Is Britain's Parliamentary Democracy Doomed?

Britain is about to get an unelected Prime Minister - again. The myth of Britain's parliamentary democracy is that we elect our MP's individually as the representative of a majority of the electorate in a constituency and that it is the choice of that representative as to which party they belong. If enough MP's form themselves into a party with a majority in the House of Commons then it is that party that forms the government and chooses a leader who is primus inter pares (first among equals). Of course none of this is true. MP's are selected to stand for election by already existing political parties and, in effect, the electorate vote for a party. The leaders of the parties are already known and are only primus inter pares until someone decides that they rather fancy the title of Prime Minister themselves. In fact Britain is an elective dictatorship in which a Prime Minister can pretty well do anything they like as long as the party will go along with it. And if the party is a little lukewarm then they can be "whipped" into agreement. So we now have the strange situation in which a small number of Tory party members can choose who the next dictator of Britain will be from a list of two presented to them by the Parliamentary party. The Labour party was pretty well run along the same lines until Ed Milliband decided that it needed a bit more democracy and that the leader in Parliament such be chosen from a list unlimited in number by all party members. The Parliamentary Labour Party now has a leader it doesn't want and believes is unelectable but has the support of the rest of the party. Milliband's attempt to inject more democracy into the Labour party came about because he saw that Parliament was a cosy club in which a political elite were far more interested in themselves than they were in the rest of the country. The revolt of the Parliamentary Labour party against Jeremy Corbyn would seem to indicate that he was probably right since they are obviously putting their own interests before the interests of their party and the country at large. The problem with democracy is that it often delivers answers that political elites don't like - which is why professional politicians don't like it much. This problem is exacerbated when the electorate are largely ignorant of the issues involved in pretty much any question they are asked and are largely unqualified to make any kind of sensible judgement. Which is why democracy is the worst kind of government except for all the rest. Essentially Parliamentary democracy in Britain is based more on myth than reality, has become increasingly unconnected with the rest of the country and is probably too unwieldy for the 21st century.

Straw And Rifkind Defend The Indefensible

Jack Straw and Malcolm Rifkind have been defending their corruption and money-grubbing today, both telling us that they've done nothing "improper". While Jack Straw was recorded in an undercover press sting informing us that he "works under the radar" to influence policy decisions that favour the rich, greedy and immoral, Malcolm Rifkind was telling us that his working day in Parliament is only 75% of what we pay him for. "You'd be surprised how much spare time I have," he told the reporters. "I spend much of my time reading books and walking." Both men admit that they can earn between five to eight thousand pounds per half-day for selling their "influence" and seem amazed that taxpayers might object to paying these clowns 100% wages for 75% effort. We shouldn't be surprised though. Corruption is so widespread in Westminster that a reporter cannot throw a rock without hitting a crook. We have had years of "accidental" expense scams, tax-dodging, bribe-taking, law-breaking and scrounging off state funds from MP's and so-called Peers of the Realm. This is how the British political system works. A bunch of spivs, confidence tricksters and petty criminals tell us lies about their sense of "public duty", we vote them in hoping against hope that maybe they mean it and they then plunder the public purse while bleating about how they don't get the respect they deserve. Respect? They are thieves, pure and simple, scroungers, albeit very talented ones, two-faced crooks with all the moral fibre of a dead whelk. Yet no sense of shame, no inkling that what they are doing is wrong can be discerned as they strive manfully to defend their nasty little scams. Commentators often ask why the electorate seem so apathetic. How can they be expected to be enthusiastic about this continuing tale of corruption or about the unedifying spectacle of MP's fighting to get their greedy snouts in the trough? What is the point of voting when the choice is between one petty criminal or another?

Tories Close Parliament.

It seems that David Cameron's preference for holidaying rather then working has, once again, got the better of him. Parliament, it would seem, is to shut down 19 days earlier than expected and several reasons have been put forward for this. The "Mirror" believes that the Tories have run out of ideas and have no more laws to pass. But, as Albert Einstein once observed; "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." Others have suggested that the Tories are so afraid that they will be wiped out in the forthcoming European elections that they have freed up their MP's to campaign. There is a third possibility, however, and that is that the Tories are simply tired of being taken to account for their evil policies and having to defend their woeful record in government. They've tried manipulating the statistics, or lying as you and I would know it, they've tried pretending that they're "Christians", they've played the race card (as far as they dare) and they've even "promised" (yet again) a referendum on Europe. Now they've run into a problem that they were calculating wouldn't occur until after the general election next year - the truth is catching up with them. So, unable to think up any more lies, finding it difficult to manipulate the figures beyond all credibility, unable to quote from the Bible because none of them have read it and frightened of losing even more of the immigrant vote, they've decided instead to shut up shop and gag democracy before it gets out of hand. The Tories are running scared and they certainly have much to be scared about. Without doubt the most reactionary not to say downright evil government in British history if there is any justice they will cease to exist as a political force after May 2015. I wonder what excuses they can find to postpone the general election indefinitely?

Yet Another Crooked Tory Resigns.

Patrick Mercer, the Tory MP for Newark, managed to get a reference to his service in the army and the word "God" into his announcement yesterday that he was resigning from parliament. He said that he was "ashamed" that he had attempted to cash in on his position as an MP and take money for raising questions in parliament. It was time to "fess up" as a good soldier should he told us. But, essentially, what he was saying was that he was sorry for getting caught. Like Maria Miller just last week, Mercer simply couldn't resist doing something illegal in order to stuff his offshore bank account with tax free money. Until he was exposed he had absolutely no intention of admitting his crime and no amount of crocodile tears now can wash away that fact. What he did was not only a criminal offence, it was also entirely dishonourable. You or I would go to prison but it is quite likely that Mercer, like Maria Miller, will get away with an apology and a bit of hand-wringing. This is how our so-called democracy functions - they get away with criminal activity and are licensed to grab what they can at our expense while we are told we are lazy scroungers for having no choice but to take the low-paid work they grudgingly allow us. We pay these people's wages and they should be regarded as what they are - mere hirelings, paid by us to perform a service. They are not, as they would like us all to think, our masters and, by-and-large, they are a dishonest and arrogant bunch of crooks many of whom belong behind bars. The question remains, how long are we expected to put up with this sort of shabby behaviour before we are forced to abandon what remains of our democracy and try to find something better?

MP's Treat Themselves To Christmas Goodies.

Our parliamentary representatives have decided to give themselves a nice Chrissy present this year and refurbish their gym at the modest cost of only £250,000. MP's such as Eric Pickles can now honour their new year resolutions to lose weight in the kind of luxurious surroundings they've become accustomed to. "I can't see what all the fuss is about," a Parliamentary spokesman told our reporter. "Nearly everyone I know has access to a gym at work and what's a few hundred thousand pounds between friends? We need somewhere to burn off all those excess calories we consume in our taxpayers-funded bars and restaurants. We are leading by example by keeping ourselves in tip-top physical condition as anyone can see." We asked the same spokesman about the £75,000 Parliament plans to spend on Christmas decorations this year, up by 100% since 2012. "It's traditional isn't it. The fact that none of us will be here between October and March is neither here nor there. Parliament is a beacon to the world and the Christmas message, charity and goodwill to all men except the unemployed, useless cripples, surplus pensioners and Northerners, is important. The doubling of the price is all down to the worldwide hikes in Christmas tree and decoration wholesale prices that are completely beyond our control. I for one think that the executives in charge of the Christmas tree corporations thoroughly deserve their bonuses. Christmas comes only once a year after all." Intrigued we asked if some of that money might not have been better spent on helping the elderly and poor to afford heating this winter. "That's sounds suspiciously like socialism to me. If we did that the reds would be crawling out from under the beds all over the country and where would we be then? The poor and the elderly have a patriotic duty to freeze this winter to protect this country from the red menace that is emanating from hotbeds of left-wing thought such as Europe, UKIP and the English Defence League."

MP's Put Differences Aside To Defend Their Right To Plunder The Public Purse.

MP's from all parties serving on the Commons Lack Of Standards Committee have put aside their arguments as to whether it is moral to freeze pensioners to death this winter in order to defend their right to steal public money. The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa)has ruled that claiming for such expenses as food, tea and biscuits, hotel accommodation, taxi fares, content insurance for a second home and a TV for their second home plus an 11% pay rise is a bit much. The MP's on the committee, however, are howling with indignation at this attack on their living standards. "Falling living standards are for the plebs only," one of the committee told our reporter. "How can we demonstrate our innate superiority over the mugs who pay our wages if we can't maintain our wealth at their expense? That's what Parliament is for - to provide the necessary democratic legitimacy for us to shove our snouts in the trough. What good is democracy if it can't provide a bunch of bone idle over-educated scroungers with a free lunch or three? I mean, what self respecting banking executive wouldn't book himself into a five star hotel less than 100 yards from his second home bought by the taxpayer if he didn't get the chance?" We asked a government spokesman for the coalition's view; "It's nothing to do with us mate. We have absolutely no control over what we decide to glum out of the public purse. That's what committees are for - to provide the necessary democratic legitimacy for us to shove our snouts in the trough without having to worry about what the plebs - sorry, the electorate - think."

MP's Continue With Their Scrounging.

Westminster MP's, despite the government's love of austerity for the rest of us, have continued with their money-grubbing scrounging at the expense of the taxpayer. Their claims for "expenses" have increased by a staggering 7% over the last year as they struggle to find new ways to steal public money to fund their luxury lifestyles. They have also increased the number of their freeloading family members getting paid for doing nothing in particular with one unnamed MP paying his daughter £60,000 per year as a "political advisor", while Nadine Dorries is paying her daughter £40,000 per year as her "office manager". Corruption is an ugly word but is the only one that comes even close to describing the scrounging that is going on in Westminster and which costs an estimated £98 million per year. While the Tories are wringing their hands over the "scrounging" of the unemployed and disabled, MP's are even busier picking the pockets of taxpayers as they themselves scrounge on an epic scale. Double standards and hypocrisy have been a constant feature of the British class-ridden political system and have been allowed to continue because of the historical and craven deference of the electorate. Criminality, however, is a relatively recent development made worse by a government that sees the state not as something to give service to but as something to be plundered for private gain. That is what austerity is actually all about - the diversion of money from public services into the pockets of a greedy, utterly selfish and already wealthy minority with an overweening sense of entitlement.

Peter Bone Fails In Bid For "Thatcher Day"

Looney Right campaigner and Tory MP for Wellingborough Peter Bone has failed in his attempt to get the August Bank Holiday renamed "Margaret Thatcher Day." His bid fell foul of the rules governing Parliament which give MP's more holidays and time off than most other professional pickpockets. Devastated and disappointed, Bone was left with only nine seconds of Parliamentary time to outline his scheme before he was forced to give up and think up ways to pad out his expense account instead. "This is important," he told our reporter. "If the President of Turkmenistan can ban ballet dancing and gold teeth then I don't see why we Tories can't have a Margaret Thatcher Day. If we can't get this through then how will ever get the death penalty reinstated or have the NHS privatised? Then there's the problem of UKIP. Everyone knows that if we get a Margaret Thatcher Day then former Tories who have turned to UKIP because they are insane will immediately return to the Tory party where they naturally belong. How can we survive as a political party without the blue-rinse "its all the fault of the EU, filthy foreigners and the unions" vote? Still, I am confident that we can get every school in the country to erect a bronze statue of the Blessed Margaret in their playgrounds in order to celebrate her stealing free school milk and every former mining community doing the same to celebrate her freeing them from meaningless jobs."

MP's Won't Have To Pay More For Their Pensions After All.

Britain's best organised criminal gang, Parliament, have given themselves a surprise present today by suddenly finding out that they won't have to pay more for their pensions after all. While millions of public sector workers have had their pensions downgraded to the derisive levels of those in the private sector, MP's won't be suffering with the rest of us. We asked a member of the Parliamentary Privileges Committee for his reaction; "Well, it wouldn't be a privilege to serve as an MP if it wasn't for all the privileges now would it? People have to realise that MP's are a special case. We have to work very hard, sometimes for several weeks every year, taking tough decisions that have no effect on us at all. Faced with agonising choices between helping ordinary people or grabbing as much for ourselves as possible, we often have to think about it for several minutes before reluctantly concluding that the fair thing to do is enrich ourselves. No one could be more surprised than me that voting to give ourselves a better pension that anyone else in the country would benefit me in any way. It was just one of those things. Very soon now we'll be faced with the difficult decision to vote ourselves a pay rise and I fear that we'll have no choice but to reluctantly make ourselves richer once again. If it wasn't for our expenses most of us wouldn't be able to stand the stress and would be forced to resign and accept unfeasibly large severance settlements.

MP's Rush To Protect God Against Gay Marriage.

Fifty-eight MP's, thirty-five of them Tories, have published a letter in today's Daily Telegraph protesting at David Cameron's call to allow gay marriage in church. Having stood idly by as his vicious government has attacked the old, the unemployed and the disabled, having done nothing to save the NHS from Cameron's privatisation plans, they have the sheer brass neck to say that he has "no mandate" for gay marriage. "It was not contained in any of their manifestos, nor did it feature in the Coalition's Programme for Government," they bleat, ignoring the fact that almost nothing this bunch of spivs and conmen have done so far was in their manifestos. A move such as gay marriage would, of course, spoil their image of the world - one in which all the unemployed are feckless, the disabled are all fraudsters who are secret Paralympic gold medal-winners, old working-class people are selfishly clinging to life forcing rich people to pay tax for their pensions and the NHS is a waste of money because it only helps the poor who deserve to die anyway. Worse yet Cameron has called into question the idea that they, and only they, know what God should think. Still, it's nice to see that there is something that will get them off their idle arses, get their heads out of the expenses claims and express an honestly-held opinion - even if it is narrow-minded, irrelevant and trailing far, far behind public opinion.

Parliament's Latest Scam.

While Britain is facing the worst economic and social crisis for nearly a century, while the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, while corporations steal money from both customers and taxpayers alike, while children can't get enough to eat and old age pensioners face a freezing winter unable to afford the cost of heating their homes, what are our MP's doing? Last week they were busy discussing whether they should award themselves a 40% wage increase. This week they are busy trying to hide their latest scam from the public on the grounds of "national security." So what is their latest scam? It goes like this. An MP buys a very expensive London house as a "second home" to live in while performing his duties in Parliament. The mortgage on this is paid by the taxpayer, even though, once its paid for, the MP gets to keep it and any profit he or she can make out of it when its finally sold. Unfair enough, you might think - but it gets better, at least if you're an MP. Once bought it can then be rented out, the profit from this pocketed and another house can be bought using taxpayers money to build up the MP's property portfolio. But two MP's acting together can, it seems, go one better - renting out their houses to each other paid for - you've guessed it - by the taxpayer and effectively getting the public purse to pay for their property portfolio twice. Of course this would be obvious if MP's had to publish their addresses and who their landlords are - so they've blocked this by citing "security" concerns. You can see their point. Not only would we then know which MP's are exploiting this loophole, we would also know where they live and where we can find them when an angry public start throwing hangmen's nooses over lamposts.

Heads They Win, Tails We Lose.

The coalition government has become rather fond of claiming that they have brought down the deficit and that their austerity programme is working. The truth is that this is an outright lie. Britain's national debt is rising faster than any other European country. In five years the Labour government borrowed £319 billion. In the two-and-a-half years since the coalition came to power they have managed to borrow £465 billion - a stagering increase by a factor of three. If this is not shocking enough the way that money is being used, or rather abused, is even more disturbing. The number of homeless families being accomodated in Bed and Breakfast establishments has increased by 44%, the number of people receiving emergency food aid from charities has doubled, many teachers are now buying food for their pupils even as the number of breakfast clubs declines at an alarming rate and the number of young people now out of work has risen by a frightening 168%. That is the cost of the Tory-led assault on the ordinary people of this country while things are set to get worse as benefit cuts begin to bite and energy and food prices rocket upwards. And what are our MP's talking about as the Tories pursue the hopeless goal of lowering spending to fund tax cuts for the rich? The proposal that their pay should increase by over 40% to "compensate" them for a potential loss in their pension rights. Compensated? They should all be beaten with sticks.

Benefit Scroungers Cost Millions.

As part of his campaign to raise his own personal prejudice against the unemployed to the level of a political philosophy, Ian Duncan Smith wants a legal ban on them spending their money on such things as booze and fags. This, of course, makes the assumption that the unemployed, many of them thrown out of work by the Tories themselves, are all feckless scroungers whose selfishness knows no bounds. It also assumes that, as a group, the unemployed are different and simply don't deserve the freedom of choice that the rest of the population enjoy. "“There are people who are using benefits to fund a habit and children are going hungry," IDS slyly suggests in a blatant attempt to shift the blame for starving children in this country from himself to the victims of his vile policies. His bigotry is brought into sharper focus when the privileges that he and his fellow MP's get are taken into consideration. While the unemployed are being faced with a choice between a packet of cigarettes or a tin of beans, MP's are faced with a choice between a risotto of pea and broad bean with Golden Cross goat’s cheese or a roasted half spring chicken with stuffing for less than £3.00, while their cigarettes, cigars and booze can be bought without the taxes that the rest of us have to pay. Why? Because such items are subsidised by the taxpayer to the tune of a cool £5.8 million per year. That is nearly £10,000 a year for each and every MP - in addition to their basic salary of £65,738 - £175 per week, or three times what a single unemployed man or woman get in benefits to pay for everything. When it comes to scrounging IDS and his mates leave the unemployed in their dust.

MP's Signal Their Support For Predistribution.

MP's, pictured above on expenses claim day, have signaled their enthusiastic and complete support for Ed Milliband's "predistribution". Unfortunately for the rest of us this consists of taking taxpayers and "predistributing" it to themselves through their spectacularly generous expense allowances. The bill for MP's expenses has risen by 25% since the time they were revealed to be stealing our money and has now reached the same level that it was at before the scandal. First in line were such fine specimens as Chris Grayling who has managed to fund the purchase of a nice London property portfolio from money that doesn't belong to him. Others have eagerly held out their hands for the rents their various girlfriends and boyfriends have to pay to stay close to their MP paramours. Travel costs for various mates, hangers-on and family members continues to blossom while David Cameron fills his wine celler after a successful wine tour has replaced his depleted stocks at our expense. From chocolate bars, crisps and dog food to £2 million mansions in London, MP's are still dipping one of their hands into our pockets while patting themselves on the back with the other.