As early as March 2006, The Power Enquiry, commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and the Rowntree Reform Trust to investigate the decline in political participation in the UK, published its findings and concluded that Britain was suffering from what they termed ‘a democratic malaise’. The Enquiry stated that there was a
‘well-ingrained popular view across the country that our political institutions and their politicians are failing, untrustworthy, and disconnected from the great mass of the British people.’ And that ‘The British party system is based on the dominance of two parties constructed around the pursuit of the interests and ideological leanings of the two dominant classes that existed during the industrial era….even Members of Parliament have little say because all the decisions are made by a handful of people at the centre and then driven through the system. Politics and government are increasingly slipping back into the hands of privileged elites as if democracy has run out of steam.”
If there is one stark fact that has emerged from both the EU Referendum and the Chilcot Report it is that the British political system is in a state of serious crisis, it is broken and it is quite obvious that no-one took a blind bit of notice of the Power Enquiry’s findings as the situation has actually deteriorated since 2006. As early as 1990, the ex-Labour Foreign Secretary David Owen was warning us that the Westminster system of government was in a parlous state when, writing in the Mail on Sunday on 3/6/90 he said
"The notion that the House of Commons is made up of 650 MPs who individually reach carefully considered opinions and who act as a brake on the Executive is so far from the truth as to be ludicrous. The Whips are in absolute command. The Executive is in total control. What the government says goes."
This perspective was reinforced by the Labour MP Dianne Abbott, who, writing in the Independent in February 2011, described the committee stage of the legislative process as a ‘dead letter.’ She added
“It does not matter which party is in power. Party managers make it their business to ensure that the government MPs on the committee, who are always in the majority, say absolutely nothing. Any government MP who goes on a committee with the genuine intention of scrutinising legislation knows they risk their career.
One of the earliest and most influential theorists of the liberal democratic system of government that Britain likes to pretend it is; was John Locke. Locke was adamant that any properly constituted system of democratic government would ensure that a government who betrayed the trust that the people had placed in them would be removed. In addition, in such a democratic system, the executive should never be allowed to dominate the legislature. Parliament, as the elected representatives of the people, must always, according to Locke, be the sovereign body. It must control the executive, not the other way round as we now have in the UK. Locke argued that in the last resort
'there remains still in the people a supreme power to remove or alter the legislative, when they find the legislative act contrary to the trust reposed in them.'
It is obvious that the Westminster legislature is simply useless, and, if we consider the last three British Prime Ministers we can see that the Westminster elite consider it quite permissible to lie, deceive and betray the people without a shred of hesitation or remorse. The conduct and the outcome of the two greatest foreign policy decisions taken since the Second World War, the Iraq debacle and the EU Referendum, were both the result of bare-faced lies and the vanity and personal ambitions of egotistical buffoons. If we add the Scottish Referendum is it any wonder that there is no trust whatsoever in the Westminster system? and, the tragedy is, in the absence of a written constitution, that system is founded on an enormous amount of trust invested by the British people in their elected representatives, a trust that is routinely betrayed.
The sociologist Max Weber argued that modern democratic states encourage what he terms ‘Caesarism.’ This happens because in countries with universal suffrage, political leaders are deemed to require charismatic qualities that will appeal to the majority of the electorate. As a result, regardless of the ability or quality of a modern politician, they will have great difficulty reaching the top positions in the political structures if they fail to display charismatic leadership. Caesarism therefore presents a genuine threat to the democratic process. It encourages the increasing centralisation of power and decision-making in the leadership and his/her immediate chosen circle, it threatens to corrupt the leadership itself by inflating their sense of importance whilst diminishing others, and it has the effect of elevating the executive at the expense of the legislature. All those tendencies are very evident in modern Britain, and the democratic institutions and structures that are supposed to counter caesarist tendencies in our society are failing us and not working. Principal amongst those failures are an effective and accountable Parliament and an efficient electoral system. One characteristic of modern British government and its caesarist tendencies is the way that party leaders surround themselves with non-elected advisers who become extremely powerful figures within the government, whilst not being formally part of that government, and who then go on to become MPs themselves bolstered by an inflated sense of their own importance. The fact that someone went to Oxford or Cambridge tells you very little about them as many people are well-schooled but are very far from being well-educated, and the evidence of that is in the staggering levels of incompetence we witness in economic and social affairs by our Oxbridge schooled elite. The defining characteristics of both Iraq and the EU referendum were that they were launched by people who had given no thought to either their conduct or their result. There was, quite simply, no plan A, never mind a plan B, and that is not the behaviour of well-educated people.
If there is one thing certain it is that our system of representative government is anything but representative, indeed the only remotely representative element within Westminster is the SNP group. This is the result of the Scottish system of proportional representation. It was John Stuart Mill who argued that in order for a nation to properly call itself a democracy all sections of the nation should be proportionately represented, that proportionally, the minority should be as fully represented as the majority. The alternative produces a political system based on inequality and privilege, which, he argues, is contrary to the principle of democracy. The defining characteristic of modern Britain is inequality and privilege. It has become a democratic imperative to abandon this political model. As there is very little chance of any meaningful change occurring in a Britain that is becoming more reactionary and fascist every day, then Scottish Independence has become essential. You have been warned.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
No comments:
Post a Comment