Give Us A Vote!

Parliament, and particularly the House of Commons, blocks the New Labour Project. Having delivered power its functioning is a constant threat to the maintenance of New Labour's grip on that power. The Project's veneer of democratic respectability comes at the cost of supporting (quite literally) the individual members of Parliament in all their single-minded pursuit of profit from office. Excluded from any real influence on Executive policies, their energies are diverted to filling their trolleys in the taxpayer's Tesco while the checkouts are unmanned. Unfortunately their antics are now so gross they are overshadowing the most elaborate propaganda to recast mass unemployment and state and private bankruptcy as an opportunity to demonstrate the importance of a post democratic, supranational ordering of our lives.

The easing away from the definitive choices embodied in a general election had been factored into policy decisions. A fluid and consensual 'Constitution' lent itself to temporal adjustments in the large-scale focus group consultations in which a general election could be recast. They thought they had a free run for a maximum of 5-year stretches with an option for a democratic sampling whenever they chose within that time scale. More than half the vote fodder in the House of Commons was on the career ladder to higher rewards, which include an electorate-free promotion to permanent position in the Upper House with poncy titles for the 'partner'.

And all this 'managed democracy', this cynical manipulation of our free (but so costly in lives and treasure) heritage, goes to waste because the lower orders of privilege-seekers knew they could not wait, their chance is now or never. Their free-loading, their pornographic free down-loading, their tax-avoiding housing investments, their free shopping on a Saturday afternoon in John Lewis (or Robert Sayle, or whatever your local never-knowingly is called) belongs to the past. But right now it is full on present. We look at them, our representatives, elected on lies and falsity, and ignore more pompous, but cheaper (oh, yes it is) lies and falsity offered, by force, in the East End. The petty cupidity of Midlands' housewives and their porno-viewing inadequate husbands outstrips the Wagwife dinners, the flagged-up speeches, the worn-out £trillions going round yet again like greenstone axeheads.

Trillions and global doesn't mean anything. We want to vote, and we want to vote now, on people living on our hard-earned money.