The Expenses Furore Shows the Centrality of the House of Commons to Our Democracy

The expenses letters were intended to arrive during the long, long summer break, when the under the carpet sweeping could be managed by the Party machine. We know this because many were still addressed to constituencies rather than to be distributed to Members through the parliamentary mail system.

The importance of Parliament sitting much more than it has been permitted to by the New Labour regime could not be more strongly brought out than by the effect of the letters arriving while the House is in session.

Our democracy has suffered dreadfully under New Labour and its post democratic governance ideology, and one of the worst outrages to our democratic system has been the side-lining and down-grading of the House of Commons: government statements and policy announcements made first to the media rather than to the House; curtailing of the working week to effectively only four days; shortening of the parliamentary session; the use of enabling acts guillotined through and then orders placed, undiscussed and unchallenged, by ministers obedient to instruction from a prime ministerial cabal made up of unelected and powerful advisors - complete with the ultimate democratic insult of an unelected prime minister; planted questions and machine-like propaganda statements, rather than answers to those that were not planted; the placing of many ministers in the Lords and beyond answerability to the Commons - our elected Commons; and last but not least a Speaker so blatantly in cahoots with the Executive and its objectives rather than the maintenance of the House and its political, democratic role, he was forced to resign.

Now an attempt is being made to judicially restrain the media from reporting what is said in the House of Commons. What has happened to the separation of powers New Labour was ostensibly so keen to enforce it abolished the office of Lord Chancellor?

We have reached the position where this corrupt and destructive regime will not accede to the overwhelming demand for a general election to clean up their pig sty until the European constitutional treaty has been forced into place and a general election becomes as irrelevant as New Labour have almost succeeded in making our parliamentary democracy.