A Non-Party Political Broadcast

It seems to me like we are paying an awful lot of people to do nothing but bicker over things they don’t really believe in. Some call it democracy, some call it parliament, I call it a massive waste of resources for little to no benefit to anyone other than those people paid to do it.

I work in Local Government; nothing special or anything, but the information I deal with on a daily basis is sensitive enough that I can’t talk about pretty much anything that happens at work. We have about 2000 people working in our building. We have 20 wards headed by 55 Councillors and something like 8000 staff across the city for a population of about 300,000. So as you can see, government is big business. The elected are just the tip of the iceberg.

So how many people do you think work for UK Central Government? Half a million? 650 Commons and 780 Lords? It’s big, whatever it is.

As staff, it makes no difference to my job who is in charge other than one party spends more on Local Government than another. The actual work I do is pretty much the same whoever is in charge, it would probably affect me more if the Chief Executive changed than if Central Government or the elected leader of the council changes in terms of what we actually do at work. I think most people would agree that not a lot changes when your local councillor changes too. And come to think of it, how many people could say they have noticed a change where they live when one MP loses out to another? Locally speaking, that is.

It is actually quite uncommon for an area to change the party it votes for. In the 2010 elections, fewer than 100 of the 650 Commons elected were from a different party than the previous MP for that constituency, and this caused us to change the ruling party for the first time in 13 years. But in those 100 or so areas, what is now different?  Apart from the smug bastard who is currently pretending to care about local and national issues, what has actually changed after the election? Some ideas have been scrapped, some others put forwards. Mostly it’s just down to where the money goes.

I think the biggest problem I have with the way people vote is that people treat politics like they treat football. It doesn’t matter who you think is the best by any standard other than who you already decided you support. You support a team, not a player. Nobody says: “I’m voting for Mr X this time cos he’s brilliant and I think he’d really get things done, is a local lad and is known to be pretty honest and upstanding, plus he replies to his emails”. Rather, you get: “I support Conservative and will vote for them again like I always do”.

I’m just as guilty of this as everyone else, it saddens me to admit. I could never vote for Conservative because I remember the 1980s. I don’t like New Labour. So yeah, the only time I ever voted was the middle lot, the .4 of our current 2.4 parties. I don’t think I will be doing that again though.

The biggest bastard elbows his way to the top of the pile and declares himself leader of the party, people vote for the party they support, and LO! we have a party in charge but that’s ok because the person at the top wasn’t really voted for by any more people than the few who support his party somewhere in Britain that the party thinks is a safe place for them. This makes me think that who you vote for is decided more by where you live than anything else, and we are governed mostly by people who were never elected in the first place. The career party officials who aren’t even resident in this country, like Conservative party chairman, the expat for tax evasion Lord Goldsmith (life peerage for money given and services rendered).

It’s a cross between a postcode lottery and an oligarchy, but we like to think of it as a democracy.

Then there’s the lies. On the one hand, we have a scheme like ContactPoint, a central database designed to allow practitioners of social/medical care and officers of the law to share relevant information on all children in Britain to safeguard against Baby P happening again scrapped pretty much the day the coalition got into power “to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties under the Labour Government and roll back state intrusion”  and on the other hand contrary to that statement a suggestion that all we really need to do to safeguard children is to carpet-ban pornography on the internet through all ISPs in Britain unless people opt-in and become official registered perverts.

The thing is, everyone knows politicians lie. We joke and laugh about it all the time. But we never hold them accountable. It’s like we expect it and don’t care because it doesn’t really matter: we know that the people who rule the party are not the people we pretended we were electing into government, as we also knew that we weren’t really voting for them anyway and that the party pretty much runs itself just fine, and the governmental machine grinds on regardless.

Another total lack of democratic process is how bills are passed in the commons. There is a trade in policies. Three ideas are put forward, and MPs haggle over who they will support in their ideas in return for support in their own. Except for when one bill is put forward and the party orders all its members to vote for it, that abstention or voting against will not be tolerated as one Nadine Dorries put it recently.

Why do we even bother with it at all? In what way would we not be better off with a monarchy? It would certainly be a lot cheaper as I can see an immediate 650 very expensive self-serving bastards that we don’t need to pay for any more. We could just get rid of the entire bunch, have someone rule who has been brought up and trained to do so from birth, and make them accountable and responsible for all their actions on our behalf. We only really need an elected treasury anyway, as that’s most of what the government does. And we wouldn’t really need more than about 13 of them with no parties, no in-power/opposition farce. Just 13 people voted directly by us for their policies and competence who decide how much money the monarch gets to spend on running the country.

So there you have it. You wanted to streamline government, I’ve shown you how. If you, Mr Cameron and your clones were really idealists and not just career suits, your path is clear: for the good of your people that you swore to serve, fall on your swords.