Read Online The Light's on at Signpost by George MacDonald Fraser - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: George MacDonald Fraser
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granted that a politician will bear a level dish. There used to be occasional scandals; now one follows hard on another, with shady deals and loans and honours for the boys and brown envelopes and cash for questions and favours in return for party contributions and blatant buying of influence and feverish attempts to hide personal interests.
It is a sorry tale, made worse by the contempt which the Commons plainly feel for the electorate, as we see when a married MP, detected in infidelity, protests indignantly that it is none of his constituents’ business what he does in his private life—and in this arrogance he does not lack support among his parliamentary colleagues. What turns the stomach is not the adultery, which is usually good for a laugh, but the lofty assumption that the votershave no right to know that he is not a man to be trusted; he has broken the most solemn promise a man ever makes, but when it is asked “If his wife couldn’t trust him, who can?” there comes the inevitable whine about privacy, and the childish attempt at justification: “Everybody does it,” which is a lie. Everybody doesn’t. Without being unduly sanctimonious, one may remark that time was when unsavoury personal character, like poor performance, was a matter for resignation, but no longer. We have government from the gutter, and neither the detected transgressor nor the incompetent minister feels it incumbent on himself to do the honourable thing. They seldom jump; they have to be shoved. No wonder Parliament has fallen into disrepute.
The tragedy is that not Parliament alone, but the very matter of government, has been besmirched. God knows democracy, that much-trumpeted and venerated myth, has faults enough; the notion of government of the people, by the people, and for the people, was silly enough when Lincoln said it, but later generations of politicians have turned it into an obscene farce. It is worth defining democracy, not in its literal * sense or in the swollen meaningless terms beloved of demagogues, but as it exists in fact: the opportunity, every four or five years, to choose among a few party hacks of doubtful character and ability in whose selection the voter has had no say. That is democracy, Western style.
None of Lincoln’s conditions for government exists in fact. There is government of the people only in the sense that they are governed, but not in the sense that government comes of the people, and only a crook or a madman would say we have government by the people, when the truth is that it is in the hands of a dishonest, self-serving clique under unbreakable party control. As for government for the people, don’t make me laugh: the people’s will is flouted at every turn, on Europe, capital punishment, and the promotion of sexual perversion by government, to take only three issues. The politicians’ attitude is, bluntly, that the public are sheep who don’t know what’s good for them, and need to be led by a pack of second-rate lawyers, trade union activists, career opportunists, student agitators, and crazed feminists. That is democracy, British style.
A striking illustration of this was given by one MP, a former minister, speaking on television, when he made clear his contempt for “grass roots opinion”, dismissing it as an unsound basis for decisionmaking; it was, he declared, a negation of political leadership.
The arrogance of this, coming from a failed politician whose judgment one would not have trusted to buy a jar of marmalade, was almost stupefying. He actually saw himself as a leader, fit to take decisions, in defiance of the public will if necessary. I had the same kind of pompous claptrap trotted out to me on a radio chat-show by another MP when I taxed him with refusing to meet the public wish on capital punishment; it was for him and his fellows, he assured me earnestly, to supply a lead, not to follow popular opinion.
Now, this kind of haughty pretension may have been well enough
It is a sorry tale, made worse by the contempt which the Commons plainly feel for the electorate, as we see when a married MP, detected in infidelity, protests indignantly that it is none of his constituents’ business what he does in his private life—and in this arrogance he does not lack support among his parliamentary colleagues. What turns the stomach is not the adultery, which is usually good for a laugh, but the lofty assumption that the votershave no right to know that he is not a man to be trusted; he has broken the most solemn promise a man ever makes, but when it is asked “If his wife couldn’t trust him, who can?” there comes the inevitable whine about privacy, and the childish attempt at justification: “Everybody does it,” which is a lie. Everybody doesn’t. Without being unduly sanctimonious, one may remark that time was when unsavoury personal character, like poor performance, was a matter for resignation, but no longer. We have government from the gutter, and neither the detected transgressor nor the incompetent minister feels it incumbent on himself to do the honourable thing. They seldom jump; they have to be shoved. No wonder Parliament has fallen into disrepute.
The tragedy is that not Parliament alone, but the very matter of government, has been besmirched. God knows democracy, that much-trumpeted and venerated myth, has faults enough; the notion of government of the people, by the people, and for the people, was silly enough when Lincoln said it, but later generations of politicians have turned it into an obscene farce. It is worth defining democracy, not in its literal * sense or in the swollen meaningless terms beloved of demagogues, but as it exists in fact: the opportunity, every four or five years, to choose among a few party hacks of doubtful character and ability in whose selection the voter has had no say. That is democracy, Western style.
None of Lincoln’s conditions for government exists in fact. There is government of the people only in the sense that they are governed, but not in the sense that government comes of the people, and only a crook or a madman would say we have government by the people, when the truth is that it is in the hands of a dishonest, self-serving clique under unbreakable party control. As for government for the people, don’t make me laugh: the people’s will is flouted at every turn, on Europe, capital punishment, and the promotion of sexual perversion by government, to take only three issues. The politicians’ attitude is, bluntly, that the public are sheep who don’t know what’s good for them, and need to be led by a pack of second-rate lawyers, trade union activists, career opportunists, student agitators, and crazed feminists. That is democracy, British style.
A striking illustration of this was given by one MP, a former minister, speaking on television, when he made clear his contempt for “grass roots opinion”, dismissing it as an unsound basis for decisionmaking; it was, he declared, a negation of political leadership.
The arrogance of this, coming from a failed politician whose judgment one would not have trusted to buy a jar of marmalade, was almost stupefying. He actually saw himself as a leader, fit to take decisions, in defiance of the public will if necessary. I had the same kind of pompous claptrap trotted out to me on a radio chat-show by another MP when I taxed him with refusing to meet the public wish on capital punishment; it was for him and his fellows, he assured me earnestly, to supply a lead, not to follow popular opinion.
Now, this kind of haughty pretension may have been well enough
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