I’ve come to the point where I’ve pretty much had it with anything that comes from Westminster. I really am of the opinion that we, the poor mismanaged people of this country, re-assert our popular power and demand to be governed in the way that we would like. The twin pillars of real power in this country, politics and business (both intertwined beyond recognition) have failed us. The wholesale and systematic abuse of the expenses system by politicians, for me, puts the final nail in an excessively ornamented coffin for the political class.
We have been kept in check by a cocktail of debt and aspiration. Both are related and are products of each other but are effective in keeping us from rocking the boat because we are scared. We aspire to be better off, to move up the social ladder, to be influential & etc. Debt is a symptom of this. We aspire to things we can’t afford so get in debt, debt that we aspire to pay off. Because we are saddled with this debt all we look to is the next pay-day, the next bonus or promotion. This cycle has been propagated by business and the free market — it is a cycle that has failed us and a system that we are now bailing out. But for what? So it can begin again.
The politicians we elect to represent us have lied and failed, putting their own agenda and that of the businesses they will consult for (Blair, JP Morgan etc etc) first. We contract with them to govern us as we want to be govern, we give them the mandate. But the contract has been broken. 1998 saw the introduction of the Human Rights Act. 2001 saw the beginning of a concerted effort to derogate those rights in a Schmittian state of exception. So we can vote them out and everything will be better, right? Wrong. Following the Belmarsh case the Tories openly condemned the courts with accusations of judicial activism, as did Herr Blair. Gordon Brown promised a written (his choice of words) constitution but now won’t even hold an election until he is obliged to (constitutionally).
Benjamin Franklin argued that the social contract/constitution should be renewed every generation. Is now not the time to do this? But how? We can’t vote them out. By them I mean the career politicians, those who are indistinguishable but for their tie colour. We have no real democracy. The Diceyan concept of Parliamentary sovereignty is now defunct. Parliament is self serving, its mandate is hollow and built on lies. It is time to put something above the cretins that milk their expenses, a code of conduct that is binding on everything they do — a codified constitution. By demanding that we change the method and form of our government we create the ‘event’ that the foundation of most constitutions spring from. In the way that Americans look to their founding fathers for inspiration, we should look to the Levellers, not the Glorious Revolution or Cromwell. We must change Hart’s rule of recognition to something we recognise and we re-write the contract. As I have said, we can’t vote them out. Turkeys won’t vote for Christmas (hackneyed, I know). I’m not advocating an uprising, more mass demonstrations, less velvet more cashmere or tweed.
I’ll be the one waving my umbrella at Parliament.
I completely agree. It is the same here in the States. Ben Franklin was an awesome dude!
[…] Original post by oedipuslex […]
But we don’t contract with them. We elect them to represent us, and each of us should scrutinise those who represent us in as much detail and with as much energy as we can. One reason some of them have been able to lie to us with impunity (up until now) is that most people with the resources to challenge what they say cannot be bothered to engage with them (with the possible exception of a 3 or 4 week period every 5 years).
For those literally struggling to make ends meet, and feed themselves, there is some excuse; for the rest of us, we get (collectively) the politicians we deserve.
Now that you have noticed the problem what *do* you want? A Speaker who can hold *our* elected representatives to account? More rules for MPs? A revolution, with a new social contract, perhaps? Or for people who have the energy to blog and complain about MPs expenses *all* to engage with the political process *between* general elections?
But we do contract with them. They make promises for their side of the contract and we, for ours, vote for them. How much more scrutiny do we need if there is no effective way of dealing with them, aside from voting in more of the same?
Revolution has ugly overtones but something on the Czech or Ukranian model wouldn’t go amiss. This can then be under-pinned by a codified constitution that is decided by the people not the politicians.
Well, you are the lawyer, so if your advice is that what is going on here is a contract, I defer to your greater insight (although to this Scot, it seems like a strange sort of contract to me).
Anyway, what is needed is not more scrutiny; it is more engagement, in between elections, between elected representatives and their electors: letters, arguments, emails, tweets, conversations in the supermarket or wine merchants’; anything to let them have confidence that we are all watching what they are doing, and that we have a stake in the outcomes of their decisions. Anything but apathetic indifference, or wild, over-dramatic calls for new settlements.
Of course we also need total transparency of what they get out of their employment (personally): salary, expenses and so on; but that is a technical and easily-achieved detail.