……………..We made politicians responsible for their mistakes.

            Is it so unreasonable to suggest that M.P.s, in general, and Ministers of the Crown, in particular, should be made responsible for their actions and called to account when, as so often happens, they get it wrong ? At the moment they can bring, and indeed have in the past on occasion brought, the country to the brink of ruin – and there is, in hard practical terms, absolutely no come back on them. In effect, after they are elected, they have carte blanche to do, within limits that are realistically set far too wide, exactly as they damn well please for 5 years with virtually no chance of retribution ever coming their way if it all goes pear shaped. If we can be bothered, which is unlikely, and if we can remember for long enough, which is even less likely, we can vote them out – but we then forget and they get back in again. There is no acceptance of responsibility and there is certainly no, frequently well deserved and justifiable, requital.

            Our representatives are policed by – themselves. As we well know from the plethora of other examples of this sort of policing – it doesn’t work. The activities of the occupants of the House of Commons are no exception to the general rule; it doesn’t work with them either. Actually I should add a caveat to that because it does rather depend on your point of view. In their opinion it probably does work, but then, it would, wouldn’t it? In the opinion of the few people in the country who can be bothered to think about these things it manifestly obviously doesn’t work. I am well aware of  Dr. Johnson’s observation that "he who never makes a mistake never makes anything" but is it right that others should continually have to foot the bill ? In a word – NO ! They, of course, are in no doubt that we should foot the bill. This arrogant attitude has its basis in the thesis fostered and encouraged by them over the years that says that they are the ultimate power in the land and totally in charge. As we have argued elsewhere, in a democracy this should not, and would not be true and, indeed, it would not have any credence here if we exerted ourselves and, ignoring the quite artificial party divides, punished the transgressors, not only by getting rid of them in a constitutional manner, but by making them pay some form of restitution when they deliberately incur cost by getting it wrong.

            Listening to this motley assortment of characters, who spend their time largely representing themselves and misrepresenting us in Parliament, when it comes to election time, we are led to believe that each of them is the great ‘I am’ who can never get it wrong, who knows all the answers to all our ills and will bring us utopia if only we vote for them – and we are so stupid that we fall for it every time. Why ? Largely because we are besotted by party labels, fail to look at the individual and completely miss out on the fact that we are being asked to vote for a bunch of self serving, servile clones. They are, in fact, a pretty fair cross section of society in general but that is completely missing the point. According to them they are a cut superior to the rest of us and the problem is that to do the job properly they need to be. The other problem is that they aren’t – either superior, or doing the job properly.

            Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places but our M.P.s seem to be very cagey about revealing their qualifications – or lack of them. I know that many of them are Barristers and that there is a smattering of Q.C.s; and I describe elsewhere how they rank on the ‘Mad Harry Scale of Uselessness’!  One Prime Minister, I seem to remember, was a Chemist – I’ll bet that came in very useful at No. 10. I am a Physicist but a few minutes critical self examination reveals to me that that does not qualify me to govern a country of 60 million people. What I am primarily interested in is qualifications that that might seem to indicate some aptitude for running a country – and, so far, I haven’t found any. Now this, to me, seems odd. A succession of governments have, rightly or wrongly – that is not the point of this discussion - gradually tightened the screw with regard to the necessity for what they see as appropriate qualifications for persons dealing in many aspects of everyday life where damage of some sort or another might be inflicted on some unsuspecting member of the public, or their property, by unqualified operators.  It has reached the point where I, myself, after around 25 years experience running my own business involving the provision of electrical installations in buildings am not, in law, now allowed to repair the permanent wiring of my own house unless I take the appropriate course and obtain the appropriate piece of paper, at not inconsiderable expense, to be paid for out of the so extremely generous pension with which these same totally unqualified M.P.s choose to insult me. There is, as the man (very loosely) said, something very sadly wrong in the state of Rome.

            What’s sauce for the Goose is, I would suggest, also sauce for the Gander. Why don’t our “representatives” (the parentheses are deliberate) practise what they preach? I do not suggest that they are totally unqualified; we have already established that many have legal qualifications that should ordinarily be useful in a law making assembly. However, making law is not the only thing that this assembly does and, in any case any existing legal qualifications are so steeped in the present utterly corrupt and useless legal system as to make them totally unsuitable for future use. They are also qualified in the sense that they have all been vetted and found suitable by the Working Men’s Clubs to which they are affiliated and for which they stand as candidates. This would be fine if it wasn’t so damming. In this vetting process it has been found (a) that, as far as can be determined, they will do what they are told, when they are told and how they are told by their party chiefs. (b) that they will always put their Party before their Country (c) that they will never give a direct answer to a direct question (d) They will begin any piece of public speaking, no matter how short, with an eulogy of their current party leader’s activities. And what a qualification that all amounts to!!  There is no doubt that the mere existence of political parties is one of the greatest barriers to good government in the world today.

            There are a few Doctors, which could be useful if an M.P. is taken ill, but there is a finite limit to just how many of these the Department of Health will require. There is very little, if any, sign of any significant qualifications in, say, ‘Government’, or in ‘Running a Country’, or in ‘Law Making’ as opposed to ‘law remembering’ and so on. We are, in fact, governed by a bunch of totally unqualified amateurs – and we don’t seem to care ! Looking at the very costly mess they have been making (at our expense) for the 50 years, or so, that I have been taking notice I find that lack of interest a bit surprising. Of course, we have all been thoroughly brainwashed into an acceptance of the normality of this situation and it is a fact that the world at large is ruled, for the most part, by the same sort of self serving amateurs as us - which is one of the primary reasons why the planet is in such a hell of a mess today. I confess to being curious as to just how many of our post-war Prime Ministers have been qualified in, say, Business Management and how many of our post-war Chancellors have been fully qualified Accountants. I don’t actually know, I am having considerable difficulty finding out and I strongly suspect that the answer is circular !

            We have wandered just a little from our original remit as defined by the chapter heading. My only excuse is that all of these wanderings have been, in varying measure, relevant to the main question posed in this chapter. Perhaps, before reaching any conclusions, it would be a good idea to recap and see exactly where we have got to.

            So far we have established that our elected representatives have, for the most part no relevant qualification; that Ministers, on the whole, have no specialised qualifications relating to the office they hold; and that the primary allegiance of professional politicians is to their party rather than to the country or their electorate. We have also established that they rarely answer the question asked, equally rarely tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth and make a comfortable living spending our money as they see fit. Finally, when in power, they very largely do just as they damned well please with little fear of retribution in spite of the fact that we have not had a government supported by a majority of the electorate this century. Every time a politician comes out with those immortal words ‘we have a mandate’ that politician is lying. The world in general is, in fact, ruled by minorities and we are no exception. In allowing this state of affairs to continue in countries where the population has, at least, some say, the rest of us really have got to be ‘off our trolleys’.

            So, short of actually becoming a democracy – any possibility of which I think we can reasonably safely discount - what could we possibly do to introduce some accountability into the system ?  Well, I have a wish list !  First let’s remove any acknowledgement of political parties from the electoral process... This has been a late 20th. Century add on to the electoral process to pander to the idleness and largely wanton stupidity of a section of the electorate. This would return our elected representatives to the status of individuals as opposed to cogs in a machine and might help a little to shift their primary responsibility to us as opposed to the party. If they wish to form groupings in the assembly to which they have been elected that is up to them and they are welcome to announce this in advance if they so choose – but it would cease to be an official electoral consideration. Secondly, we really must require that any elected representative, be it national or local (other than parish) should be suitably qualified. I am quite certain that our educational establishments could put together a suitable 3 year degree course or, alternatively a 2 year postgraduate course. This is not the time or place to discuss the content of such courses so I will take this no further here.

            We should further require, in this modern complex age, that all government Ministers should be specifically qualified to suit the department for which they have assumed responsibility. The Home Secretary would need to be Barrister, the Chancellor a Chartered Accountant, the Health Minister a Doctor, the Minister of Defence a time served General and so on. Finally, for now, the period for which our elected representatives can serve at a stretch should be capped at the greater of 8 years or two terms - with the same interval to elapse before election can be sought again. With this in place it becomes perfectly legitimate to hold these individuals totally responsible for the actions, and the consequences of the actions, of their respective departments and to require them at all times to answer all questions put to them with the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth - so help them. We have a very creaky, to the point of being almost useless, system for holding local government representatives to financial account. The system should be reformed, given some teeth and applied also to Parliament - ruthlessly.

            We have a useless Railway System; an increasingly useless Water Provisioning System; a Legal System that is grinding to a halt; a Prison System which is collapsing under the strain; a Police Force which attends to the cases it can and ducks those that it can’t and more sleaze than the Sunday Papers can comfortably focus on - to name but a few ! Somewhere along the line all of this is due in large measure to crass incompetence or even gross negligence on the part of those members of these Working Men’s Clubs that we refer to as Political Parties who have misled us into believing that they were competent to oversee such enterprises. And who has suffered the consequences of this incompetence and negligence ? Us………

            Power without responsibility is the prerogative of the Harlot, as Stanley Baldwin so quaintly observed, and power without accountability is, undoubtedly, the prerogative of the politician. The only punishment ever afforded to them is that they are deprived of their favourite toy (Office) for a year or two before being given it back again. Now isn’t that nice. In my view all this has to change because if it doesn’t then, sooner or later, we are in for a serious fall. And who will be the first to suffer then............??

            Whose fault is all of this ? Ours of course. Because we are idle and stupid and can’t be bothered we have allowed this rubbish far, far too much rope and it really is about time that we started to reel a bit of it in. It was Democritus, in ancient Athens, who said that ‘an official is not elected to make mistakes but to do things well. Those who do not so do deserve blame and PUNISHMENT’. I have no doubt that if this motion was put to the people it would be carried by a thumping majority.