The Real Power

Peter Hitchens writes:

Why are political professionals so foul-mouthed? The real stars of George Clooney’s clever and enjoyable new film about politics, The Ides Of March, are the backroom fixers and spin doctors who turn rather average individuals into TV superstars and propel them into office.

And they swear all the time about everything. I am sure this is completely realistic, from what I have seen of their real-life equivalents here. I think they do this to prove that they have power over their underlings and can humble them without risking retaliation. Using dirty language to someone who cannot answer back is a form of showing off.

Interestingly, they often swear at the politicians who are supposed to be their bosses. Because, of course, the smiley Blair or Cameron figures who are sold to the public are not really in charge. The backroom fixers, who create them and mould them, represent the real power, which in the U.S. and increasingly in Britain comes from big-money backers. As Bob Dylan sang long ago ‘Money doesn’t talk, it swears’.

If we want to get control of our country back, we have to devise a way of liberating politics from such people. Nationalising the existing parties, by giving them taxpayers’ money, is definitely not the answer.

But doesn’t it say so much about the Labour and Tory parties, that if you held a flag day for either of them it would raise a few old Spanish coins and some buttons? They have to rely on big donors because they long ago deserted their roots. Why is it considered so eccentric to say it is time to get rid of them and start again?

We need electoral reform. Including, primarily, the vigorous contesting of every seat by every party on behalf of a candidate in every case capable of being that constituency’s MP. That the existing parties do not do this proves that they cannot do it, that they simply have not sufficient people of sufficient calibre.

In the course of each Parliament, as a matter of routine, each party should submit to a binding ballot of the whole constituency electorate its locally determined internal shortlist of two for Prospective Parliamentary Candidate, submit to a binding ballot of the whole national electorate its nationally determined internal shortlist of two for Leader, and submit to a ballot of the latter kind the 10 policies proposed by the most of its branches, including affiliated branches where applicable, with each voter entitled to vote for up to two, and with the top seven guaranteed inclusion in the subsequent General Election manifesto.

We also need to legislate for a ballot line system, such that voters would be able to indicate that they were voting for a given candidate specifically as endorsed by a smaller party or other campaigning organisation, with the number of votes by ballot line recorded and published separately. Each party should choose its working peers by seeking nominations from its branches, including those of affiliated organisations, and putting out to a ballot of the entire electorate those with the most nominations, up to one and a half times their respective allocations. Each of us could then vote for up to half that allocation, and the highest scoring allocated number would get in. The law should further require that every four or five years, the 12 units already used for European Elections would each elect three Crossbenchers, with each of us voting for one candidate and with the three highest scorers being ennobled.

Thank goodness that there is still some part of our parliamentary system from which it remains possible to speak from outside the nasty but inevitable union between, on the one hand, what has always been the anti-parliamentary New Left and, on the other hand, the sociologically indistinguishable New Right’s arrival at hatred of Parliament as the natural conclusion of its hatred of the State. From that union, together with the SDP’s misguided Alliance with the Liberals around their practically Bennite constitutional agenda, derives the Political Class’s desire to abolish the House of Lords.

For those who keep such scores, the House of Lords has a higher proportion of women, a higher proportion of people from ethnic minorities, a broader range of ethnic minorities, and far more people from working-class backgrounds generally and the trade union movement in particular, than can be found down the corridor. More significantly, and despite the very hard efforts of successive governments, it also retains a broader range of political opinion, more reflective of the country at large. But that is under grave threat, both from the party machines and from the way of all flesh. The future composition of the House would be secured, at least in part, by providing for each current life peer, at least who attends very or fairly regularly, to name an heir, by no means necessarily or even ordinarily a relative, but rather a political and a wider intellectual soul mate. That heir would become a peer upon his or her nominator’s death, and would thus acquire the same right of nomination.

However, we most certainly do not need recall elections, a charter for nuisance, mostly by Liberal Democrat activists. Anyone who secured a recall election should be required to pay for it. Much better to have no such provision in the first place.