Skip to main content

Er...where's my voice?

It has been, to put it mildly, one hell of a time in politics.


As I write, Andrea Leadsom has withdrawn from the contest to be the next Prime Minister, leaving Theresa May unopposed; and David Cameron has announced that Ms. May will take over on Wednesday evening. He must have one hell of a good removals company - it usually takes months to move house, but he appears to be going with extraordinary expeditiousness. It's almost as if he'd been planning this months ago...

Meanwhile, over on the other side of the chamber, Angela Eagle has announced she will challenge Jeremy Corbyn for the leadership of the Labour Party. Just when we needed a united main opposition party the most, we find that once again we're back to the bad old eighties, and the Tories' capacity for holding onto power no matter the cost comes into play.

And while the chicanery and treachery continue in Westminster, all the rest of us are trying to get on with our lives, and I'm sure that I'm not alone in the feeling that we are being ignored: We've had our little fun with the referendum, now we're expected to wait for our betters to recreate the political landscape around them for their benefit.

Sorry, I'm not having it.

Dear reader, I'd like to make a suggestion. Maybe it's a daft one, and it's certainly something for the long term, but this seems like a time for ideas, ANY ideas, as our honourable representatives do not, at the time of writing, appear capable of finding their honourable bums with a map.

I'll start with a question: Who do you trust to represent you and voice your needs?

Another: Why do you trust them?

A third: When did you sign the contract that permitted that person to make decisions for you?

Now, we live, apparently, in a political system that relies on consensus and trust, in very much the same way that we trust that the bits of paper and metal in our pockets are commonly agreed to be money, and have a redeemable value (have you seen how Sterling's doing, by the way?).

Yet it strikes me that that consensus and trust have been severely eroded, not merely by the last few weeks, but going right back to 2003 and the invasion of Iraq. Last week, we saw the entirely unedifying spectacle of Tony Blair trying to explain away the dripping gobbets of blood that trail from his hands.

This erosion has become so bad that we must, in some way, rebuild it. Here's one way: a kind of Power of Attorney.

Let me explain. If you've got older or incapacitated relatives, you may well have one of these. In essence, Power of Attorney allows you to make decisions on behalf of someone else. It's a relatively simple legal instrument.

Why don't we apply this to voting? Currently, it's tradition and custom that allow our vote to count towards giving a politician our mandate to speak on our behalf. Yet tradition and custom are no guarantor of legality. Just because something is customary doesn't make it correct: Slavery was (is!) a custom; so is FGM.

Now, before you blanch at this, I'm not suggesting that everyone has to read and sign some massive wad of documents. Instead, I suggest that, by voting, you have in effect agreed to the putative MP being your representative. YES, I know that sounds remarkably like what we already have, but here's the catch: They are legally required to represent your views - and legally required to honour all commitments laid out in their manifesto. Should they not do so, then they are to be held in breach of contract, and therefore a new election, whether local or general, would be triggered.

By introducing a legal element to this process, we can achieve two good targets. The first is that political parties (or groups representing certain views in a referendum) would be held directly and legally accountable for the policies they claim to represent. Secondly, it invites the voter to be more closely involved in the process by actually reading what their party of choice stands for. You get more responsible politics and a more politically educated electorate at a stroke.

See? Not bad, is it?

Of course, it probably doesn't stand a snowball's chance in Hell of being actioned, seeing as the last thing our politicians want is an educated electorate.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Imbolc is here!

  Happy Non-Dry January, everyone. February 1st marks Imbolc in the old calendar - the day that is halfway to equinox (more or less), and the first stirrings of Spring. It also marks the beginning of my month of birthday celebrations, but that's another story (but don't let that put you off sending me cards, money, NFTs, Cryptocurrency wallets, chocolates etc etc) This year, it also signifies the end of a month of abstinence from booze. Earlier on this evening, I stood in my kitchen, staring at an inviting bottle of red wine, and seriously entertaining second thoughts about opening it or not.  I've never felt that about a bottle of wine in my life!  Then again, Dry January has been the longest time I have spent away from booze in my entire adult life. I won't lie about this: I have drunk like a fish since university. I don't know whether to be impressed by my 31-day achievement, or bloody terrified. The shocking thing? How easy not drinking turned out to be. I shoul

Same old day

 Well, of course it isn't, but as this is meant as a companion piece to the previous post, it seems only right to link the titles. So, I hope you weren't left with the impression that I am always in the deepest throes of anxiety: I am not. While I recognise it as the climate of my mind, it is nevertheless not actually the weather, as it were. Sometimes, the sun shines: at others, storms rumble and tear across the skies of my psyche. The good thing is that I have been able to forecast the problems a lot more accurately as I've grown older, and so I've developed several coping strategies which work, more or less. Not always, but they mitigate the worst moments and mean I climb out of any spiral just that bit faster. It'll blow over So the first thing is what I've alluded to in my meteorological metaphor - these moments when things are bad are temporary and they will pass. They always have done before, and there's no reason that they won't again. That is a

The Carrot....or The Stick?

 I would guess that you, like me, were horrified by what happened in Washington DC last week. Actually, I've felt pretty horrified on a daily basis by everything coming out of Washington for the last four years, not to mention our own fun and shenanigans with Brexit here.  A dark and divisive mood still pervades on both sides of The Pond, driven by extreme views, propaganda, disinformation, rumour, and outright lies. Joe Biden's victory and coming inauguration as President may do something to alleviate these stormclouds of thought, but it's going to take time - time and cooperation. It's that latter word I miss in the world right now - cooperation, along with empathy, perception and openness. The American and British Worlds, right now, still seem to be firmly set in a retributive, punitive, aggrieved mood. But who to punish? Who to exact retribution on? And more importantly, why? What's the point?  It has struck me that in the current political climate, there is ver