Rescuing Democracy in the United Kingdom from our current Elected Dictatorship

You will notice that, since New Labour came to power, not a single leading Cabinet member or party 'heavy hitter' has appeared on the programme (BBC's Question Time). Spin, not face-to-face confrontations with the voters, is the Government's chosen method of communication. Ordinary people are dangerous. Ordinary people might ask a question which throws a politician 'off message'; the Cabinet member might reveal himself or herself to be a human being like us, and not a programmed android. Worse still, he or she might tell the truth. Ann Leslie - Daily Mail, September 16, 2004

 

WWW silentmajorityspeaks.com

Wake up call for ALL our politicians

By Melanie Phillips, Daily Mail, June 14, 2004

The stunning success of the UK Independence Party in the Euro elections, and the beating administered to both Labour and Conservatives, represents much more than a mid-term protest vote for a political party which came from nowhere and may vanish in the same direction. It quite simply changes the terms of the political debate.

It delivers a wake-up call to our whole political class. For it does not merely tell them that many British people are viscerally opposed to the EU project. It registers a profound disillusionment with politics, because people think all politicians are on another planet.

Europe is the classic example. If euroscepticism is considered extreme, leaving the EU altogether is said to be totally off the wall. Yet many British citizens have now voted for a party that stands for precisely that. As a result, Tony Blair's claim that eurosceptics secretly want Britain to leave the EU - and are therefore barking mad - now looks less than clever. For the election has shown that, far from this claim terrifying 'moderate' eurosceptics out of their wits, that is precisely what is desired by a large tranche of the electorate.

Whether or not UKIP is a collection of cranks is irrelevant. the vote is a protest by people who for years have felt totally disenfranchised. Politicians for whom it is an article of faith to position themselves on the centre ground have not grasped that the centre of political gravity has shifted. The centrist position is said to be to use our membership of the EU to get a better deal for this country. But bitter experience has taught British voters that this is a pipe-dream, not least because of the ever-expanding rulings of the European Court of Justice and the obliteration of Westminster's powers over large swathes of British public life.

This upsurge in feeling is not an isolated British phenomenon. All over Europe, populations have been frantically signalling that they do not support the creation of a superstate. Such is the pressure that the EU constitution may disintegrate even without Britain vetoing it.

In the light of the European election results in Britain and the wider mood in Europe, Mr Blair might conclude, however, that the smart move would be to refuse to sign up to the constitution this week and thus wrap himself in the mantle of the principled defender of famous 'red lines' and the national interest.

But the British vote of UKIP is about far more than the EU constitution. It is a protest at the decline into irrelevance and incompetence of the very concept of Britain as a nation. It is thus closely related to the other protest delivered in local government elections last week. For the voters' fundamental message is that the political class has simply lost the plot.

On public services, they don't think the Government is delivering. But since the government repeatedly claims the public services are improving, this reinforces the impression that it never tells the truth. And this, surely, is the really lethal damage done to the Prime Minister by the war in Iraq. For rightly or wrongly, many - including some who supported the war - think Mr Blair did not tell people the truth about Iraq.

Perhaps even more damagingly, others believe he himself was misled. Rightly or wrongly, people believe he went into that war as a junior partner to an American president who walked all over him.

At the heart of this whole collection of protest votes is the feeling that the very idea of the nation is being betrayed. People believe that, over Iraq, the British government did not lead but was led, against the interests of the nation. They also believe that the EU is destroying the Government's powers to defend such interests, while on the domestic front the Government is destroying those interests altogether. Both Labour and the Tories are claiming that the other side has lost or failed to gain the voters' trust. But the more the Tories try to paint Mr Blair as a liar, the more the public remembers why is doesn't trust the Tories either.

For the overwhelming message of these elections is that people feel that no main-stream party now speaks for them. This is because, although the public has fallen badly out of love with Labour, the Tories have so far failed to deliver a positive reason for voting for them. To win public attention and support, a political party has to articulate the galvanising issue of the moment. That issue is nothing less than the threat to the democratic nation itself. This threat takes a variety of forms.

There is the increasing threat posed by the EU to the power of self-government. There is the threat of unlimited mass immigration and multi-culturism, which, if left unchecked, will destroy national identity. And there is the threat to the moral values underpinning this nation, as the Government shatters our bedrock norms of respectability and responsibility.

The issue of the nation is a trap for Labour that it cannot easily escape. This is because of what lies behind both its attack on the country's ancient constitutional conventions, and its fanatical zeal to subsume it into the heart of the projected European superstate. This is the Blairite belief that the self-governing nation state has had its day because 'globalisation' means it can no longer make its own way in the world; and that the idea of a majority culture expressing its values in its laws and institutions is illegitimate.

It's the belief that the nation has to take second place to supra-national institutions and laws like the EU, the International Criminal Court or the Human Rights Convention, whose values must trump anything the British people might express through their own Parliament and Courts.

Defending British democracy against this world-view is the big internal issue of our time. But the Tories have been very slow to grasp this. Despite the undoubtedly impressive strides made under Michael Howard, they have yet to articulate just why it is such an urgent priority to unseat the Blair government, and why they should be trusted to do so.

To make this case, they have to present a vision which is far more profound than the arguments over which party is the more daring in allowing the puboic a modicum of freedom to spend their own money on the public services - which frankly sounds like little more than angels dancing on the head of a pin.

They have to show us not only that they share the concern over the nation but, in additon, exactly what they will do to protect it against the EU and the supra-national world-view. They have to show that, far from undermining British democracy, America is our principal ally in the struggle to defend it. They will never do this if their main preoccupation is to avoid being painted as 'extreme'. Voters reward courage, not cowardice, principle, not pusillanimity.

Only if the Tories raise their game in this way will they make the breakthrough that still eludes them. There is an open goal in front of them. The question is whether they yet have the self-confidence to play the ball under pressure.