Emancipation
England, Northern Ireland, Scotland & Wales
House of ill repute? |
From the Magna Carta to corrupt politicians in a diminished house
Thousands of members of the British electorate visited the Houses of Parliament on 27th February, 2008 to request that their MPs vote against the ratification of the European Treaty before the House. However, these requests of the British public were largely ignored under the pressure from the whips. The whips represent political parties who together cannot muster a membership larger than 1% of the total British electorate.
British political parties do not serve the interests of democracy because they choose not to represent the people in Parliament. They follow their own visceral instincts of political survival like some economic sector which begs for public support in elections only to spurn the electorate when they gain power.
This represents a failure of democracy and in particular the failure of representation of individual sovereignty of the people of Britain because MPs do not regard theselves to be agents of their principals, the constituency. They consider themselves to be agents of their parties. The Levellers, in their 1649, "An Agreement of the Free People of England" warned of the dangers of professional politicians and political parties (factions). The Levellers proposed that in order to avoid conflicts of interest, people with specific professions would not be permitted to exercise them while acting as a representative for their community. Members of Parliament were to be elected only once, having to stand down at the next election but they could be elected in a subsequent election. This was a precaution against the build up of embedded interests and to discourage the formation of a class of "professional" politicians. Parliaments were to last one year with annual elections; not to act on this provision was to be considered to be an act of High Treason.
Public officials should be chosen by Members of Parliament and elected each year. This was a move to avoid the formation of so-called factions within government service who could become embedded as permanent and likely to develop arbitrary power and be increasingly prone to corruption.
Already under Cromwell the corruption of politicians became difficult to thwart and in spite of the Levellers' writings being abundantly clear. "An Agreement of the Free People of England" was a proposal for a written constitution for England. 40 years later parts were used in the English Bill of Rights of 1689 and the American Bill of Rights in the American Constitution of March 1789, some 140 years later. However, the English Bill of Rights of 1689, and also the US Bill of rights, did not make use of some of the Levellers proposals and thereby sowed the seeds of our current plight. Specifically "legislators" of the time did not include five specific points considered by the Levellers to be fundamental to the defence of individual freedom including:
- making petitions legally effective over parliament
- organizing military ventures by involving the direct participation of the people safeguarded by the right to conscientious objection
- preventing the formation of a class of professional politicians who would develop entrenched interests
- avoiding the organization of factions for the same reasons as professional politicians
- avoiding the ills of corruption arising from the existence of factions and a professional political class
It is worth recalling the inspirational appeal of the Levellers work. During the seventeenth century life did not always default to people enduring the excesses of a corrupt and sometimes cruel political establishment. People did not always continue to do things as they had always been done for fear that suggesting improvements might attract attention and perhaps a punishment or two. There were many chinks of light, illegal pamphlets and exchanges between people causing many hearts to rejoice at inspirational ideas concerning the liberation of the people of England.
Universal suffrage - a government by the people
In particular a wonderful concept arose that people should be governed by a Parliament of their popular choice. Such a concept was justified by Colonel Thomas Rainborough, a participant in the Putney Debates organized by the Levellers at the Church of St Mary the Virgin in Putney in the County of Surrey, in October and November 1647. He stated:
| “...for really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore truly, Sir, I think it's clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under...” |
This concept, although very advanced for the time, was limited to full male suffrage only.
The decadence of our democracy
During the last few years, under the tutelage and coercion of politicians as agents of political parties, we have witnessed some of the worst symptoms of political party corruption of democractic processes. The system overtly serves the interests of political parties and fails to serve the interests of the people. To serve the interests of the people representatives of communities need to act as faithful agents able to articulate local community concerns. Today a handful of policy agents within each political party think up "priorities" and the electorate is offered a selection of the preferences agreed within each political party and promoted through the media. Such preferences are not representative since the parties themselves have a total membership of less than 1% of the electorate and in any case the parties do not have the intellectual critical mass to develop any notion of national needs. Such needs could only be determined by faithful representatives of communities gathering such information.
Just as political parties corrupt the informatin flow within the political process to substitute rational community concerns with partizan lobby-directed propositions, so governance has become directionless and the concept of Parliamentary democracy where a national decision-making forum reflects the will of the people is nothing but a dream. Political parties, by their nature and, indeed, the nature of those who join such collectives, are no longer relevant to a modern Britain. The substitution of political parties by faithful independent representatives could help revolutionise the relevance of governance to the people.
The European Treaty - the supremacy of self-interest
The latest tragid episode of so-called Parliamentary debate concerning the European Treaty is an illustration of how dishonest politicians are. They all play a theatrical game of justifying their existence by participating in poorly attended "debates" on the European Treaty when they all know the outcome is a forgone conclusion. In Britain today, the Labour party with less than 0.5% of the electorate as members and with less than 19% of the vote of the electorate imposes its dogma on the people of Britain on the basis of an unfair advantage of having an absolute majority in the House of Commons equivalent to 54% of the seats. Legitimacy of governance arises from the breadth of national support and this government has little. A majority of seats in the House of Commons should not be the excuse to force through dogma but should demand that the governing party "rise to the occasion" and take into account all opinions and in particular that of the majority whilst safeguarding minority positions. But this is no longer a habit amongst politicians whose natural instincts are more visceral and directed to self-preservation within a framework of sustained party power. Unfortunately we cannot look to our politicians as examples of rational and faithul representation of our communities and therefore we can not rely upon them to uphold and defend the interests of our collective sovereignty. This is because they are always willing to proactively ignore people's preferences when instructed to do so by the particular party collective of which they are a member.
The party is over
It is not an irrelevant question to ask what purpose MPs serve for the people of this country when their motivation seems to be an unabashed self-seeking and promotion of the particularly limited interests of tiny private political parties. They will respond that democracy is founded on political parties and that political parties are necessary to shape the agenda. But the track record during the last 800 years or so and definitley since the Levellers penned their excellent documents, has been that democracy has been undermined by them and the agendas they shape serve their interests often at the expense of the people. Is it not time, in the context of securing a safe passage to a future where the individual freedom of the people of Brtain remains an imperative, for us to acknowledge that the party is over?
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