This is for those of you who have not bought my book but who might be persuaded to read or hear this chapter in full.
The first 15 chapters explain, in jaw dropping detail, why our current system disables long term decision making. Those chapters also show how and why all but one of our post war Prime Ministers are ‘crap‘ (I quote Jeremy Paxman) at administering and managing our country. Their historic policy cock-ups continue to waste our tax money years after and continue so to do!
What follows is Chapter 16 of ‘British politics is broken, but…‘ in audio and text formats.
Chapter 17 goes into more detail about what the DFTP could achieve.
Just click the play button below and, if you wish, follow my voice in the transcript or just close your eyes…
Chapter 16 A possible future without party-politics
Rod Liddle has also spotted that our current party-political system just cannot provide long-term policy solutions. His articles in the Times and Sunday Times propose a ten-year voting cycle, but he leaves party politics in place. He does admit that his ten-year cycle is unlikely to happen.
However, I am proposing a national administration system that eventually removes party politics completely. I first want to show you where I think we need to be and then explain how it might just be possible to get there.
Of course, this can’t all happen at once but my starting point is the creation of a new Political Party!
We now venture into my fantasy world where what could solve short-termism probably won’t happen either, unless…
We create a new political party!
I know this seems to go against everything I have said pointing out the flaws in party politics, but unless our new ‘Democracy for the People’ party (DFTP)’ gains a majority at the ballot box in a general election, things will stay as they are forever.
There is no other way according to our unwritten constitution, as far as I know. I doubt anybody else knows either, which is why we must have a written constitution together with a written bill of rights.
The DFTP would have the planned but gentle removal of the party system as its main message. More detail policy measures and a vision for the future follow in the next chapter.
This is where you come in once ‘someone’ has created the new party!
You lot would have to vote for it and probably cast more votes than the other parties put together.
The only other way forward would be a violent revolution and blood on the streets which I don’t really want to see! This however is the most common way that radical political change has occurred in the past.
Once you have the DFTP in power the other parties will be gently dismantled and some members of the former parties will probably be absorbed.
The first Witan was an Anglo-Saxon invention where the monarch called a meeting of senior citizens and land owners to discuss and approve major policy changes, going to war, tax increases etc.
I suggest we create something like the Witan but perhaps call it a Citizens Assembly of 500 regularly, period to be defined, elected members chaired by a President or some other grand leadership name.
One of the first jobs for the DFTP would be to appoint a team of historians, philosophers, economists and lawyers to create a written constitution and a written bill of rights. This would probably take a year or two and drafts would be voted upon by the DFTP members.
The policies of the new party advocate the disestablishment of the Church of England, removal of the monarchy, a beefed up the civil service, quangos would be subsumed into the new civil service, the House of Lords would be renamed as House of Review or similar and repopulated with an elected elite!
Britain’s citizens would, at last, feel more connected to each other and more democratically engaged.
Government, both local and central will be able to look to long term solutions.
Government, both local and central will be better held to account.
Political parties will be replaced by one apolitical beefed-up Civil Service which would now contain the Ministers in charge of departments. The People’s Assembly would oversee this.
Those ministers would not however have the power to enact policy decisions unless ratified by the Citizens Assembly.
The Quangos would be gone and useful people from them absorbed into the new Civil Service. This restores power to where it should be which is in the hands of elected members who would be appointed as departmental ministers.
The Treasury[2] would retain its current role but proposed major policy measures and tax changes would be voted upon by the new Citizen’s Assembly meeting periodically.
The ministry of defence would be part of this new Civil Service.
The NHS would be brought back into democratic control as part of the new Civil Service
It is probable that those new Witan-like Assembly members are retired successful, well-educated people who want to give something back plus leaders of district and county councils.
Elitist?
Yes, of course.
Do you really want a country run by people like you and me or power mad despots? 😉
Here is an amusing aside on the way things used to be run: –
It shows that things governmental haven’t changed much in two hundred years.
Here is the Duke of Wellington, in 1812 responding to his government’s requests for budget cuts. A masterpiece of English understatement – I would have loved to have found the reply, but sadly history seems to have lost it …
“Gentlemen, whilst marching from Portugal to a position which commands the approach to Madrid and the French forces, my officers have been diligently complying with your requests which have been sent by H.M. ship from London to Lisbon and thence by dispatch to our headquarters.
We have enumerated our saddles, bridles, tents and tent poles, and all manner of sundry items for which His Majesty’s Government holds me accountable. I have dispatched reports on the character, wit, and spleen of every officer. Each item and every farthing has been accounted for, with two regrettable exceptions for which I beg your indulgence.
Unfortunately, the sum of one shilling and ninepence remains unaccounted for in one infantry battalion’s petty cash and there has been a hideous confusion as [to] the number of jars of raspberry jam issued to one cavalry regiment during a sandstorm in western Spain. This reprehensible carelessness may be related to the pressure of circumstance, since we are [at] war with France, a fact which may come as a bit of a surprise to you gentlemen in Whitehall.
This brings me to my present purpose, which is to request elucidation of my instructions from His Majesty’s Government so that I may better understand why I am dragging an army over these barren plains. I construe that perforce it must be one of two alternative duties, as given below. I shall pursue either one with the best of my ability, but I cannot do both:
- To train an army of uniformed British clerks in Spain for the benefit of the accountants and copy-boys in London, or perchance…
- To see to it that the forces of Napoleon are driven out of Spain.
Your most obedient servant,
Wellington”
The government’s reply seems to have been lost in the post.
My medium-term vision for the future of Britain
Our new Civil Service will maintain strong and well-defined links to: –
- The judiciary and law courts which remain independent from government interference.
- The armed services
- The police service
- The fire services
- The national health service.
The church is nowhere to be seen in legislature as it would have been disestablished as it was in the constitutions of the USA and France several hundred years ago.
We are no longer a theocracy with a monarch deriving power from his or her invisible friend in the sky.
The assets of the so-called Crown Estates would be slowly returned to public ownership after we have removed the monarchy.
The executive’s ministers will be chosen from the best leaders of the civil service, armed forces, police service, academia, art and business.
The executive would be chaired by someone who knows how to chair a meeting, has a human face and an ability to communicate with the public without lying all the time. That chairman might be called ‘The President’ but without much of the power abused by the president of the USA.
That executive will be monitored and controlled by a periodic meeting of 500 members of a renewed Parliament probably renamed as The Citizen’s Assembly (Witan 2) or senate, voted in every three years or so; the actual period is obviously debatable.
The new Witan-like group of citizens vote on suggestions made by the executive after being fully briefed by them.
A draft policy platform for the DFTP
Having read this far, it should be evident to all readers that party-politics and the five-year voting cycle just cannot ever provide the long-term thinking essential to providing the best solutions to Britain’s more complex problems.
Therefore, we need a form of republic where real power, for most policy decisions is removed from government ministers and voted on by the new DFTP assembly.
Here is a list of major policies to be put forward to the public by the new DFTP when it has an opportunity to take part in a general election
- Existing Party-Political parties are to be replaced by a Citizens Assembly.
- The Civil Service will be beefed up with better paid heads of department.
- Quangos will be absorbed back into the Civil Service and reorganised with teeth and stronger administrative powers.
- The main idea here is that longer term planning and investment can be made where it desperately needs to be.
- Great Britain will become a new form of republic ‘The Republic of Great Britain’ where the citizens will have more say, in a more meaningful way, than ever before.
- The Church of England will be removed (disestablished) from the legislature. The monarch will no longer be head of the church created by Henry VIII. Instead, the Archbishop of Canterbury will be in charge.
- State funding of faith schools will cease over the following few years and all state funded schools will have a secular charter like the one already in operation in France.
- The monarchy will be removed so that the peoples’ assets stolen in the past can be re-instated and the cash generated used for the benefit of the people, as in:
- Commercial rights to our seabed
- Duchy of Cornwall assets and land
- Duchy of Lancaster assets and land
- And many more
- Privatisation has been shown to be an utter failure and economic disaster and has cost the British public hundreds of billions since Thatcher’s era.
- There will be a plan to take back control and ownership of our water supply
- There will be a plan to take back control and ownership of our nation grid
- British Rail will be reformed integrating track and rail again
- Existing PFI contracts will be repealed by act of parliament
That’s probably enough to get most of the population voting again.
At least I hope it is.
If not, we are doomed to ever increasing debt, the consequences of which are just too terrible to contemplate.
[1] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/transpennine-express-trains-rail-rod-liddle-kqtzzj909
[2] https://www.hmtreasurycareers.co.uk/about-us/role-of-hm-treasury/
