Not far enough Mister Cameron
Guido has been reading with interest the response in the Daily Telegraph to the Conservative proposals for making our House of Freeloaders Commons more responsive to the wishes of the electorate.
Having considered the proposals carefully, Guido is of the opinion that it is a case of too little reform and not enough checks on the overweaning ambitions of the Civil Service. All very well to argue, as some commentators have done, that to allow the infamous e-petitions to be a tool for forcing a debate in the House may result in single issue parties hamstringing Parliament. That may well be the case – it will certainly slow down the avalanche of unnecessary and badly written legislation this present government has rammed through the Statute Book, but it doesn’t go far enough, it should bind the House to modify the subject proposal, or hold a referendum. Saving one issue here – where a single issue group are lobbying for some new legislation it should be subject to the same control as any other legislation – if it was something approved by the electorate or in a manifesto approved by the elctorate, it may proceed, otherwise not.
For far too long the excuse has been that Parliament “represents the people and is sovereign over the people”. There is much chatter about the “Sovereignty” of Parliament, but is it a reality? Of course not, since Heath signed up to the EC and the Blair government gave away the veto and adopted the Maastricht Treatry clauses Major had had the wit to reject, Brussels has ruled. Strasbourg is nothing but an expensive talking shop to which the Commission pays no attention at all, and Westminster has become nothing more than a rubber stamp for the Commissions dictats. Even before that happened the fact that we have a system of “Whips” meant that the elected representative didn’t represent anyone other than the Whips Office.
Mister Clarke has correctly identified that voters feel disengaged from the legislature because, no matter what we think, we are ignored from election to election. Between elections the ruling classes do as they please to suit their interests and sponsors interests arguing vacuously that “it was in the manifesto” and that voting for them means you voted for this or that legislation to be drafted and forced onto the statute books. Since probably 98% of the electorate never see the various Party Manifestos, it is completely disingenuous, the vast majority vote without any idea of what their party of preference is going to actually hit them with once they are elected. These claims that something is in the manifesto and that we must therefore “deliver” is also falacious in so far as 80% of the legislation currently being rammed onto our statute book is not formulated in the UK at all – it comes from the unelected Commission in Brussels. Almost all of it was never in any Manifesto! Therefore, Guido feels that ALL the EU Commission’s Dictats should be subject to a Referendum, that is the only way that we can regain control of our destiny in this country – and take power away from the equally unelected Civil Service which operates by whispering in the ears of the Minsiter what they may and may not be “allowed” by Brussels to adopt, modify or object to and which is also the sole controlling body when it comes to spending the taxpayers money.
Three things are, as far as Guido can see, absent from these proposed “reforms”. The first is a check on the power of Parliament to ram through legislation which is contrary to the interests of the majority of people in this country without reference to the electorate. The Reform Act of 1836 was supposed to reduce the influence of “patronage”, it has simply changed its face and its clothes. The average voter is of no interest to Parliament at all, their paymasters are Big Business, Brussels and the infamous single issue Lobby Groups like the Pseudo-scientists infesting Greenpeace and other similar organisations. There is no proposal to address this. Nor is there a viable proposal to address the problem of “Tribal Voting” in elections where certain parties could put up as a candidate the local tarts pet poodle (In some cases Guido thinks they do!) and the voters in that area would obediently elect it. Some of these are no better than the famous “Rotten Boroughs” the Reform Act was supposed to remove.
One further reform must be made to our system of elections – parties must be made to actually list their key manifesto points and the voters must indicate Yes or No to each. Anything which does not acquire at least a simple majority cannot proceed without a full referendum. That will prevent the sort of farce we have seen over the devolution issue which was supposed to be carried forward by breaking England into eight “Regional Assembly” areas. The electorate rejected the Assemblies leaving Blair’s constitutional vandalism exposed. When Gordon Brown becomes the PM he will do so in a totally unrepresentative House of Commons, representing as he does a constituency which is not in the least bit affected by any legislation he steers through Westminster, and all of which is rammed through by a majority created by the dual representation accorded his voters in Scotland, with their own Parliament (funded by English tax) and the Welsh, with their Assembly and their Westminster seats voting on English affairs. Guido wonders how many people realise that Labouyrs majority actually rests on those Scottish and Welsh MP’s. If we are to remain a United Kingdom Blair/Brown/Cameron has only one choice – England must have a Sovereign Parliament, free of Labour’s entrenched poodles from Scotland and Wales.
Guido does, on the whole, give a cautious and qualified welcome to these proposals. Anything which cotributes toward making the so-called Representative of the People actually take notice of us is a start. But it is only a start. We need a fully elected Lord’s chamber with the powers to block anything which would be detrimental to our interests and legal system. And we need the Civil Service cut down to size and removed from the power they currently wield. Only then will the electorate start to believe that the legislature really does listen to them.
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