I hope I am not putting people off by being too serious but before I return to normal I would like to post some of my fundamental thoughts on government and politics. I trust my posts are not confusing as I do not plan them and just write whatever is spinning around in my feeble brain at the time, although I admit there is normally an identifiable sequence to whatever is occupying me at any given time. I have been writing about how I feel that the discipline of economics has been totally corrupted and I would like to comment on the same phenomenon in politics.
Government is derivative. What I mean by that is that as the human being is a social and regulatory being, we establish regulatory mechanisms and processes that become formalised and institutionalised into what we call politics and government. The most obvious form of regulation is law, and we establish law making mechanisms and institutions. Thus, government is derivative of the natural human inclination to regulate and govern both the human environment, and human behaviour. The greatest form of regulation is the normative order where our value system is translated by custom and practice into everyday norms that express those values and that are often formalised in the legal process. Thus, government is functional and does not exist by right or for its own sake, it exists for a purpose and derives from the fact of human social life. As a result, government arises out of the social, interactive and interdependent nature of the human being, and being in government does not give you the right to do exactly as you please, unaccountable to the people who put you in government in the first place. The following observations are probably applicable to all modern forms of government, but if you will allow me I will make my observations with respect to Britain because that is the system I am most familiar with.
In modern Britain, government has become a form of entitlement for a narrow elite based class of political careerist, regardless of whether they have any talent or ability, and has long since abandoned its role of representing the nation and the people in favour of class and elite interests. Genuine recovery for British society must be preceded by a radical reform of the British political and economic system. British government is wholly unrepresentative, and staffed by a self-serving and self-perpetuating elite that constitutes a form of heredity. The traditional constraints on British government no longer operate effectively and the British need a proper constitution that codifies and formalises their rights as citizens. At this time, the singular most pressing need for the British political system is a reform of the Westminster electoral system and the introduction of a genuine form of proportional representation. Because of the absence of a formal and written constitution, British government is heavily dependent on trust to maintain its authority and its legitimacy, and that trust is evaporating due to the incompetence, greed and outright criminality of successive governments. That is the real impetus behind the rise of a demand for Scottish Independence. Since 1979, successive British governments have ruled by blatant class warfare, which led to serious rioting in British cities in the summer of 2011. These riots are a sign of what is to come unless political and economic priorities are altered, and I have no confidence that such changes will occur. To dismiss such events as the 2011 riots as sheer criminality, as all official accounts have done, is to deny reality.
Lord Acton famously noted that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” In the UK we have a political system where people get voted into office under the auspices of the party system, and for many of them it becomes a job for life. They develop a strong sense of entitlement and become corrupted by the power that comes with office, particularly when that office is largely unaccountable. A British politician has to go through the tedious process of regular election, but it is not they who are being elected; it is their party, for whom they are little more than a cypher. Too many British politicians are of the opinion that the office they are elected to is theirs! They have a right to it; it belongs to them. In government there is a belief that those elected are somehow special and superior to the common man, that they have a right not only to guide the ship of state, but to control its every movement. This is compounded by the class system, whereby a political elite recruit their successors from that same elite. From an early age they progress through an elite education system that socialises them into believing that they are indeed different and entitled to govern. They then progress into leading universities which groom them for elite recruitment into a privileged form of employment that will prepare them for election to the highest offices of state. If there is one thing certain about our representative democracy in the UK, it is that British politicians represent no one but themselves and their class. Our representative democracy is a farce and a disgrace – a self-perpetuating elite minority of public schoolboys. This elite group of so-called experts are so expert, competent and effective that they have endangered the political structure of the United Kingdom by causing the Scots and Welsh and increasingly the Cornish people to demand more and more self-determination and responsibility. They have collapsed the financial system and caused a crisis in our relations with the European Union, the Middle East, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. If that were all, it would be bad enough, but they are increasingly a danger to their own population. This expert elite has demonised the working class, single parents, the unemployed, people on benefits, the disabled, significant ethnic groups, black people and Muslims. It passes ever more repressive measures to protect itself from challenge and from the repercussions of its own greed, corruption and incompetence. These actions stem from an arrogant belief that the Anglo-American way of life – its culture, and its political, social and economic systems as interpreted by its elite class – are so self-evidently superior to all other models that it has a duty to impose them, not only on its own people but also on the rest of the world, if the rest of the world is too stupid to recognise them and embrace them. That is why its members exhibit open hatred and contempt for their own people if they happen to be working class, or adhere to a different culture than that espoused by the elite. The ruling classes in both the United Kingdom and the United States will not be challenged, and, if any challenge is mounted by people who believe they are exercising their fundamental human rights, then those human rights will have to be constrained and/or removed. I apologise for the length of this post, but that is the situation we face today and it is one of the results of adopting free market neoliberalism that cannot and will not be subject to either democratic control or democratic accountability. Our civil and political superstructure is indeed a reflection of our economic base and genuine reform of the political system will not emerge until that base is itself reformed. You have been warned
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
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