What's The Problem?

It is utterly astonishing that 80 Tory MPs have been reported to the Electoral Commission for receiving funds from unincorporated associations representing business or other interests, just as it is that there is serious talk of banning financial contributions to political parties from such associations and from trade unions.

Precisely in order to avoid ties either to the localities that they purport to represent, or to civil society generally, the political parties now fund themselves by means ranging from the morally questionable to the criminally dishonest. Funding by such associations or by the unions is exactly what should be encouraged instead.

That deliberate cutting of ties is related symbiotically to the fact that, over the last thirty years or so, the political life of the United Kingdom has descended into the crisis that now threatens the continued existence of British liberty and democracy.

Vast powers have been handed over to the European Commission, to transnational corporations, to whoever happens to have the ear of the President of the United States at the given time, to an effectively unaccountable Executive, to the judiciary, to non-governmental organisations, to private contractors, and to politicians’ hangers on.

The House of Lords has been turned into a source of vanity titles for politicians’ friends and benefactors. Most members of the House of Commons, and soon almost (if almost) all of them, are drawn from a very particular section of the upper middle class, a class which it has become almost impossible to join other than by being born into it.

Policy appears out of some sort of ether, devised and implemented by persons whose views and (insofar as they have any) values bear little or no resemblance to those of the population at large, nor to any of this country’s three principal political traditions. The internal diversity of each of those traditions is now barely represented in Parliament, and will soon cease to be represented there at all. Independent voices are almost completely excluded at every level.

The Conservative Party has little or no organisational or electoral base outside London, the South East and East Anglia. It neither knows nor cares much, if anything, about any other part of the country, nor even very much about East Anglia or the less chi-chi parts of London and the South East.

The Labour Party has little or no organisational or electoral base in the South of England, in any part of Scotland beyond Glasgow and its immediate environs, or in North, Mid or West Wales. Yet it still neither knows nor cares much, if anything, about any part of England, at least, other than, again, the most chi-chi parts of London and the South East.

The Liberal Democrats stand for totally different things even in immediately adjacent localities, and very strikingly in different parts of the country. They are most notable for surviving on the atavistic tribal loyalty of areas where their social, and increasingly also economic, policies could not be further from mainstream opinion, but where the other two parties have gone out of their way to make it impossible for people to identify with them.

No national party is any sort of force in Northern Ireland, and two of them do not even bother to organise there at all. Therefore, no national party is representative of or responsive to the views and concerns of people in Northern Ireland, many of whom have paid with their lives for that institutionalised unrepresentativeness and unresponsiveness.

The parties themselves have tiny numbers of remaining members, since most constituencies are more or less safe for one party or another, most MPs are chosen at best by a handful of local stalwarts, and at least as often as not by an infinitesimal number of Westminster functionaries who have never set eyes on the constituency in question. Most of such members as remain are at least rather old, many of whom are very old indeed, and a strikingly high proportion of whom are either in receipt of councillors’ allowances or closely related (especially married) to people in such receipt. Yet local government itself has been eviscerated.

Both candidate selection (whether for Parliament or for prominent positions) and policy formulation are done with an eye to whom or what the BBC, in particular, will or will not condescend to allow on air, and with any eye to whom or what the Murdoch Press, in particular, will or will not condescend to give favourable, if any, coverage in print. Many political journalists act as little or nothing more than unpaid press officers for particular parties or individual politicians, and several are little or nothing more than glorified gossip columnists.

Just as the end of the recruitment of national politicians from wider civil society throughout the country has restricted politics, so the end of the recruitment of national journalists from local and regional print and broadcast media has restricted political journalism. In both cases, that restriction is to those who can afford to live in Central London on very little pay in their early twenties, and often for a number of years after that. This largely accounts for the growth of political blogging, which gives a voice to those without such family fortunes.

Yet even blogging has largely been co-opted, with attention lavished on a tiny handful of well-connected, carefully chosen 'über-bloggers'. These allow and encourage politicians and others to use them to plant favourable stories, but they maintain the pretence that they themselves are demotic and free-thinking, and that theirs is the bespoke voice of the British blogosphere, any deviation from which is therefore either insane or intended as a spoof. But in fact, theirs is only the bespoke voice of their own Political Class. This might be why the über-bloggers presume to put out three-line whips on certain issues, and to abuse hysterically, even to the point of criminal harassment over periods of years, any blogger who breaks those whips.

The slow but remorseless economic, social, cultural and political dissolution of the United Kingdom is, quite intentionally, the destruction of bulwarks of thought and practice critical of that of the central power-elite (and of the power-elites within, in particular, Scotland, Wales, Ulster Unionism, and Irish Republicanism). Those bulwarks include the middle class, the working class, the agrarian interest, the Catholic Church, and the network comprised both of the Church of Scotland and of the Free Churches, among numerous other aspects of this country’s historic pluralism.

The process of destroying them by dissolving the Union is now a generation old, going back to the wholesale Thatcherisation of England and Wales while Scotland and Northern Ireland were left largely untouched, a device for making common cause impossible, and at least as great an example as any today of Scottish MPs voting to implement in England and Wales policies that they knew would never be implemented in their own constituencies. That process also incorporated the Thatcher and Major Governments’ successively more draconian impositions of the Welsh language on English-speaking parts of Wales, at once detaching Welsh interests from those corresponding elsewhere and stoking up divisive resentments against the Welsh-speaking minority on the part of the English-speaking majority.

By such means, the central power-elite, the Political Class, began to silence nationwide bourgeois, proletarian, agrarian, Catholic, Church of Scotland and Free Church, and other dissent. That silencing is now all but complete. Anyone even passingly familiar with this country’s history should give that fact a moment to sink in.

As they should the fact that political parties’ names, constitutions (including aims and objectives), symbols and Leaders are now subject to annual government approval, approval for which a fee is charged.

Every party currently having representation in either House of Parliament is in fact a cynical device for containing certain categories of voter in order to prevent those voters from disrupting the economic, social, cultural or political status quo. Voter turnout is in free-fall, with Labour and the Conservatives between them reaching only forty-two per cent of the eligible vote in 2005. Everyone without exception expects the abstention rate to be even higher at the next General Election. Next to no one votes at local elections.

And so one could go on.

In order to remedy this, the more funding by the likes of the Midlands Industrial Council (as surely as by the likes of Unison, Unite or the GMB), the better.