Let It Die...

A few weeks ago I stood on a street corner while a large group of scared, panicky people ran toward me. They were followed by a line of police officers, who were trying to keep the first group apart from another group, who had decided that the kind of people who make up the first group were not the kind of people who should be allowed in this country. This situation continued for some hours. 

At the same time - exactly the same time, and for some hours following - the local MP, for whom I have a great deal of time, was telling the world via Twitter that everything was fine, no problems, no roads cordoned off, everybody going about their business as usual. 

Obviously everything here is fine.

Which summed something up for me: I, and everybody else in that area that evening, knew what was going on out there. The MP didn’t. Either that, or she was feeding a different narrative to the world. And there we had it: the problem with politics today in a nutshell. 

Politicians seem to have no idea what actually concerns the majority of people in this country today. There’s this strange idea that everybody belongs to the ‘squeezed middle’, that everybody’s main concern is whether they can afford the usual restaurant or shall they have to downgrade to takeaways, that there’s nobody actually at the sharp end of day-to-day living in recession-era Britain. 

And obviously these people are on their way to a lovely teaparty.

There’s a disconnect between us and them, and there’s a reason for this; most politicians have chosen politics as a career. Most - especially the younger MPs that sit at present - have gone in a straight line from university (usually PPE) to a researcher or Special Adviser position within either one of the main parties or a government department, then risen swiftly to a safe seat. 

And without wishing to come over all Animal Farm on you, there seems to be very little difference in style or substance between them, regardless of party. Certainly there are the outliers, the publicity whores, the slightly extreme sorts; trying to be the political equivalents of shock jocks, aiming for Howard Stern and just about hitting Dermot O’Leary. 

Overall, though, there’s just a coating of human pubulum, a bland smoosh of interchangeable suits and smiles spread like Philadelphia cheese over the leather benches of the House. 

They’re disconnected from ordinary people, who don’t trust them and show that distrust by not voting. Let’s make that clear: people are not voting for a party or a person, nor against. They’re simply not bothering to vote at all. Turnout falls in each consecutive election. Some local elections have turnouts so small they might not have bothered to call the thing in the first place. 

What the public needs is something to believe in again. Either that, or a swift kick up the arse. 

There’s talk at the moment of renovating the Houses of Parliament. Beautiful though it is in its gothic overkill, it’s an old building, full of asbestos and vermin, daily becoming a more and more apt metaphor for what goes on within. It’ll have to be closed down while it’s made safe. 

So why not, for the length of the renovation work but possibly longer, reintroduce the electorate to the importance of democracy by taking away the process of democracy?

Let’s say, then, that Parliament is dissolved, that we have no government. What we have instead is one person in charge of each region; a Commissar for London, another for the South-East, another for Manchester, for each Riding of Yorkshire and so on. Unelected, of course; appointed by the Privy Council perhaps, or chosen by lottery one grey weekend. 

For five years, maybe ten, these couple of dozen people sit in committee in a conference centre somewhere, and make decisions for us. With any luck there’ll be a spread of political convictions between them, but if there isn’t then tough luck, because if they turn out to be maniac extremists, we’re stuck with them. 

And then, when the House is ready for re-occupation (and it may never be; we shall hold on to the possibility of a wholesale relocation of a reinstated Parliament to the QEII Conference Centre, or to the Olympic Park, or to an industrial estate in Lincolnshire), we shall disband the committee, thank them for their work, and start from scratch. 

We’ll have to tweak the system a little. The public may welcome it back with open arms and hugely increased participation, but equally they may not. So instead, we’ll have to incentivise the MPs. 

Ballot papers will have a ‘None Of The Above’ option, and if that option is the most popular, a constituency will just have to get along without an MP for a while. MP’s salaries will be tied to average wages, and rise only at the same level as the same index used for calculating raises in state pensions and other benefits. Outgoing MPs will get the same redundancy benefits as any other worker. Expenses will be subject to the same scrutiny as they would in any other company. 

You see, the problem with too many MPs at the moment, especially those in safe seats or with large majorities, is that they see themselves as creatures of privilege, set for life (or until tabloid scandal) in a cushy job where they can swan along whenever they feel like it, waffle a bit, then bugger off home. Not all of them; the MP I mention at the start of this is very good at her job, working hard both within her constituency and in the larger arena. But a lot do. 

We have to make being an MP a job, one that rewards those who are good at it with positions of greater responsibility, but which weeds out the placemen and the careerists and the mates of the PM and all the others that make politics as it stands such a feeble parody of what it should be. 

Then maybe the people will stop looking at politicians with contempt and distrust, and start voting in decent numbers again, and rediscover what it means to have control over the people who legislate for us.