PIP

Wheelie-bin democracy

The people of Portsmouth need to avoid submitting themselves to the current notions of participation being promoted by the government. The government considers that the participation of the people of Britain in the decisions which affect them should be largely limited to "local issues" whilst the government retains for itself the vital decisions through a strong and largely illicit control over national agendas and budgets which, of course, remain undere the influence of the political party. New Labour have such a poor opinion of Britons that they consider their intellectual limits will be attained and their interests satisfied if they are encouraged to participate in decisions through "citizen's juries" who, at great cost, will decide on such matters as to where wheelie bins should be located or what colour they should be; local authorities will also be held to account on how they handle such vital matters.

In constitutional terms the tragedy is that whereas the government wishes to promote expensive "citizens' juries" they have been working slowly to rid the country of the more important juries of citizens which operate in our law courts to protect each and every one from arbitrary legal decisions. Paradoxically the arguments used by the government in reducing the role of juries has been their cost. But the government wishes to spend more money in a parody of democracy to involve people in less important decisions.

The legitimacy issue

The legitimacy of government to take decisions is more than evident in the fact that the current governing party gained less than 19% of the support of the electorate in the last election. As a result, the Labour party, with less than 0.5% of the electorate as members, have used a support of just 19% of the electorate in votes to lever themselves into a position of absolute power through a Parliamentary majority which makes debate a waste of time. The party whips ensure that MPs vote in line with party dogma as opposed to supporting constituency preferences. Indeed, we have a government which is run by a factional minority which is able to impose its dogma on the majority (the 81% of the electorate who did not vote fo the governing party).

Political parties and centralised budgets

The reason such factional minority political parties wish to prevent the electorate from participating in decisions is that they wish to maintain control over both the justifications as well as the management of centralised policy budgets. The control over central budgets can be levered to provide the governing party with considerable political leverage over those who spend the money and those employed in the public sector.

Decision-making ¹

A key to breaking this marginalization of the people of local copmmunities, such as those in Portsmouth, is to call for specific changes such as banning the whip, making all Parliamentary votes a free vote, for voters to give preference to candidates who are independent and more likely to act as faithful representatives of constituencies rather than as intellectually-shackled clones obey their party masters. Lastly, to reinforce local participatory influence it would be of great benefit to have the salaries and allowances of MPs being paid from a local budget overseen by a local jury of members of the electorate selected from the local ocmmunity. The failure of MPs to engage with or to reflect adequately local points of view in their Parliamentary decisions could result in their contracts of service being revoked and a by-election called to replace them. MPs are agents of the people and agents should represent their principles in a fathful manner. Power to judge this aspect of performance needs to rest with the people and not with political parties who today remain unrepresentative of the people of Brtain.

¹ These points are a selection of constitutional reform proposals set out in: "The Briton's Quest for Freedom .. Our unfinished journey", McNeill, H.W., HPC Portsmouth, July 2007, ISBN: 978-0-907833-01-7