100,000 voices will be required to get motions debated in parliament. A lot of people do not like this, one of my favourite bloggers Mr. North at EU Referendum does not like it either. Yet one of my favourite politicians Mr. Hannan likes it so it would appear we are having a good old bout of difference of opinion. I like it not because I am naive enough to think that it will actually improve democracy in this country but because it is a very useful tool for politicians to shot themselves in the foot with. And since our ruling class is monumentally stupid as it is, you can be quite sure that given the opportunity to shot themselves in their feet; they will.
Politicians nowadays despise the electorate, our current ruling class is a testament to this fact. No one voted for the coalition yet the coalition now votes for us. That is not democracy and certainly not representative democracy where they are supposed to represent us, instead they represent themselves since under the aegis of 'coalition' they threw out their election manifestos, wrote a new one and forced it onto the people under the guise of 'compromise'. We were stupid enough, as always, to swallow that, line, hook and sinker.
Thankfully the public will always outshine private politicians. We have the benefit of 60 million minds and they only have 646 of our kind, not even our best kind, a rather mediocre staple they come from. With few scholars, officers and entrepreneurs. They are by and large sheep and followers, not leaders. Hence it is not a surprise at all that they now think this gimmick of a measure is going to help shore up their popularity (read 'the LibDems popularity').
What will happen is this: we will suggest loads of things we want debated and changed by our "sovereign" parliament. We will submit the HRA for expulsion from the legislature, we will demand that immigration is significantly reduced, we will demand a referendum on the EU, we will enforce very convincingly our commitment to the Armed Forces, we will demand the termination of the Human Rights Commission and we will most likely demand that a number of services such rail traffic and postal services are returned to the public sector. And many others.
They will of course ignore every single one of our requests, when we come, cap in hand, and beg that our masters listen to us.
But what they do not seem to have factored into this ploy is that there will be a lot of these 'citizen's initiatives' - because we, as a whole, despise our politicians and what they have done to this country. When the hoi polloi start to realise that their vox populi is being ignored en masse, even they will realise that their politicians are not serving their best interests.
Hence it will follow; motion after motion will be rejected because it is truly what the people want, people's disillusionment with the ruling class will only grow and grow, the ruling class will become more and more aware of their disillusionment until they one day feel compelled to act on one of the requests.
Alas, this act is a pointless play to the galleries for is should not be needed, politicians should by definition hold the executive to account. They should by definition have balls and a firm spine. But what this act will do is to force the public balls and spine onto our politicians, and there is not a single thing they can do about it.
Unfortunately we are a nation which is going nowhere.
I have written this before. But now Daniel is writing about France’s envy of Britain, so I will write about this again.
I was a student in Paris as a teenager in one school year in the late 1960’s; and in a different year spent the summer in Paris. I spent no time in any other part of France, but Paris is where French policy is formed, so it is fair to consider “Paris” as “France.” I have been in France since then, but it is the time period of these first two times which is important.
In one of the stays I lived with a socialist working class family who took in foreign students because they needed the money. In the other stay, I lived with a very grand, titled right-wing family whose friends included several of the generals who were in prison for opposing de Gaulle on the surrender in Algeria. The two families, and their respective circle of friends, came from the two ends of the social and political spectrum. Additionally, the lessons in French school were written and taught by a third group of French adults. Less than 25 years after the end WWII, when the adults in both families, and some who wrote the textbooks and taught and many other adults I encountered had lived through the German occupation, they seemed to have few hard feelings towards the Germans (perhaps because Germany was split up into East and West and thereby suitably humiliated?), but were already anti-American and very dismissive of the British.
To read the history lessons, one would learn that de Gaulle and his legions of Free French were instrumental in defeating the Germans and liberating Paris. Nowhere was it mentioned that the Free French fighters numbered only in the thousands. Certainly nowhere was it mentioned that Vichy French fought with the Germans when the Allies, including the Free French, invaded German-held North Africa. Eisenhower, who probably didn’t eat escargot, kept meddling and getting in de Gaulle’s way. Churchill was a minor historical figure who hardly merited mention, certainly not as important to history as de Gaulle. French culture and style was what was important to the world and French culture had always been the envy of the world. And if we must talk about history, France had a great empire too (Never mind that they had just been kicked out of the biggest piece of it.) and they even had Napoleon. And in current world affairs, France under de Gaulle was the most important country in the world because he was somehow making France the buffer and negotiator for the rest of the world between the Soviets, who were quite sympathique, and the boorish Americans. If that sounds somewhat muddled - it was.
What I found inescapable in those years - aside from the anti-Americanism - was that the France appeared to deeply resent Britain for its place in world history and it stance in WWII, as opposed to the French non-stance. France may have had honorable and understandable motives to form a European Union to keep Germany tethered, but everything I saw and heard in my time in Paris in the 1960’s makes me believe that the motive towards Britain has always been to overcome a historic sense of inferiority, and especially shame about WWII. That means a dominant France and a humiliated and cowed Britain.
Other posters have commented on my “rants” about France. My “rants” are based on how upside down I saw history turned during those two stays in the 1960’s. I think the Brits would do well to understand what was germinating in Paris in that time period.
Anyone who is not old enough to have been in Paris in that time period may have a different view of French motivation, but they cannot dispute what I saw first hand at that time.