The Light’s On At Signpost. George Fraser MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ the public wish on capital punishment; it was for him and his fellows, he assured me earnestly, to supply a lead, not to follow popular opinion.

      Now, this kind of haughty pretension may have been well enough in the days of Burke and the Pitts, when there was genuine force to the argument that the country was best governed by an educated elite, trained and fit to lead and make the many-headed’s decisions for them. Many MPs then looked on public service as something to which they were devoted by tradition; they could also, with some justice, consider themselves the intellectual as well as the social superiors of their constituents and the unenfranchised masses. Those days are long dead. No one in his right mind would suggest that today’s MPs are superior in intellect, morality, education, or judgment, to the people they represent; many of them are plainly inferior on all four counts. Some cannot even talk grammatically, and by their speech shall ye know them – assuming you can interpret the half-educated proletarian noises they make.

      I have mentioned Burke, and those who defend the practice of MPs following their own judgment against the voters’ wishes can quote, if they are familiar with his works or have even heard of him, his warning to the people of Bristol that their MP owed them his judgment, “and betrays … you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” Fair enough for the eighteenth century, no doubt, but it was also this same Burke who said: “In all forms of government the people is the true legislator”, and, most tellingly: “I am not one of those who think that the people are never wrong … but I do say that in all disputes between them and their rulers, the presumption is … in favour of the people.”

      It appears that the great Parliamentarian was no more consistent than any other politician, but he would repay study by those who, in their complacent self-admiration, have so little regard for the wishes of those whose judgment they were only too delighted to accept when it sent them to Westminster.

      An excellent way of demonstrating the unfitness of MPs is to compare them to ourselves. I think I know my capacity and limitations, and I doubt if I have ever been competent to run a department of state, but I led an infantry section in war when I was nineteen, commanded a platoon when I was twenty-one, and in middle age edited a great daily newspaper. Now all these jobs required some degree of what is called leadership – a gift which people like Blair seem to think is automatically conferred by election. I hold no very high opinion of myself as a leader, but can it be contended that the sorry collection of placemen and party hacks and p.c. women and semi-literate nonentities who have crawled and toadied and lied their way to Westminster are fit to lead me and millions like me – educated professionals and workers and artisans and craftsmen who have made their way in the world by real skill and perseverance, not by blathering and caballing?

      If I weren’t so outraged at the idea, I’d be helpless with laughter. Blair, a junior barrister who has never done a real job in the real world, to lead me? I wouldn’t follow him round the corner. Or any of his Cabinet of freaks and oddballs. Or the sorry parcel of yuppies and businessmen opposite.

      It may be asked, what’s the alternative, and the answer is that there isn’t one. The British political system has been defended as the least bad polity yet invented, and there is something in it – but only so long as the people who operate it play the game. I don’t apologise for using an old, perhaps outworn, expression; what I am saying is that our “democracy” is acceptable only if our elected rulers are honest, tell the truth, behave with decency, and strive to remember that they are there to serve the people as the people wish to be served.

      That is not what we have, or have had for thirty years, or look like having for a long time to come. Politics has become the preserve of the second-rate, a career primarily seen as a means of advancing personal ambition and lining the pocket; service is the last thing an aspiring parliamentarian has in mind. I must say again that I speak of the majority, not of the handful who have not forgotten what honour means.

      Occasionally, and more often since we became involved in the European folly, it is suggested that we need a constitution. This is puerile. There is not, and never has been, a written constitution worth powder to blow it to hell, including the collection of platitudes and wishful thinking by which Americans set such misguided store. Why it should be supposed that a document drawn up by a group of eighteenth-century English squires and merchants for a largely agricultural country should be thought suitable for the governance of a modern, highly industrialised, multi-national state, has never been clear to me, but then I have always been mistrustful of vague, high-sounding, and sometimes downright daffy pontifications, and uncomfortably aware that a constitution means what you want it to mean. We have seen the US Constitution twisted and distorted and turned inside out by slick lawyers to a degree which Jefferson and Co. wouldn’t believe; to take one small example, they wouldn’t have equated pornography with freedom of speech.

      We must remember also that any constitution endures only until someone comes along who is powerful enough to tear it up, as the history of Germany, and others, bears witness.

      That, of course, is the ever-present danger, and it applies regardless of whether a country has a constitution or not. Any democracy which plays its people false is liable to find itself displaced by tyranny, and don’t think it couldn’t happen in dear, sane, sensible old Britain. All it takes is enough betrayal by dishonest government, and enough public disillusion, and suddenly Wodehouse’s wonderful fun about “Spode swanking about in his footer bags” is funny no longer.

      We can only hope for the best, reminding ourselves that our creaky old “democracy” can work, given integrity and courage in those charged with operating it; even the ghastly party system needn’t be an insuperable obstacle to good government. It’s a bloody awful manifestation of the worst in human and political nature, but it’s inevitable, as is the lure of politics to the corrupt and venal personality. The days when Cincinnatus could be called from the plough are long gone – and if he could be called he would be derided as a comic figure at Westminster.

      In closing, I must cite a prime example of hypocrisy in the so-called mother of Parliaments: the clamour from the Liberal Democrat benches for proportional representation. They demand it as the only fair, equitable, sensible, honourable, etc., etc., system. In fact, fairness, equity, sense, and most of all honour, have nothing to do with it; the Liberals want it because it’s the only possible way by which their clapped-out party can ever hope to get a share of power. Strange that their cry was never heard in the days (now some time ago, fortunately) when the Liberal Party meant something; was it not fair and equitable then? The truth is that today’s Liberal Democrats are like a football team fed up and resentful at languishing permanently at the bottom of the league, crying: “The rules must be changed, so that we can win.” It is a pathetic, typically dishonest plea.

      Quite apart from the moral one, there are many reasons why proportional representation, in any form, would be an extremely bad thing. One is that in Britain we traditionally vote for people, not parties, and the notion of party lists of candidates, chosen by the party hierarchy, is totally odious to any serious democrat. Not only is it wrong in principle; in fact it would mean that you could never get rid of those parliamentary disasters who so often rise to the top in their parties; p.r. would guarantee them permanent seats.

      On that last ground alone p.r. is abominable, but we may add the equally convincing objection, namely that it doesn’t work, as consideration of the havoc it has wreaked in various continental countries shows all too clearly. Fortunately, thus far New Labour has resisted the Liberal Democrat demand; the danger is that if ever they suffer a reduced majority they may bring it in to ensure the survival of Left-wing government – and its probable continuance until the day when Scotland becomes fully independent, and England, spared the presence of the Clydeside rabble at Westminster, will get the conservative (I emphasise the small “c”) English government it wants.

* Admittedly, Commons tradition militates against this. СКАЧАТЬ