Thou art Thyself

The member of the Westminster parliament for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath is sitting in the saddle of dear old Dobbin, who he bridled and mounted in the cash for honours and seats in the legislature debacle, but Dobbin isn't content to go.

Dobbin is tired of a decade of hard work and still no let up in the tax take from working people; Dobbin has realised that two generations of primary school-age children have ended with levels of functional illiteracy and innumeracy at 40% on entry into secondary school, and if you can't read and add up at eleven you're not going to get much of a crack at a job five years from then; Dobbin has noticed there are few apprenticeships or decent technical and industrial training systems even if minimal academic competence were on offer; that the index of inequality has worsened severely while the Leader ran the country's economy; that some parts of the country are a great deal more equal than others when it comes to state-provided services, not least his rider's home country; Dobbin notes sadly that Scotland, where he has been welcome for over half a century, has backed another horse despite the payoffs his work has funded; Dobbin is deeply distressed to be held responsible for any part in the terrible war crime of Iraq and repelled by attempts to pretend lack of involvement by the Leader; and, getting on, Dobbin isn't pleased to have his pension taxed at double the rate, if its there at all when he gets to old age, should he survive with patchy and dirty health service treatment.

But Dobbin isn't Boxer, just as England isn't yet Orwell's dystopia; large sections of the Labour Party and of Labour's supporters are repelled by what has been going on.

This is Rose Hacker, 101, writing in the Camden New Journal:

“Brown has all the power”
The Labour Party and I were both 100 years old in 2006, but we seem to have gone in different directions.
Where did we go wrong? As a teenager I was inspired by Karl Marx and joined the Fabian Society and the Labour Party. I was never a communist because I never believed in violence or that the end justifies the means.
In 1938 my friend, Krishna Shelvankar, wrote a book entitled Ends Are Means and I still believe this and support gradualism and democracy. ...When Tony Blair captured control of the Labour Party he re-established the cult of leadership and removed any concept of socialism.
Despite launching a programme called ‘Extending Democracy’, Gordon Brown has taken a series of actions intended to consolidate the leadership principle. With this top-down approach it is now impossible for constituency parties to initiate policy creation or challenge the launching and adoption of policy by Prime Minister Brown.
Policy forums allow local parties to debate, but not change, the policies under discussion.
In elections, lowering voting ages, tinkering with polling station times and introducing electronic voting, with all its attendant risks of fraud, are not going to change the fact that most people now feel their votes don’t count because they don’t bring about change.
Mass defections from the Labour Party over the past decade have been largely due to members feeling they no longer had any role in initiating policy but were expected to go out and promote policies dictated by the leadership.
This policy-from-above approach led to what was supposed to be a ‘consultation’ on future energy options becoming the adoption without consultation of policies for renewing nuclear power stations and Britain’s atomic bomb programme. It has been the same in many policy areas.
I believe this obsession with leadership has cost us so many votes that we have lost our democracy.
In Victorian England all sorts of good ideas rose to the surface. We can trace the origins of our current voting systems back to then.

One person, one vote sounds great as long as people also have the right to influence policy making, not just vote for who will carry out the leadership’s programmes...

For many decades after the Second World War, equalisation was a concept built into government policies and local government practice – the idea that the wealth and assets of the wealthy and advantaged should be used to redress social imbalances. Under Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair this equalisation process was unravelled, leaving Britain in 2007 with the highest levels of inequality since the 1930s.
Gordon Brown shows little sign of wishing to restore policies and practices that reduce inequality.
The last quarter of a century has seen the emergence of a new elite with the power to isolate itself from the real needs of the population: the new, wealthy, parliamentary elite, able to do something no other group in society can do – to make laws that favour themselves. Not all MPs support this, but all are now part of it.
Perhaps we should have a totally different system. Instead of voting for competing political parties, should we, as in jury systems, appoint everybody, no matter what their wealth or station in life, possibly for a single term of two years?
Something similar was done in ancient Greece. However, there they had slaves who were not allowed to contribute to Greek democratic thinking and could not be part of government... even in my lifetime, we ignored the fact that our political thinkers disregarded servants as people. Servants knew their place and did not presume to take part in democratic thinking. Until the second quarter of the 20th century only male property owners were considered ‘fit’ to vote.
Whatever system we do have must not exclude people. A change of leader should give the Labour Party the possibility to change direction, to correct imbalances, to reduce growing inequality.
Gordon Brown, when he became Prime Minister, promised change, change, change. Since then he has made it clear that much of his change means bringing in advisers from outside the Labour Party and consolidating the policies of the past decade.
...Gordon’s policy advisers seem to be made up of anyone but Labour.

In his first Labour Party conference speech, Gordon appeared to offer little real change and show little interest in tackling inequality. It may be too early to judge, but I will be watching and judging.