Oedipus Lex

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.