constitutional reform

A peerage! It seems that the last speaker to be forced from office, boss-eyed Sir John Trevor in 1693, was one of those who did not get a peerage following his fall from grace, and nor should Martin. Lord Martin of Milnburn or wherever it will be should never happen. It is an affront. We all know there are people who should never have been placed in the Upper House, having failed at their elected job or even run away from re-election, but Martin has been thoroughly disgraced in the process too.

Now, don't get me wrong, this is not snobbery, George Thomas was a man from a similar background and to me thoroughly deserved the last hereditary ranking peerage to be given to a former Speaker (even though it was pretty unlikely anyone was going to inherit it anyway). But at a time also when we need desperately to change both houses of parliament (or abolish both as I would have it) this is no time to be simply patting people on the back and kicking them "upstairs".

Not one member of the commons apparently dissented from the motion that Speaker Martin should be elevated. If they are so concerned about tradition and face that they cannot see that this is one occasion in which that tradition ought not to be honoured, given the extraordinary events that have led to this, none of them deserve to wipe their arses on that green leather benching.

Do I look bovvered? Well, do I?

Let's face it, the problems of the political class in this country will not be solved by one person in a funny get up however many reform committees they chair. Representative democracy is the problem. The state itself. The sooner they go home for their long vacations, and we get to put padlocks on the doors so they can't get back in to continue screwing up our country and our lives the better we will all be for it.

Anyone who thinks the system can be fixed, even with major surgery, is missing the point. The political system is a competition to see who is most persuasive in getting to a position that gives them power over an unthinkable proportion of our national wealth and production, the ability to tinker with markets with the now seen disastrous results and to force us all into slavery to their ideas for generations to come.

We don't need a new Speaker, we need a new constitution, rebuilt from the people upwards and relieving us of the burden of the state and its political masters.

Just a quickie really. There is a lot of confusion in the non-wonk world about "PR". Of course there are two meanings for the "P" in "PR": "Preferential", in which candidates can be ranked and which tend to ensure that the one least out of favour with the most electors actually gets elected, which in itself has some good points - very few UK MPs and English & Welsh Councillors can claim to have the confidence of at least half their electors and this would give them that; and "Proportional", in which the aggregate votes across a number of candidates tend to result in a number of people being elected fairly closely related to the overall share of the vote a party gets - they have such a system in Northwrn Ireland and in Scotland for local government and, even on relatively small constituencies of three or four members seems to have produced a fairly proportional result in council chambers.

The apparent proposal due from Gordon Brown is to use "Alternative Vote" which is one of the purely Preferential types of PR, with no pretense to Proportionality at all. It has the advantage mentioned above of ensuring that in single member constituencies someone has to get 50% support and so, I suppose, is slightly better that being fed to alligators in a Florida swamp, but not by much.

However, given that a general election is less than a year away, assuming no attempt is made to invoke some of the Civil Contingency powers to grant Gordon permanent rule without parliament (which cannot be ruled out of course!), it would be impossible to rearrange constituencies in my opinion to accommodation my preferred method of multi-member "Single Transferrable Vote" which is the Scottish local government system and certainly not, God help us, any list based system, or even "AV+" in which the constituency is decided by Alternative Vote then some top up regional members are allocated according to the overall share of the vote for each party in all the constituencies in that region.

So, I would support the Alternative Vote suggestion for ONE ELECTION ONLY and with an automatic clause that after that the relevant body (is it the Boundary Commission any more or has it been subsumed into the Electoral Commission?) immediately begins to reform constituencies in preparation for STV the next time round. The primary legislation preparing for this should be included in any imminent Bill proposing Alternative Vote so there can be no doubt that it will happen.

If that cannot be achieved, then I agree with those who say that AV is too small a step which, once taken, may set back the cause of true reform for another decade, and we should not in such a case support it at all. We must secure a firm commitment to proper reform. It is the proportionality of the UK parliament that is all wrong. AV can make a small difference in that, but it can also have the opposite effect.

Yesterday, 8th June 2009, was the two hundredth anniversary of the death of Thomas Paine, corset-maker, pamphleteer, father of the American Revolution and member of the revolutionary National Convention of France. Despite all his achievements, six mourners attended his funeral, and his final resting place is unknown, having been disinterred by William Cobbett with the intention of giving him tomb in Britain, but the bones were lost when Cobbett died.

But as so often, Paine speaks across those two centuries as clear as the day he wrote. Of particular interest today, at a time when our government, parliament and constitution are showing such strain comes this gem:

I draw my idea of the form of government from a principle in nature, which no art can overturn, viz. that the more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered; and the easier repaired when disordered; and with this maxim in view, I offer a few remarks on the so much boasted constitution of England. That it was noble for the dark and slavish times in which it was erected, is granted. When the world was overrun with tyranny the least remove therefrom was a glorious rescue. But that it is imperfect, subject to convulsions, and incapable of producing what it seems to promise, is easily demonstrated.

[From Thomas Paine, "Common Sense", February 1776]

We all know what happened three and a half months later. And what a success that has been for two centuries. Time to listen to his words again in Britain today and do the right thing!

So, we're to get an Independent Regulator for MPs? Might I suggest the acronym "OffRAMP" - the Office of the Regulator of All Members of Parliament.

Does nobody else think this is a really bad idea. I'm sorry, we "elect" these people to run the country, to represent us in the High Court of Parliament. I realize they're looking a pretty untrustworthy bunch right now, but who, philosophically speaking, has the right to regulate or oversee those we theoretically put right there, at the top of the tree of government?

That they cannot, it seems, be trusted to regulate themselves says more about the political system than can be fixed by some kind of external regulator. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe puts it:

"Free entry and competition is not always good. Competition in the production of goods is good, but competition in the production of bads is not. Free competition in killing, stealing, counterfeiting, or swindling, for instance, is not good; it is worse than bad. Yet this is precisely what is instituted by open political competition, i.e., democracy."

Basically our system of government is so undermined and the problems facing the country so great that I do not any longer believe that parliament can fix this on its own. As regular readers will know I'd personally prefer to do without them entirely. Their infantilizing tendency is a drain on the country and their propensity to claim to be able to act on almost any issue in all our names is repugnant to me. Putting this right cannot be the work of a general election process, as parliamentary reform will be subsumed within a mish-mash of policies covering every area pressing the country and there is a grave danger that any parliament so elected will feel itself cleansed and only needing minor tweaks to rebuild confidence.

This must not be allowed to happen. The combination of the contempt in which parliament is now widely held by the people of Britain and the economic situation is, to me, an unprecedented and unmissable opportunity for the widest reforms since 1649. I believe that a centralized parliament at Westminster and a government accruing more and more powers is no longer required in the 21st century, having evolved throughout eras where even travel within Britain was difficult and when the monarchial system required ministers to be physically at court in order to advise and have laws approved.

Central government is no longer even a "necessary evil" to me but an unmitigated disaster that does more harm than good to this country and the freedom, prosperity and happiness of its people. And this is an opportunity to begin to wield the grim reapers' scythe on its powers and constitution. But if members are going to vote themselves an opportunity for repentance and expiation by accepting the SNP/Plaid call for immediate dissolution and an imminent general election it must not be allowed to believe that any parliament elected is thereby cured of these ills. The new parliament must have only one effective function - to be a temporary body in which to agree the ground rules for the new Britain that will take us into the twenty first century as a modern nation of sovereign individuals requiring as little government as possible, and so I put forward the following amendment to next week's debate:

1. Lest any parliament elected as a result of this Act consider itself to have been cleansed of miscreants and absolved of blame, it is hereby enacted that this parliament shall sit for no more than one year, and shall be dissolved on a date to be decided by said parliament but in any event not after 9th July 2010.

2. That the sole purposes and business of this parliament shall be to:

• a) oversee and co-ordinate the process of research, consultation and formulation of new constitutional arrangements to apply to future legislative and government institutions;

• b) agree by a two thirds majority a definitive declaration of the economic and fiscal problems facing the country in order that in any future election the electorate will be able to know that proposals for economic and fiscal policy to deal with these issues are based on a common understanding of what the problems actually are.

3. In respect of 2.a) consideration of constitutional reforms to include, inter alia:

• i) reformation of the methods of election of members of all parliaments, assemblies and local government bodies throughout the United Kingdom;

• ii) reform of the methods of selection or election of individuals carrying executive responsibility in any part of the governance of the United Kingdom;

• iii) the introduction of fixed term parliaments;

• iv) the introduction of an English Parliament;

• v) the abolition of parliament;

• vi) reform of the second chamber;

• vii) abolition of the second chamber;

• viii) devolution of any or all powers and competencies of parliament and ministers to government structures closer to the electorate, including structures not heretofore in existence that may be recommended by these reforms;

• ix) widespread reformation of those local levels of government to enable them to take on new roles devolved from Westminster;

and

• x) any other matter referred to the parliamentary commission on petition of more than one hundred thousand (100,000) ordinary electors of the United Kingdom.

4. In respect of 3.

• a) that members of all political parties who have contested national level election in the past two parliaments be invited to participate in these reviews on an equal footing with members elected at the forthcoming election;

• b) that professional experts in constitutional arrangements in other countries and in political science more generally be invited to participate;

• c) that leaders of each existing local authority and their opposition lead members be convened to a parallel reform body co-ordinated by the Local Government Association to be consulted by and to propose initiatives to the parliamentary commission on reform;

• d) That local groups of interested citizens be formed to scrutinize the work at all stages and to be consulted on all proposals

• e) If the new consitutional arrangement call for a parliament to be elected at Westminster, elections to said parliament under the new arrangements will take place not earlier than 10th October 2010 and not later than 31st October 2010.

5. That on or before the last day of the incoming parliament as in 1) above a series of options numbering no fewer than two and no more than three presented by the parliament and, with the consent of both houses, up to a further two options presented by petition of half a million (500,000) electors or more shall be put to the electors of the United Kingdom in a referendum conducted under a preferential voting system in which the option achieving 50% or more of the votes cast in the referendum, or, if none, the first to achieve 50% after elimination of the least favoured options and transfer of their votes to remaining options shall become the initial constitutional arrangements with effect from 10th July 2010.

6. In respect of 2.b)

• a) agreement of a majority of two thirds of the interim parliament shall be required to confirm the list of economic and fiscal problems;

• b) if, by a date no later than 28 days before the end of this parliament, 10th June 2010, no agreement has been reached by a two thirds majority of the parliament, the session on that day shall not rise until it is able to reach a two thirds majority, with no adjournment for refreshment or rest after midnight on 10th June 2010.

Does anyone know whether there is precedent for changing Chancellor of the Exchequer between the budget and the Finance Bill passing all its parliamentary stages? This year's hasn't made it through the legislature yet has it?

The time has come to pass as it was written in the year of our lord Sixteen hundred and ninety, and in the second year of the reign of our glorious sovereign majesty William, Stadtholder of Holland, Prince of Orange and Count of Nassau-Dillenburg and his Queen, Mary; King and Queen of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, Defenders of the Faith, etc. by Mr John Locke:

222. The reason why men enter into society, is the preservation of their property; and the end why they chuse and authorize a legislative, is, that there may be laws made, and rules set, as guards and fences to the properties of all the members of the society, to limit the power, and moderate the dominion, of every part and member of the society: for since it can never be supposed to be the will of the society, that the legislative should have a power to destroy that which every one designs to secure, by entering into society, and for which the people submitted themselves to legislators of their own making; whenever the legislators endeavour to take away, and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience, and are left to the common refuge, which God hath provided for all men, against force and violence. Whensoever therefore the legislative shall transgress this fundamental rule of society; and either by ambition, fear, folly or corruption, endeavour to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other, an absolute power over the lives, liberties, and estates of the people; by this breach of trust they forfeit the power the people had put into their hands for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the people, who. have a right to resume their original liberty, and, by the establishment of a new legislative, (such as they shall think fit) provide for their own safety and security, which is the end for which they are in society. What I have said here, concerning the legislative in general, holds true also concerning the supreme executor, who having a double trust put in him, both to have a part in the legislative, and the supreme execution of the law, acts against both, when he goes about to set up his own arbitrary will as the law of the society. He acts also contrary to his trust, when he either employs the force, treasure, and offices of the society, to corrupt the representatives, and gain them to his purposes; or openly preengages the electors, and prescribes to their choice, such, whom he has, by sollicitations, threats, promises, or otherwise, won to his designs; and employs them to bring in such, who have promised before-hand what to vote, and what to enact. Thus to regulate candidates and electors, and new-model the ways of election, what is it but to cut up the government by the roots, and poison the very fountain of public security? for the people having reserved to themselves the choice of their representatives, as the fence to their properties, could do it for no other end, but that they might always be freely chosen, and so chosen, freely act, and advise, as the necessity of the common-wealth, and the public good should, upon examination, and mature debate, be judged to require. This, those who give their votes before they hear the debate, and have weighed the reasons on all sides, are not capable of doing. To prepare such an assembly as this, and endeavour to set up the declared abettors of his own will, for the true representatives of the people, and the law-makers of the society, is certainly as great a breach of trust, and as perfect a declaration of a design to subvert the government, as is possible to be met with. To which, if one shall add rewards and punishments visibly employed to the same end, and all the arts of perverted law made use of, to take off and destroy all that stand in the way of such a design, and will not comply and consent to betray the liberties of their country, it will be past doubt what is doing. What power they ought to have in the society, who thus employ it contrary to the trust went along with it in its first institution, is easy to determine; and one cannot but see, that he, who has once attempted any such thing as this, cannot any longer be trusted.

[from John Locke, "The Second Treatise of Civil Government", Ch XIX "Of the Dissolution of Government", Para 222 (1690)"]

At the present government's behest we have:

• over a decade seen ordinary people robbed of their earnings through massively rising house prices and the debt money inflation created on to finance these;

• in the past year seen the result of this: further destruction of capital on a scale almost unprecedented, affecting those impoverished by the first as well as those made more wealthy;  

• seen that our own and future generations will be paying for the bitter pill with which they have tried to clean this ordure of their own making through the further attachment of our earnings, property and wealth;

• overt examples of politicians taking our money for their own frivolities under the eyes of all the others;

• a parliament reduced to a leisure club by the business management of a government desperate to get their authoritarian legislative program through further to curtail our liberties;

• and a government that has used all the patronage at its disposal to buy the votes of those elected to represent us, not them;

• had a government that has taken us into military adventures of the most unwise kind, based on lies and exaggerations and at the behest of a foreign power and which have killed many of our bravest fellow citizens.

I do not believe the good and wise Mr Locke was suggesting that it was up to the various people inside that suppurating House of Common Thieves and Accomplices to invoke the right to dissolve and choose the form and method of replacing it, perhaps especially those whose main interest is in securing power in the next parliament. He said it was up to us, the "other half" of the social contract: We The People.

To stitch up a new set of regulations to permit lesser troughings amongst themselves would be a complete travesty. We need a comprehensive and popular settlement that will not become a part of a package of hundreds of other policies in a party manifesto whose importance may vary from voter to voter and eclipse the program of change in the orders of the House.

I suggest that we have a National Government beginning as soon as possible, with, effectively, only one task: to consult as widely as possible with the people of Britain on a new constitution, new forms of government and representation, to include the powers and competencies of national, local and community level governance, and to produce a short list of different constitutional options to be voted on by the people in a referendum.

If we can be trusted to choose from thousands of hopefuls to dance or sing or otherwise perform before our monarch in a variety show, we can surely manage to sift through the various options and priorities and put together a constitution worthy of Her Majesty's signature.

A Zero Based State! By the people and from the people. Vive la Revolution!

Let me make no bones about this before I start - I loathe the British National Party. They are the wolves of Nazism in the pseudo-respectable clothing of all the other political psychopaths; trying to be honey tongued while hiding an agenda dripping with hate. I don't believe most of the people who may vote for them in just over a week appreciate their background or would want to see most of their policies even remotely implemented. And they should remember when they stand in the polling booth that it took just four years for the BNP's historical inspiration, the NSDAP, to go from 2% of the vote in general elections to 37% of the vote and catapult Hitler into effective absolute power. The BNP is not the vehicle with which your vote can give the government or the boondoggling and exploiting MPs at Westmonster a wake-up kick in the pants.

But the BNP are merely a symptom of a problem, just as the rise of the NSDAP in Germany was; the problem of a decadent and failing democracy. Both the state of the economy and the expenses issue are other symptoms. Democracy creates the situation in which different groups of people vie with each other to persuade as many as possible of us that they will be able to perform miracles by taking others' property or curtailing their freedoms. And the more that proves not to work the more inured we become to their promises and tribal in our votes.

And yet we hear nonsense such as from Alan Johnson recently about their leaders being the sole messiahs who can run Britain and get her out of her problems, cynically ignoring the part their beloved system has played in causing those problems. As if we are a nation of numbskulls who would collapse without Our Dear Leader. And if we lose patience with their failed promises we drift around looking for some other silver tongued hero, and latch on one we either think is telling it how it is about the others, or baffling us with the science of how they can do better with our money and security.

There has been much talk recently about how the fall from grace of parliament over the expenses issue and so on ought to lead to big constitutional change. That at last there must be an appetite for proportional representation, or of independent scrutiny of this, that or the other. I'm sorry - we elect these people as our representatives. If we trusted them that much with the best part of half our production and property why on earth do they need some higher watchmen to watch over them? The system is clearly broken, and is making the country broken, leading some to make rash decisions that someone new, almost anyone, no matter he be a extremist at heart, could do better than this lot.

PR is no longer enough for me. We are, I believe, at that moment of which David Hume wrote in 1745, where we need discover the system is irretrievably broken and need to decide to do things differently. That democracy itself, at least this electoral democracy of state government, is the thing that has failed. That it gives to much power to too few over too many with too little of a mandate. It is fertile ground for all sorts of corruption and psychopathic nastiness, but only because we grant them this power over us as if we concede we need it. We do not.

I don't think I can be both a Liberal and a Democrat. They are irreconcilable ideas. It is time to abandon the quest to reconcile them.

You know, I don't understand why everyone is getting so upset about troughing MPs. Is it that we are appalled that people could be so blatant in taking our money for their own use? Or is it that we are disappointed that the real purpose of democratic politics has been revealed to us and having naively put our trust in it all our illusions are now shattered?

After all what else is multi-party democracy other than an open competition amongst different groups of people who want to command for themselves the vast resources government takes from us. That the extent of this has now been shown to reach such personal use of those resources should hardly surprise us.

Last night I was listening, via the magic of my new pride and joy, my iPhone, to a lecture by the market anarchist Austrian economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe, most of the substance of which he had covered in his speech last year at the Libertarian Alliance conference in London. My iPhone entertainment was a lecture entitled "The Impossibility of Limited Government" and you can read it at the Mises Institute's website or download the podcast (which I recommend because in places it's actually quite sardonically funny).

It seems even market fundamentalists believe that there are limits to the benefits of competition. Here's the most salient passage applicable to our troughing MPs:

Moreover, because the Constitution provided explicitly for "open entry" into state government — anyone could become a member of Congress, president, or a Supreme Court judge — resistance against state property invasions declined; and as the result of "open political competition" the entire character structure of society became distorted, and more and more bad characters rose to the top.[12]

Free entry and competition is not always good. Competition in the production of goods is good, but competition in the production of bads is not. Free competition in killing, stealing, counterfeiting, or swindling, for instance, is not good; it is worse than bad. Yet this is precisely what is instituted by open political competition, i.e., democracy.

In every society, people who covet another man's property exist, but in most cases people learn not to act on this desire or even feel ashamed for entertaining it.[13] In an anarchocapitalist society in particular, anyone acting on such a desire is considered a criminal and is suppressed by physical violence. Under monarchical rule, by contrast, only one person — the king — can act on his desire for another man's property, and it is this that makes him a potential threat. However, because only he can expropriate while everyone else is forbidden to do likewise, a king's every action will be regarded with utmost suspicion.[14] Moreover, the selection of a king is by accident of his noble birth. His only characteristic qualification is his upbringing as a future king and preserver of the dynasty and its possessions. This does not assure that he will not be evil, of course; at the same time, however, it does not preclude that a king might actually be a harmless dilettante or even a decent person.

In distinct contrast, by freeing up entry into government, the Constitution permitted anyone to openly express his desire for other men's property; indeed, owing to the constitutional guarantee of "freedom of speech," everyone is protected in so doing. Moreover, everyone is permitted to act on this desire, provided that he gains entry into government; hence, under the Constitution, everyone becomes a potential threat.

To be sure, there are people who are unafflicted by the desire to enrich themselves at the expense of others and to lord it over them; that is, there are people who wish only to work, produce, and enjoy the fruits of their labor. However, if politics — the acquisition of goods by political means (taxation and legislation) — is permitted, even these harmless people will be profoundly affected.

In order to defend themselves against attacks on their liberty and property by those who have fewer moral scruples, even these honest, hardworking people must become "political animals" and spend more and more time and energy developing their political skills. Given that the characteristics and talents required for political success — good looks, sociability, oratorical power, charisma, etc. — are distributed unequally among men, then those with these particular characteristics and skills will have a sound advantage in the competition for scarce resources (economic success) as compared with those without them.

Worse still, given that, in every society, more "have-nots" of everything worth having exist than "haves," the politically talented who have little or no inhibition against taking property and lording it over others will have a clear advantage over those with such scruples. That is, open political competition favors aggressive, hence dangerous, rather than defensive, hence harmless, political talents and will thus lead to the cultivation and perfection of the peculiar skills of demagoguery, deception, lying, opportunism, corruption, and bribery. Therefore, entrance into and success within government will become increasingly impossible for anyone hampered by moral scruples against lying and stealing.

Unlike kings then, congressmen, presidents, and Supreme Court judges do not and cannot acquire their positions accidentally. Rather, they reach their position because of their proficiency as morally uninhibited demagogues. Moreover, even outside the orbit of government, within civil society, individuals will increasingly rise to the top of economic and financial success, not on account of their productive or entrepreneurial talents or even their superior defensive political talents, but rather because of their superior skills as unscrupulous political entrepreneurs and lobbyists. Thus, the Constitution virtually assures that exclusively dangerous men will rise to the pinnacle of government power and that moral behavior and ethical standards will tend to decline and deteriorate over all.

[from Hans-Hermann Hoppe; "On the Impossibility of Limited Government and the Prospects for a Second American Revolution"]

So, let us not be angry at our conspicuously greedy MPs; let's instead be grateful that they have exposed at last the true motivation behind democracy and its participants and hangers on. Also I suspect we should not be surprised that it has taken Labour's excesses to expose much of this. After all, Tories, and Whigs, and Liberals, have had many centuries developing their pick-pocketing style, it had to be these brash, clumsy, nouveuax elites who would get carried away, as if they thought they had to catch up with these others' centuries of pilfering in one term in case they never got the chance again (which may now very well be true of course).

Just last week I saw a piece by Stuart White at the Next Left blog saying that

...one claim made by some on the right (not all) [Jock: I'd argue not "right" but "libertarian" and therefore the true "left"] is this: at base, all people are really just selfish bastards who never miss an opportunity to maximize their own income and wealth. Even very moderate social democrats, who hold to a less radical egalitarianism than, say, Jerry Cohen (or John Stuart Mill), must, in all consistency, hold that it is both possible and desirable for people to run their lives on the basis of a higher principle than this.

and goes on to say that

If a Labour MP uses the expenses system in a way that deliberately maxes out what they get then, I suggest, they are acting in a way that conforms to the right-wing claim. They are not acting in their own lives on the basis of the principle which they must, in all consistency, think society as a whole both can and should live up to.

[from Stuart White; "If you're an egalitarian, how come you claimed so much in expenses?" on the Fabian Society "Next Left" blog]

Needless to say, I disagree. If a Labour MP, despite their apparent claim to the "higher principle" Stuart conjures up, can be getting up to this, does it not actually confirm the truth of the analysis of the likes of Hoppe and libertarians and anarchists past and present that we make it easier for bad men to come to rule over us, and this applies both in the political sphere and the commercial sphere by creating these power structures that maximize their opportunity to do so. Do away with the state and they'd not have this opportunity.

Let us not let the grubby system sweep this under the carpet and claim it is an aberration of otherwise good men trying to to good things. In is endemic in the system that puts a few people in charge of the vast resources they are able to steal from the rest of us. The system does not need reform. This episode has shown it for what it is, and it needs to go.

For further reading, I suggest:

"Democracy: The God That Failed - The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy and Natural Order" (Hans-Hermann Hoppe)