If you want to change the System, don’t go into politics

While we pride ourselves on being the home of Parliamentary democracy, the simple reality is that a large number of the useful bits of legislation from the 13th  century onwards came  from a not entirely judicious mixture of force, riot and regal whimsy.

King John didn’t exactly sign Magna Carta willingly. Without Henry VIII’s love of expansionist power and desire for a male heir, our naval traditions and Protestant scientific pragmatism couldn’t have led to the Empire and the industrial revolution. Later Kings who wanted such power were beheaded and deported respectively.

The first great Reform Act was (in the last few days) only passed because it seemed the best way to appease the London Mob. Safer merchant ships with plimsoll lines happened because the MP of the same name violently interrupted Parliamentary business to such an extent, it was deemed better to pass his Bill than pass nothing. The tradition of trade fairs and exhibitions to boost exports was largely created by Queen Victoria’s husband Albert. The Suffragettes got votes for women by chaining themselves to railings, attacking  policemen, and throwing themselves under horses. And the Poll Tax was defeated by violent ex-Parliamentary demonstrations which, in the end, brought Thatcher down too.

In many of the cases above, the legally endowed and constitutional system of moving things forward had temporarily broken down – and usually for the same reason: a self-satisfied clique with undeserved privileges had stopped paying attention.

We have this in Britain today; and to fail to appreciate this is to ensure a failure to change things in the fundamental way they need changing.

Most elites, in the end, become less accountable, and thus feel inviolate. They get distracted by self-enrichment, and neglect the crucial job of looking ahead. They drift away from reality towards a different Universe that they alone share, and shrink from the sort of decisive leadership required to face the realities endured by their citizens. When the People become indifferent to them, they take this as evidence of fecklessness. When the People become angry with their inaction, they see this as insurrection to be punished. So busy are they looking down on the People, they no longer wish to be looked up to: they assume this as their right anyway.

Our self-perpetuating, smug Establishment displays every last one of the symptoms described above. They will never vote themselves out, and they will never allow any legislation to pass that allows us to have a realistic chance of voting them out. The elite I refer to, by the way, starts in Brussels, and goes right around the EU until it gets back to Westminster again – where UK politicians are perfectly happy to deal with that higher elite…because just below a very thin surface of skin, they’re exactly the same.

Were in 2011 the British People to try and form a new ‘political Party’ operating at Parliamentary elections, five things would make real progress impossible:

1. Organisational expenses incurred via election publicity and lost deposits 2. The vast spending power of the two major Parties, and their ready access to the media. 3. First Past the Post elections 4. Wonks joining the Party and engaging in endless esoteric debates 5. After many years of ploughing through treacle in lead boots, MPs being elected to Parliament and, very quickly, joining the Establishment.

UKIP has enjoyed the support of perhaps 10% of Britons for the last decade, and the ‘opinion sympathy’ of perhaps another 65%. It hasn’t elected a single MP to the UK Parliament in that time.

The overwhelming reasons for this are very straightforward: first, our MPs are tied to constituencies, and are elected by local Party organisations. The constituency organisations worm their way into the fabric of local life and, once elected, an attentive, flesh-pumping MP also becomes part of that. There is thus a strongly inbuilt local resistance to sweeping change.

Second, local constituency Parties are influenced by the Westminster leadership and – once seen to be on-message with the platitudes of the day – choose candidates in the Leader’s image…or gender, or social class – or whatever peer group is the most decisive. The natural inclination to follow and obey is then given the occasional prod with a sharp stick, as necessary, by the Party Whips.The Liberals tried to buck this without success for over seventy years. Now, as the LibDems, they have one powerless Deputy Top Suit called Nick Clegg, and a 9% level of electoral support, to show for it.

Only a list-system PR approach to electing MPs – and a separate system for electing local representatives – could ever break this unholy link. Given the chance to reform the House of Lords, I would make 50% of its members locally elected, and have 50% nominated from commerce by an independent body. To undertake just that one reform by ‘entering’ the existing Parliamentary system would take decades, and cost perhaps a hundred million pounds.

And having done that, there would still be a broader host of profound changes – to the way we interact as a society – needing our attention.

The only way to make a radical and speedy impact on the System is thus to stay outside the legislature….and outside the maintream media until such time as they catch on. But the most important decision is not to bother getting involved in sham elections. Once that area is ignored, most of the problems for a new Movement fall away.

To engage in elections is to risk playing the game of politics alone. The sort of organisation I’m talking about would concern itself with the culture: socio-familial standards, the Rule of Law, equality before the Law, professional ethics, business morality, the encroachment upon personal liberty in every walk of life, radical reform of the tax and banking systems, and the regeneration of a commercially viable (as opposed to largely financial and retail) economy.

It is a sure sign that something is wrong in the UK when one reads that exhaustive list, and concludes pretty quickly that there is no way engaging with the political system is likely to achieve any of it.

The Left understands nothing of real equality, has little commercial experience, and is hand-in-glove with the increasingly grasping trade union and legal professions. Many Labour politicians are part of the socio-familial-gender-race ‘industry’, and their voters/donors tend to be in favour of poorly targeted benefits and unreformed public sector structures. As for the Right, it is supported by big business, the professions, the City, banking and unelected media proprietors. In this last, exclusive group, most of them do not pay tax, and have motives that are at best shady or unknown.

All Parties, meanwhile, sign up to the robocrat Civil Service armies both here and at Brussels.

Whitehall is a major part of the oligarchy, and lies at the core of our problems with incompetence, waste, and above all a resistance to change. “The civil service exists to explain why nothing is possible,” a former Minister told me two years ago – but I didn’t need telling. I spent over 20 years working on and off with these people, and they only ever had two concerns: how to employ more and more people, and how to ensure an even bigger budget for the next fiscal year. After the age of 50, the upper echelons had two further concerns: the size of the pension, and the quality of the gong.

I have come round to the idea of a cultural rather than political ‘persuasion’ group as the best way to get our country back onto some kind of straight and narrow again. But what I envisage is an extremely hard-headed organisation.

The levers of power are not only changing form: their location has changed too. The power to effect change today – beyond the citadels in banking, the civil service, the ISPs and proprietor-driven media – lies with the following groups – which aren’t mutually exclusive: business, consumers, and the internet axis of blogs, campaigning sites, Facebook, twitter and texting.

The electorate gives its votes. A vote today confers no power upon the holder at all, because its decision will be derided and ignored once the required election result has been obtained.

But the consumer buys products. The consumer can exert real power over business: and when the consumer does that, business almost becomes the law. It was advertisers that killed the News of the World, not the police or the judiciary.

Not only that, the campaigning and blogging sphere sells ideas. If properly organised and aggregated for some issues, the internet can be a major force for change. Because on the internet – and growing via the internet – are those small businesses most aware of how everything from ISPs to banks and spendthrift governments are screwing the life out of their entrepreneurship…while the multinationals use ridiculous tax dodges and armies of tax accountants to compete unfairly….or push for a multi-speed internet where Might is Right, full stop.

So after many months of thinking, hatching, and hinting, that’s it: no more than a sketched outline….but a very different approach, I think, to what people tend to imagine as a weapon of reform.

I don’t think the more switched-on folks in our midst can any longer cede ownership of radicalism to those who ‘look’ radical, support fundamentally anti-capitalist aims, and carry placards with the words ‘smash’ on them. There is no need to smash anything: the only thing required is for a minute oligarchy to be persuaded to listen, and then be shoved into releasing much of their power into the hands of those with a better idea of how to use it for the greatest number of deserving citizens.

We will never reach Utopia. Utopian dreams are, by their very accumulation of piety, dangerously intolerant. The name of the game – for me anyway – at this point in the human story is to reverse the drift into a ghastly material Dystopia.