‘new political era’ which Oborne desires.

In a sense, very little has changed. The sorry relationship with Murdoch, established by Blair and continued by Cameron, may be under the spotlight, but it is not unique and will endure in other forms. The only way to facilitate a genuine transformation of the British political scene and re-establish the truly adversarial nature of ‘dog and lamp post’ is to strengthen Parliament and the hand of the electorate.

The decline of our democracy into state managerialism, bureaucracy and EU dictation has gone hand in hand with the slackening in adversity between media and politician. If we are to reverse the trend then we could do little better than start by breaking the connection between state and media.

The stranglehold grip the BBC and its civil partner, the Guardian, enjoy over the media establishment through uncompetitive funding (by the license fee and public sector job advertisements respectively) create problems for increased plurality in the media marketplace. This has, to some extent, been alleviated by the blogosphere – but the fact still remains that the market is heavily distorted.

Furthermore, we cannot ignore the fact that many of the ‘private conversations among elite groups’ occur at the supranational level of the European Union. As the sovereign power of our Westminster Parliament has been willingly transferred to the apparatus of the European Union in Brussels, the House of Commons and thus MPs have declined in importance. They no longer legislate and debate, but instead rubber stamp directives and diktats from our new masters, leaving them with ample time to concentrate on the unimportant and banal.

Even if we were somehow or other able to regain our national sovereignty, the concerns over the calibre of MPs and political parties would remain. It is only by strengthening the link between the electorate and their ability to select and vote for candidates that would result in a better, more representative Parliamentarian. But then, we have rehearsed these arguments and many others countless times before.

The above reforms will not magically occur overnight or, indeed, in the course of one manufactured phone hacking scandal as Oborne may suggest, but sadly over years of sustained pressure and hard work. Of course, the age old problem is how one goes about achieving all of the above without being in power. In all honesty, I do not believe we can achieve much until one of the established political parties collapses – mostly likely the Tories. For such a seismic political event, the conditions must be just right – and that time is not yet. But it will come… or there really is no hope.

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.

The sheer volume of coverage has been somewhat staggering, with the broadcast media having given the matter virtually wall-to-wall treatment, with every miniscule new event turned into ‘breaking news’, all reported in wide eyed, breathless tones by metropolitan elite newsreaders.

Likewise, the print media have gone into overdrive, filling hundreds of pages and columns with mindless prattle on the technological equivalent of rummaging through someone’s dustbins (something that, incidentally, our beloved and benevolent state does to us with little comment or complaint by that same media and politicians).

Yet, for all the quantity of reporting then there has been very little in the way of quality, with most articles rarely scratching beyond the surface of the issue and indulging in the typical kind of bubble-journalism which is increasingly prevalent in the mainstream media.

If only the media elite expended as much effort examining Britain’s membership of the European Union, the financial crisis into which we are rapidly sinking, or the way in which (as Christopher Booker weekly highlights) children in this country are let down in the ‘care’ of the state. But, then again, this is the British media…

During this manufactured scandal, the political and media classes have shown the full extent of their regressive and symbiotic relationship, with each feeding off the filth disgorged by the other and revelling in the spectacle: one rotten establishment propping up another equally rotten institution, like two corpses with rigor mortis.

Meanwhile, as our politicians and media vie for the limelight in their race to the bottom, dealings of far greater significance are taking place across the Atlantic. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard tells us:

On the other side, the recovery has sputtered out and the printing presses are being oiled again. Brinkmanship between the Congress and the White House over the US debt ceiling has compelled Moody’s to warn of a “very small but rising risk” that the world’s paramount power may default within two weeks.

This, as he highlights, is an incredibly scary prospect. Whether it will actually happen is another matter, but the spectre of default now hangs over the US economy and consequently the world. After the Wall Street crash in 1929, it was said that when America sneezes, the rest of the world catches the cold – and it now appears that the same or worse may well happen again unless the US institutions can pull the country back from the brink with debt reduction.

Of great interest has been the way in which the price of precious metals has risen as paper currency has receded in value due to the inflationary pressure of printing money. I recall reading an article in the Daily Mail back in May, which noted that the US State of Utah became the first in the country to legalise gold and silver coins as currency. This was a warning sign of events to come, and Evans-Pritchard highlights the increasing flight by the markets to Gold.

Yet, so absorbed in its own sordid affairs is our British media that the crisis that is gripping the world is treated as almost purely an economic rather than political issue. This is the news that should be on the front page of newspapers. This is the news that should be leading daily broadcast news bulletins on the BBC and Sky. Instead though, we have to contend ourselves with the dreary mug shots of Rebekah Brooks and company as the world crashes and burns.

Yet, while the liberal media and Westminster village continue to absorb themselves with the fantastically important matter of News Corporation’s aborted takeover of BSkyB and supposed phone hacking, those of us still residing in the real world have to contend with the prospect of an Italian debt crisis, as the credit agencies again downgraded the country’s credit status.

Meanwhile, our wise, hardworking MPs have rushed like brain-dead sheep to condemn Murdoch’s various organisations, presumably in the vain hope that it would divert attention away from their own scandals, the most recent of which took place on Tuesday night when the House of Commons kindly donated £9bn of our money (or at the least money borrowed at our expense) to the International Monetary Fund, who, in turn, will pass that money to Greece which will soon default on its debts. Excellent work gentlemen. Well done.

Thus, the divide between the political class and electorate widens ever further, and yet more of our money is poured down the drain. In all probability, once the liberal media has given up flogging the Murdoch horse, they will return to the ‘nasty cuts’ agenda, blissfully unaware that their world is collapsing around them.

Never mind though. It’s not as though I’ve missed all that much, since very little on the British political scene has changed in that time. Yes, we may have had a General Election last year, but the Government’s policies have remained largely identical.

And so it came to past that the electorate were duped into believing that voting out New Labour and voting in Blue Labour – sorry, the Conservatives – would constitute a real and perceivable change in the way the country was run. Sadly though, they were wrong.

No longer does the ‘terrible’ and ‘awful’ Mr Gordon Brown head up our Westminster administration, but instead that nice young man, Mr ‘Dave’ Cameron, who in contrast to the great clunking fist seems unable to do wrong in the eyes of much of the liberal media. Such was the negative media frenzy at the time, people blamed Mr Brown if their train was late, or they dropped their coffee on the floor, or their shoelaces snapped while they were tying them, or if it rained.

Quite why Mr Brown was apparently so ‘terrible’ and ‘awful’ very few people remember or care. They’re just glad that he’s gone, and anyway, isn’t the new Prime Minister so much better looking than the last? He just looks the part doesn’t he? And hasn’t he got such a lovely, well dressed wife? She has such nice hats. And doesn’t he make such good speeches (though one can never quite remember what they were about)? And so on and so on.

In the meantime the steady process of our MPs giving away yet more of our sovereignty to the EU has quietly continued without opposition. State expenditure and borrowing has continued to rise at an even faster rate than under Labour, despite boasts of ‘putting the finances in order’ and talk of those nasty, evil and increasingly non-existent cuts. Crime has gone up. So has immigration. And our taxes too. Yet some people just fail to notice, so distracted are they by the bread and circuses of modern British politics and media.

A great storm is approaching though, one that even those caught up in the usual media circuses of the moment won’t be able to ignore forever. The crisis in Greece is likely only the beginning of it, and quite where we will all be in another two years time is anyone’s guess – but I think we can safely predict that it’s not sunlit uplands which lie ahead. It’s going to be downhill from here on in.

Despite a valiant rejection of the Lisbon Treaty by the Irish last year in the face of overwhelming opposition from their entire political class, the media and big business, the nation that once sought independence from British rule has been bullied into accepting rule from distant Brussels.

Only Poland and the Czech Republic have yet to ratify the Lisbon Treaty, and it will likely not be long before they do. As the Czech President Vaclav Klaus sadly noted to waiting journalists:

The Irish had the last chance to say something about Lisbon… because after today’s Irish referendum there will never be another referendum in Europe.

And slowly but surely, as day turns to night, the EU’s slow motion coup d’état takes effect. Our sovereignty has been strangled, our independence dissolved. Squandered are centuries of hard won liberties, rights and freedoms – so often without our knowledge or even a care. It is, as Hugh Gaitskell so accurately predicted, to be the end of a thousand years of history.

Yet, there is hope. We, as a nation, are still capable of saving ourselves from the jaws of defeat as we have so many times before. Perhaps it will be that resilience of character and spirit that sees us through again – but only if we will it to be so. For there will be no-one else behind us to catch us should we falter or fall; no foreign intervention to rescue us from our fate.

That decision is up to us now. Either we wake from our delusions of a benevolent European Union, realise that our future as a truly democratic nation lies in grave danger, and resolve to act – or we slowly subside into bureaucracy, and foreign rule by an unelected state, a fate for which we will only have ourselves to blame.