The Enquiry has become Westminster’s smokescreen of choice

If I were to launch another website at the minute (and no, nothing is further from my mind) I’d almost certainly call it nomorefuckingenquiries.com.  I only very rarely leave the u in the f-word, but on this occasion justified and impatient anger demanded it.

Following today’s disgraceful (in a proper country it would be criminally unconstitutional) decision by Rotherham Labourloons to take happy kids off successful foster parents out of sheer controlling, politically-dictatorial spite has evoked in the Ed Miller Band the desire for an enquiry. What’s to enquire? Two politicised social workers kidnapped properly-placed children for no acceptable reason, Rotherham Council stood by the decision, and then oooh look when the media got heavy, the Rotherham Councillors absolved themselves on the basis of this having been “a professionally arrived at decision”. Without enquiring further, it seems to me this is a case of two brainless Stalinists  working for spineless politicians. Fair enough, somebody inside Not Quite New any more Labour needs to get his or her arse on a train and check the facts. But that having been accomplished, the enquiry requirement is – I would on a scale of 1-10 – about minus 703.

Thirty years of enquiries have achieved close to nothing when it comes to persistent and brazen abuse of children in our care. The Waterhouse Enquiry was very narrow for reasons that remain unexplained and thus suspicious.

The Leveson Enquiry due to publish next week – says a retired police source – “will be a fudge – or at least parts of it – if not downright dishonest. For at least 10 years (and probably beyond; back to the murder of Daniel Morgan) it seems that News International will have been privy via their unauthorised methods to most secrets of Parliament and it’s members. They will have accumulated a store of such unbelievable sh*t to unleash if they don’t get their way, that I believe Murdoch has the whip hand still, to the effect he is the Government – and will be for some considerable time.”

The Iraq Enquiry went on forever, spawned websites of considerable quality, and changed nothing. Nobody was indicted and at the end of it, the UK political Executive was no more accountable than it was beforehand, and perfectly obvious perversions of constitutional form went entirely unpunished.

In fact, The Enquiry has become another of the many weapons of delay and distraction available to our rulers. Have the People discovered our bankers are incompetent muggers? Quick – let’s have an enquiry. Is there a whistle-blower in the NHS revealing what a crock our systems are? Quick – let’s have an enquiry. Has the Daily Telegraph caught over 60% of MPs on the take and fiddling expenses? Quick – let’s have an enquiry. Then, when the dust settles, the Speaker can reconstruct the entire system, and gag anyone trying to stop it.

What I believe we should do at the earliest opportunity is have another sort of enquiry, the market research survey. Only this time, instead of answering the elite’s own obssessive questions about who’s winning in the Corby & Bess by-election, we should ask more searching questions about the system. For example:

Would you like the option of voting ‘none of the above’, and having it count as a vote?

Do you think the current Party line-up at Westminster reflects the Citizens’ needs?

Do you trust any of the contemporary Party leaders?

Do you trust the output of Parliamentary enquiries?