The faultlines of the British Constitution deface our political landscape. Without a formally constituted English Parliament we are condemned to subjugating policy to the agendas and vagaries of Labour's coalition with Scottish-elected MPs, Irish Unionists determined to their last breath to deny the reunification of Ulster and of Ireland itelf, and Wales, as in the position of Italy and Mandelson - 'Italy is Italy', ' Peter will continue to be Peter', Wales will go on singing its ancient lays.
Constitutional renewal is as urgent as it is unacceptable to the current British political establishment of all parties.
Crown prerogative in the hands of the prime minister is elective feudalism. Many prerogative powers must be transferred to the electorate's representatives. As the monarchy is nothing more than a prop to Executive arrogance, we can do without it, for who could argue for such a front to the power in the hands of the Executive except those who hold it and those who hope to win it? The monarchy and its institutional beneficiaries should be displaced by an elected President. If America can then so can we. If the current hereditary head of state had any democratic function she would have functioned in the interest of the democracy long ago.
Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland must be excluded from their pernicious influence on England's governance, as the sudden trip of the unelected Scottish prime minister of the UK to Ireland underlines. What does he want? Votes. Where does he get them? Ireland and Scotland.
Time to stop blaming the European Union for the United Kingdom's democratic deficit. And if the EU requires elected, bite-sized, English regions then at least let us be rid of the Scotch, the Irish and the Welsh, who can go and sit in their own countries while we sort out the power relations of England.
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"...while we sort out the power relations of England."
But, how?
After 2 Scotch PMs we seem to be welcoming a third toff Scot as the antidote. How many in the Cabinet and alternative Cabinets (including Ming) over the past years have Caledonian origins?
It's where they represent rather than their origins that cause the problem. We've just had an entire Labour conference pretending that the Labour party is ruling Scotland. Most of the policy, as opposed to the jollying along and outright lies about the economic disaster we are living through, only applied to England (and sometimes England and Wales).
Yet the politician primarily and specifically responsible for the mess we are in answers to a Scottish electorate. We can't get at him at all. And people complain about an undemocratic, remote European Union?!
All the things we care about are devolved except England has no democratic forum where we can hold our English members of parliament to account. Indeed we are infested with Scottish Labour, a peculiarly and virulently corrupt bunch of bullies.
I care far more that the winners of any election should be from English constituencies than I do that they should be Conservative or Labour. The celts can go off and celt about in their own parliaments. As you say, the Conservatives are pretty indistinguishable (except for having better dresses) in their policies. But if we could get ourselves sorted out into our respective, democratically elected in our own countries, federation with a head of state who is not the head of the governing party or a hereditary monarch, and a graspable constitution plus efficient means of redress, like Germany, or Switzerland, or Italy, or America, we'd be able to deal quite competently with the EU and what we will and won't put up with. And that without having to try to push 26 other EU member states into agreement on our requirements.
We've got this whole EU lack of democracy thing back to front. WE lack democracy; THEY never claimed to have it, and expect their member states to supply it for their member states' populations.
It's some kind of psychiatric commonplace making the Other guilty of one's own failings, isn't it, S,?
Thank you, and yes to the last, I guess. But it's like asking the cat to bell itself. Will we end up with ruin, followed by revolution and then much-more-hard-handed tyranny? Are we seeing 200 years of democratic progress coming to an end?
Hatfield Girl,
I think you might want to consider what your avatar/picture/monogram/whatever it is says about you.
Didn't the De Havilland Comet have a nasty habit of falling apart at 30,000 feet?
Word verification "rabloid" - a film-maker with rabies?
Alfred, The de Havilland Comet is the most beautiful aircraft ever made. And in the end we all fall apart at 30,000 feet. England is doing it right now. It's got metal fatigue, or democracy fatigue.
Alfred
The first plane I ever flew in in the early 1960s was a beautiful Comet 4B. In those days it was at the forefront of aeronautical engineering for passenger aircraft and those involved were still on their learning curve. Nobody but nobody had ever experienced or indeed heard of metal fatigue at the time. But thanks to that unfortunate incident over the Med, huge strides in aircraft safety were developed. Not many Comets fell out of the sky - especially compared to the number of Boeing 737s, several of which seem to come down every year somewhere in the world.
HG: I agree with the thrust of your post. It is time to take our country back.
Thank you Nomad. Even Icarus fell into the Med. That's what happens when your wings are so beautiful but you fly too close to the sun (or cutting edge).
Actually, I'm sick of people dissing English engineering and engineering skills. England had fantastic cars, planes, locomotives, bridge engineering and dams, ship builders, specialised foundry workers, textiles at the front of product innovation and valued standard product; it had an incredibly skilled workforce - from invention to design to implementation.
And it was laid low by the beastly trade unions, which once were organised labour representing the workforce to entrepreneurship and capitalist investment - but not FIGHTING them.
And then communists and socialists deliberately targeted the union and co-operative movement with ideological opposition to capitalism as an economic system, and entryism not by democratic vote -they couldn't get any - but by packing meetings at every level, denying the very existence of the highly-skilled worker, presenting as Labour policy the notion that there could be only confrontation with capital and entrepreneurs.
Labour destroyed the whole apprenticeship structure, so that the skilled workers could only be replaced by inappropriate educational systems that yielded engineers with degrees but left the unions without their head and shoulders. They replaced the skilled men with a narrative of pitmen as representatives of Labour ideals. With local government and low grade civil servants as representative of the working people. Yes there were more of those sorts - more and more of the latter because the former were removed by technological change itself and the geological realities of the basis of their workplace, and unskilled industrial workers were replaced by cheaper labour elsewhere in the world; while Labour pretended that Thatcherite schadenfreude was the real cause of the collapse of demand for unskilled manual labour.
Communist and socialist idealogues and frontmen, infiltrators answering to agendas and masters from elsewhere, drove the conservative working people out of the tade union and co-operative movement by pretending, then insisting as they gained control, that hacking coal or pushing bits of paper around in some beastly qango is the same thing as designing and building the Comet.
England is now without a manufacturing base because of Labour and its infiltrated crypto communists and anti-capitalist idealogues with their pathetic, deluded, brain-washed, 'trade unionist' followers.
Why were they called TRADE unions? Who, in the Unions, has a trade now, as Angels in Marble did?
Moving rapidly onto Italy's one man Democratic Deficit, Sr. Berlusconi, I see he is in trouble again -
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6864928.ece
"Berlusconi faces fight for career as top Italian court strips him of immunity"
I guess I do expect him to wriggle out of this one way or another.
it's article 3 of the Italian constitution (I think, Elby) that states all are equal before the law. Any alteration to that requires constitutional procedures, not just the laying of an order in the House to be retrospectively validated using his parliamentary majority if it is challenged. (Now what Executive has been loading us down with that perversion of parliamentary democracy for the last 12 years?). So his immunity is not there. It never was there. And he cannot get constitutional changes through - even his majority isn't big enough in both of the Houses. So h ewill stand trial.
Whether he will be found guilty as Mills (Mr Tessa Jowell) was at his trial is another matter - indeed there are so many cases against Berlusconi I have rather lost track of what has failed because of the statute of limitations and what still stands.
Berlusconi was so angry he has denounced the constitutional court and the Head of State as 'leftists'. Not going down well with anyone, that isn't.
Quite so, HG, and they were wondering on Today this morning how many cases would be resurrected, and also - would he, as usual, wiggle his way out of it.
The difference between Italy and the UK, both with madmen in control, is that in Italy no-one takes any notice of the government, here we have let them crush us.
What happened to the Blitz spirit? What have New Labour put in the water to so subdue us?
Blogger's up the creek. Can't sign in any more, just have to post under my handle. Been going on for three days now :-(
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