Established Political Parties; A Menace to Liberty in the UK

The accompanying picture is by Jorge Arrieta, and I suspect that he would not approve of my illustrative use of his excellent political artwork, or of some of my views. You can find his site here.

In the coming elections, make your voice heard by silence. Do not vote.

The UK, and specifically England, is suffering at the moment from a particularly sapping illness, regardless of the failure of swine flu to strike apocalyptically. Its aetiology is quite simple. A small number of people, often whilst still at school, substitute the human yearning for ritual and for association with traditional and bigger causes that can make them feel important to others from religion to political parties. In doing so, they often develop a tribal narrative of opposition to other 'types', and a personal history of isolation from their peers and the concerns which society considers normal for teenagers.

Then, when they get to university, this small band of political supporters participate in rituals designed to sift and promote those who are most prepared to elevate their parties and the candidacies and causes with which they associate. Unlike in other countries, parties are sectarian, membership based, and frown on individual difference. Most people are alienated from them by this point; those in them, still convinced of their great deeds or of their capacity to do great things in an ill defined future millennium of their own rule, actively look down on those not involved.

More rituals follow. People arrive in London, or attach themselves to municipal offices for which very few people voted, and then they live out a life on a low income until--mirabile dictu--they are picked as candidates for a losing election, but marked out by the way in which they 'take one' for the party whilst living in the drunken yet righteous snakepit that constitutes the value system of the political-media class.

By the time some few get elected, not only has most integrity or trace of independence gone, but methods of advancement, and the worship of consensus have become ingrained, and a conspiracy of mediocrity prevails. These few are then expected to legislate--except they don't, since most of that is done by statutory instrument or European directive. Small triumphs then become invested with great importance, but people are at all times reminded to think of their faction. The young idealists of yesterday are expected to claim expenses as allowances and to distribute portions down to their parties and aspirants below, and to enjoy their achievements. This is the venal reality of the latest scandal; it is a form of corruption much worse than personal gain. It is the corruption of ideals.

Of course attitudes and outlooks become solidified; of course, these are good people, who just know more about their public trust that they think of as a career. Of course their own advancement helps the cause.

A free society would enforce three things that would stop the inevitable leakage of corruption outward. Firstly, even if ambition is and always has been a ruling passion of any mind, the ambitious should be made, personally, constantly to talk with, communicate to, and get the votes of, the people they rule. Not journalists; not the gatekeepers of party candidate lists; people. There should be regular elections to personal office and people should be subjected to individual votes, either by primaries or alternative votes.

Secondly, free speech and freedom of information in everything should be the rule. If this makes some shy of politics, so be it; those who pathologically promote themselves are likely to be punished by diminished lives or to appear in even worse numbers if they can hide.

Tax returns, personal histories, and educational achievements should be available; if they all were, I really believe that the press could not get the public interested in any secrets. We all have things innate to ourselves that have made fools of us; the people would understand if the people didn't think they were being lied to. Setting up any body to deal with the public money and shrouding it in secrecy, or displacing its debts to taxpayers whilst moving its ownership and profit into the private sector without compensation, is wrong. The culture of secrecy starts with the secrets of the self.

Thirdly, those elected should represent enough people and have enough responsibility that their jobs were serious and that their recall could be justified. We need fewer laws, more scrutiny, clearer taxes, more recall elections, and an end to the begging bowl of rights-based, green-tinged bullshit that public life has become.

Those things are directly opposed to the interests of major British political parties. They want party-list elections which are really only a chance to endorse them, or a farce of safe seats and marginal electoral contests; 'electoral reform' in the name of a chimerical popular will; a thousand regulations and a hundred ways to reward but neuter their own members, and they want to feed the drama of their friends in the media whilst hiding from their stupid obsessions and concerns. They want more offices, not fewer, and more corporate secrecy, and more outsourcing of the state, and more servile brainwashing and more state regulation of people's lives, and more denial of a common culture that they do not feel a part of.

This is not going to hold up in the sort of long depression we are now in. The public have been growing in anger for a long time. I wish that there were people around who had the credibility and the understanding to pilot the state to where the people want to go. I worry that, enmeshed in righteousness and spiritual exhaustion, our awful, godless political-media class will just deliver not just more but worse of the same. Unchecked, the resulting public response will assault the good with the bad, the worthwhile with the worthless, and all will lose.

People have died, and are dying, so that you, if you are reading as a British citizen, have the right to vote. It is not to dishonour them to note that encouraging the people who treat your rule, your sovereignty, and your country with contempt and who ensure that whoever is elected treats you in the same way, is not freedom. The empty gesture of voting is not choice. It is empty, a hollow genuflection that does no one any good.

In the coming local and European elections, make your voice heard by silence. Even over the bile of their websites and the high volumes of their inner, solitary, voices, they will hear it if enough of us withold our consent.

Do not play their silly game. Do not vote.