The danger of the wrong kind of revolution

Naomi Langford-Wood

Rotten to the core, the MPs who milked the system, and the only way to get respect into the electorate is for them all to go. I entirely agree. There is a second reason why we should have a general election with all haste, and that is the downgrading of the UK's credit rating by Standard and Poors, specifically as it carries the caveat that it cannot be reviewed again until after the result of the next general election.

We delay at our peril for that has long reaching effects that will ripple out for a very long time if Mr Broon thinks it is a 'good decision' to hang on by the remnants of his fingernails until the last minute. That will also be his most negative legacy.

Steve

Quite right. The Guardian's New Politics campaign is rank hypocrisy. How can they campaign for New Politics when they have supported Labour and the EU for years, who are precisely the people who got us into this mess. Also, what is the point of having more more plebiscites when we have been denied one on the most important issue of the day - the Lisbon treaty. Hopefully, the by-election in Michael martin's seat will allow the parties to debate these points and expose the mendacity of the constitutional reformers.

Jenny

It has indeed been astonishing to see people watch the herd turn in anger on Parliament and try to run the public into a bear trap.

Rahm Emanuel has been part of a masterclass in whipping up public antipathy in favour of 'change' - while assiduously avoiding ever spelling out what that change will be.

It's a time-worn modus operandi.

Let's make sure none of these spivs get away with it. "No, you bloody well can't."

Mark

Ah, how did I guess this would end with a familiar peroration on cultural Marxism!

Mel is wrong on just about every count here. To take just one example - how does she justify an unelected second chamber? Her general line seems basically to be, just leave everything as it is. Any takers for that?

David Lindsay

No matter what a written Constitution said, it would by definition cede yet further power from elected parliamentarians to unelected judges.

The Attlee Government would have been severely hampered, or even completely neutered, by any written Constitution.

Never mind one written on the back of a Rizla, or in the margins of some Trotskyist rag, thirty or forty years ago.

Mark

Incidentally, I'm intrigued to learn that Sir Peter Viggars is a cultural Marxist. Does he keep Muscovy ducks?

elixelx

Do you remember how, as a child, you would bump your head while running wildly around the breakfast table, and your Mom would smack the table and say "naughty, naughty table"? (Have I said too much?!)

Well, it's called The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness--the very same fallacy for which John Bolton memorably excoriated the UN--and it is, of course, the belief that the fault is in our stars, not in ourselves.

The breakfast table has no more the power to hurt me than the Institution of Parliament has the power to hurt our trusted (sic!) representatives, yet here they be , bawling their lungs out, about how the naughty naughty expenses system hit them on the head as they were running wild!

Any resemblance to whupped children is NOT coincidental!

I know, I know, Baby: It's that damned Devil's fault!

Sally Forth

I'm not sure I can see the difference between 'slinging the present incumbents out' at a general election en masse and doing it one at a time using recall elections for serious trangressions. Recall elections don't seek to replace the institution of parliament but to replace a misbehaving MP with a (preferably) better behaved alternative.A combination of transparency and recall elections should mean that we won't hear much more about plasma screen t.v's etc and definitely won't need the other 'improvements'.

Mark

David Lindsay's comment about unelected judges doesn't really make sense. In a properly constructed legal system,the role of unelected judges is to enact law passed by - elected representatives. Look at it the other way round: elected representatives in Italy obediently pass laws designed to assist Berlusconi in evading justice. The Italian judiciary is the only stop on his total grip on Italian public life.

Charles

Melanie,

I've been increasingly come round to the view that a written constitution is needed (having been a strong supporter in the past of the flexibility offered by our historical arrangement). My concern is the last 12 years have demonstrated the risk on an over-mighty and unscrupulous executive. Perhaps Hailsham was right - more than 30 years ago - when he spoke of the dangers of an elective dictatorship.

The core to a flourishing democracy is a separation between the Executive and the Legislature. That was what the Glorious Revolution achieved - and what the American Constitution was set up to codify. Since then - call it power of the whips, ambition, lack of alternative career structures, whatever, the Executive has captured control of Parliament. This is at the root of many of the problems that we have in the country.

My proposals (happy to defend them against all comers!)

1. We live in a presidential system - how many people vote for their MPs vs the party? Let's recognise that and make the Prime Minister directly elected. Fixed terms as well probably make sense when you have an individual rather than a legislature in power.

2. Cabinet - lets have this appointed. Part of the problem with the government is there are too few talented individuals.

3. Ministers should be appointed (from wherever). Not only would provide a wider talent pool to draw from, but it would eliminate the payroll vote

4. Give the legislature real power - power to approve ministerial and key quango appointments, power over government budgets, power to summon witnesses for public hearings, power to approve treaties, etc. Make it a viable alternative career structure for politicians

5. Devolve real authority to local (or possibly regional) government - give them the authority of a US State. My suggestions would be Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Wessex, Mercia, Northumberland, East Anglia and London, but then I always was a sucker for history.

6. Elect many local representatives - polce chief, school boards, hospital trusts and give them real authority. So long as they are properly advised on the technicalities they often know better than 'the professionals'.

To make all this stick, however, you probably need to written constitution that sets out the rules of the game

Herbert Thornton

Mark -

Canada, which has adopted a written Constitution, demonstrates that David Lindsay's comment is entirely accurate.

Canada's Constitution Act includes our misleadingly named Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms - a statute couched in such imprecise and vague terms that it empowers Judges to nullify anything in an Act of Parliament that - in the Judges' opinions - is in conflict with the Charter.

That has turned out to be a most socially harmful and anti-democratic piece of legislation because it has, in effect, converted the Supreme Court of Canada into a western version of Iran's Council of Guardians, with power to over-rule Parliament. Supreme Court of Canada Judges have been largely appointed by Liberal governments and they lean as naturally towards Liberalism and political correctness as the members of the Council of Guardians lean towards their own attitudes founded in the Koran.

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms would be better described as a 'Criminals' Charter', but that describes only one aspect of the defects of our Charter. Apropos my description of the Charter as anti-democratic, there has even been a case where a court has directed a Canadian Provincial Legislature to amend a law that the Legislature had enacted to include a matter that the court said it ought to have included.

Judges should never be allowed, guise of interpretation of legislation, to thwart clear Parliamentary intention, nor should powers conferred on them be so vague and general as to amount to legislative powers superior to that of Parliament.

Augustus

The expenses scandal has clearly shown that secrecy is the breeding ground of power abuse and corruption. full accountability, accessibilty, and representation are the essential elements of a democratic system of government.
The current system and practices
of government are obviously wanting, and serve the electorate more poorly than they should, and there is certainly a lack of popular control between elections. MPs in all parties should be given a greater say in drafting legislation for submission to Parliament, instead of laws simply being rammed through with the help of the government whip. The first past the post system of electing members also clearly does not result in a House which truly reflects the views of the electorate. The principle of proportional representation would result in a Commons more in tune with the actual wishes of voters.

John B

Agreed, but one further step. Push decision-making and accountability down to the local level. So, key positions in local education, police, prisons, etc are voted on every 5 years by local people. Parliament would decide key strategy and law but enactment takes place locally.

Fergus Pickering

Melanie, you said it all, or most of it. All the public's guns are pointing in the wrong direction. I was standing in a bank yesterday waiting to be served and the old chap behind me started on about MPs and wasn't it dreadful? I agreed that indeed it was, almost as dreadful as the salaries of the bankers who supposedly ran the institution we ere queueing inside But no, bankers were yesterday's men. He didn't mind about them. It wasn't tapayers' money. Since we were inside Lloyds it certainly was, but the point seemed to be that THIS week's scandal cancelled out lst week's. If thatis so then the MPs just need to waint a bit. Something else will come up. The Telegraph will run out of steam. This is obviously the nearest thing McBroon has to a policy. It can't work. Can it?

Terry, Eilat - Israel

I don't think this is confined to Britain - a worse example is the Israeli system of proportional representation. To a lesser extent, you can see the same thing in America.
I would hazard a guess and say that this is associated with the ''dumbing down'' of the electorate, their alienation from the political system, & the declining standards of journalism that feed the people garbage.

London Calling

I agree with you Melanie, One must be sure that decisions that are made are correct and agreed upon, however it is important to remember that there is one position if groups of people are controlled by One person.

If all groups are one how can others be controlled by that one that is the question here that we are talking about and I hope that the EU realise that groups do not consist of one, but as many, therefore it is essential to maintain a grounding by electing within groups so that Justice prevails, otherwise the One could make a mistake for the whole, and that would be a mistake, wouldn’t you agreee? Join the EU?

Peter Haydock

Looking on from afar it seems to me a simple case of parliamentary greed is fostering radical if not ridiculous suggestions for solutions. The fact that a newspaper has published wrongfully spent expenses and caused a furore heard around the world is surely proof that parliamentarians' expenses need only be free to view for any individual or member of the press to restrain any such greed in the future. It hardly needs PR, abolition of the House of Lords or devolution to regional governmental entities.

phil

I wrote here some time ago regarding expenses, that although much of what has been done has been "legal" it has not been what we would call moral and that a word from the past has come to mind -that word was a spiv-and a man that could claim he needed an eight thousand pound TV to fulfil his parliamentary obligations ,wholly ,necessarily and exclusively reflected that description --The fact that this Parliament will forever be known as "the duck pond Parliament" shows how unfit to rule our country it has proven to be .

.It is not Parliament that needs changing it is the people who sit there and profit from our trust in them (not all of course).This Parliament has lost the trust of the nation and we must have a new election ,and quickly-Mr Browns idea that he needs to sort out the financial mess that he has much to answer for,prior to that election , is plainly ridiculous.The confidence of our nation is at a very low ebb and it is time for renewal so I will echo the words of Leo Amery to Neville Chamberlain at our lowest ever ebb -----"You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go."

Margaret Muller-Johansson

The British get what they deserve! bad weather bad food bad MPs, etc etc,
Did Tony "B" Liar said something like Cool Britannia before? it should have been the corrupted Britannia long time ago..

Drakken

I was just wondering if the Queen could disolve Parliment and throw out the bums as so too speak and just maybe you folks over there could get some common sense, decent folk too do the right thing? or is that too much to ask ?

Olaf Rye

I have rarely heard this put any better:

'And there’s the wider cultural and moral breakdown of Britain under the onslaught from nihilism and cultural Marxism, which has created our general free-for-all of incontinent personal gratification enforced by a secular inquisition which treats any brake on the appetite as heresy – a culture of which our MPs are demonstrably such triumphant exemplars.'

Well done, as ever, Melanie !

Disorganised1

Strangely, as one talks about corruption in Parliament, state control, and constitutional reform the words Nu-Labour don't seem to crop up.

Corruption is still Jeffrey Archer and now Douglass Hogg or Sir Peter viggers, the names David Chaytor, Elliot Morley, Peter Hoon, and Shahid Malik don't feature. Jaqui Smith's name has disappeared and Hazel Blears is now only reported for facing up to Brown.

Read the biographies of some of the Jury Team members and you see the profiles of the shop stewards that under-pinned old Labour and gave us the likes of John Prescott.

We need to inform our children of political realities, we need men of experience and ability in Whitehall, and I don't see many of them being offered to us.

Expat 44

An excellent summary by M Phillips. Thank you.

One important point to note about the dangers of PR.

I sat next to a prominent MEP at a dinner in a London Club some years ago.

I asked him if he'd come back to see his constituents.

"Certainly not!" his ambitious wife sneered.

"Thank God ******** doesn't have to bother with them. No, the only people we have to grease and keep sweet are the people that control the Party list."

Tha is the reality of PR in the EU.

If pressed by the Editor of the Spectator, I am prepared to name and shame.

Ian Walker

Saying that we shouldn't change the electoral system because PR is somehow dangerous is entirely disingenuous, though.

The plurality system that we have at the moment has the sole advantage of rarely producing hung parliaments, meaning that by-and-large parties can get on with implementing their manifestoes. However, it has the great disadvantage of being almost entirely unrepresentative. The only people that parties need to appeal to are swing voters in marginal seats. Living in a safe Tory seat, my opinion is utterly ignored by all of the parties.

The single transferable vote system, as used in Ireland, gives most of the benefits of PR, without a lot of the downsides. See the Electoral Reform Society's excellent website for the pros and cons of most of the systems in use.

The main criticism of STV in Ireland is aimed at candidates feeling they are TOO accountable to the electorate! The public at large love it.

As for the upper house, I would like to see that chosen by random allotment, like jury service - at any point, you could be chosen to serve a fixed five year term in the Lords. Aided by an experienced secretary, this would work absolutely fine in the crucial role of ensuring that rotten laws never made it onto the books. After all, if you are accused of a crime, you would trust 12 of your peers to find you guilty or innocent. Why would you not trust them to decide what should and should not be a crime in the first place?

Denis Cooper

I agree with the thrust of this article, except that I strongly support the idea that constituents should be able to "recall" their MP.

It should be assumed that when an MP is elected he has a contract with his constituents for a maximum of five years, renewable, but with a clause for early termination of the contract in the event that he fails to perform his duties or is otherwise seriously at fault.

And it should be his constituents, nobody else, who have the legal right to invoke that clause for early termination of his contract - unless, of course, he chooses to avoid the ignominy of recall by resigning. That power should rest with his constituents, not with some committee in the House of Commons, or some "independent" body, and certainly not with the leader of his political party.

One possible scheme would be roughly as follows:

1. The resignation of the MP is compelled by a legally binding "requisition" - not a supplicatory "petition" - which starts with words along these line::

"We the undersigned, being registered electors in the Parliamentary constituency of A, and being greatly dissatisfied with the conduct of our present representative, B, hereby demand and require that he resigns from that office with immediate effect, and that a fresh election be held within a period of six weeks of his resignation."

2. To be legally effective, the requisition must bear the signatures, names and addresses of 10% of the registered electors in the constituency. Each entry must be dated, and any older than three months when the requisition is presented are discarded; all the names and addresses are checked against the current electoral roll for the constituency, and signatories who are not on the electoral roll are discarded; all duplicates are also discarded; and a sample is checked to see that the electors listed have actually signed the requisition.

3. The costs of collecting the signatures to be borne entirely by those organising the requisition, who must also pay in advance for the costs of its validation by the electoral officers.

4. No recall requisition may be accepted by the electoral officers until one year has elapsed since the last election.

It makes me sick to read about disgraced MPs who refuse to stand down immediately, and intend to hang on for another year until the next general election.

If they're going to go, they should go now; if we had a recall system then they would know that their constituents had the power to force them out within weeks or months, and probably most of them would decide to resign straight away.

john lynch

HOW TRUE, HOW TRUE.

Mark

Its the Europeans fault!

I knew it! them foreigns eh? When will they learn to keep their grubby mits away from our honest, hard-working, happy go lucky MPs who just wanted to do their best.

Tripe.

Mary

Well.... 'Kick them all out!' That's one of the rallying cries of a website in the U.S. but sadly nothing much has changed as far as the apathy of the American public at large. Hopefully the "Tea Parties" will expand and get some results. But until the people take responsibility for putting things right, it just won't get done. Apparently things haven't gotten bad enough yet!
Governments are supposed to be servants of the 'people', not the masters, so until the masses understand that concept instead of giving all the power to government, then the thugs in office will continue with their abuse of the system and deceiving the public.
The public needs to realize that there are more of 'us' than there are of 'them', and therefore ask, who really has the power? Do we continue to allow these government non-representatives of the people to continue with their 'legalized organised crime' or do we put a stop to it once and for all? These are questions that need to be asked on both sides of the pond. Are we willing to make our voices heard?

Mary

Oh...and by the way, we have a written Constitution in America, but guess what, it's been ignored by our 'law-abiding' Congress! Ha! Shredded is probably a better word.

Sergey

It is impossible to have a healthy politics in a country whose moral is sick. There is no political remedy for a rampant moral depravity.

Mary

There's still enough moral people to keep government in check! Not everyone is morally depraved.....otherwise, who are we, (the comments on this post), expressing our outrage? If we don't represent morality, then who does? It just takes a grass roots effort to educate the rest of the public. After all they may be asleep, but they aren't stupid!

Alex Spak

Difficult to disagree with you, Melanie.

Original Tony

Open any good dictionary and read what the word 'politics' means. I am sure you will be totally astounded!! One of them is "to deal with people in an opportunistic, devious and manipulative way to gain advancement."

This being the case, our politicians are living up to their brief, so why on Earth are we surprised? Did we honestly believe the people we elect are above corruption?

Power is the worst corruptor of all and rules must be introduced that allows politicians do their jobs without recourse to any financial control over their daily lives at all. They are our servants and should be given a good basic wage and that is that.

Let them live like the rest of us plebs for a while.

Neil Craig

If the effect of PR was to prevent any single party having a majority & thus total executive power I can think of nothing which would so strengthen Parliament against the executive (though not the people). Can anybody else?

David Skinner

At the end of the day, it is not the system but the character of those parliament that is important. We need people of moral courage and martial vigour to enter into the arena. Calling General Sir Richard Dannatt

J. Temple

I agree wholeheartedly with Herbert Thornton. The "written" Canadian Constitution and it's so-called Charter of "Rights" was created to be vague. The intent was to ensure social engineering (of the Marxist variety), and has worked remarkably well. The power of Parliament has been ceded to an activist court, stacked for years with “liberal” judges, who have been all too happy to comply. Political correctness runs amok in the judiciary, trumping reason and common sense. The only winners are the lawyers.