political corruption

There's been a bit of a giggle going round the blogs over Johann Hari's three point plan for revitalizing our democracy. The Centre Forum's Free Think blog described them, I hope with tongue firmly in cheek, as "radical"; they do not even trim the overgrown leaves of our democracy, let alone get at the root of the problem. Tom Papworth offers a characteristically more critical appraisal and says much that I would have said about Hari's ideas themselves ('boneheaded' and 'rent seeking').

But as his suggestion about compelling students to take a newspaper rather shows, Hari is one of the current establishment and it is that centralized establishment that is at the heart of the problem. Our politicians are so remote that we are being told we must rely on people like him, who few of us will ever know personally well enough to tell whether they're honest or not, in the pockets of the trough feeders, or even at the trough with them, to interpret accurately what's going on it the Westmonster village. This is not democracy in anything other than name.

If we want to make politics the topic of discussion around kitchen tables, in the pub or at coffee after Mass, democracy needs to come down to that level. Street level democracy. Most of the parties witter on a lot about "localism" (I notice "localism" seems to have replaced "devolution" largely in their lexicons), perhaps especially the Lib Dems, for whom devolution of power to the lowest practical level is part of the pre-amble to our constitution, the touchstone of our supposed beliefs. Yet even we don't really explore really radical alternatives.

And that's what we need. Our system of democracy was designed in an era in which central government didn't actually do a lot compared with today. Our "representatives" (of curse really only the representatives of the landed population) got themselves elected by a few sheep and packed off to Westmonster for whole sessions at a time - you could hardly hold surgeries in Edinburgh one evening and be back at Westmonster the next.

The civic movement grew up as a more local parallel system often in response to industrialization and urbanization and, at the height of its power was responsible for most welfare, health and education provision, policing and most local infrastructure like sewage, water supply and later still energy supply, whilst private interests built inter-city infrastructure such as toll roads and later railways. And even that was a centralization of power in cities from the previous parish system - you can still go round and see "Parish School" above the doors of those Edwardian school buildings - Glasgow has some particularly good examples. Until as recently as, I think, 1938, Oxford, for example, had at least three pretty well autonomous local authorities responsible for different parts of the city. A few years before that it still had separate public boards to deal with public health issues and so on.

Now, whilst we live in a fast moving globalized world, I question whether we actually need to rely on one representative for sixty odd thousand of us each packing off to Westmonster and fighting for our local hospitals, say, with a bloke from Hull, or having our policing priorities set by a woman from Redditch. I don't much care how they see such things in Redditch or Hull, it's Oxford I'm interested in and all these decisions ought to be more, much more, accessible to me made by much more locally accountable people. Even many of Westmonster's international negotiating functions are much less needed today. We trade for ourselves with people and businesses all over the planet. The sense that we need a national level broker wheeling and dealing in what is almost always rent-seeking and protectionist ways is diminishing rapidly.

Now there are two approaches to devolution and subsidiarity I'd suggest. The one, it seems the preferred one at Westmonster, amongst all the parties, is for we, the people, to wait for the crumbs to fall from the top table. Look at the department for Communities for example. It is this part of centralized government who announces initiatives, looks for councils to fight amongst themselves for a share of the resources to pilot them and ties them up in knots reporting back on outcomes so that "Communities" can decide whether to make those initiative compulsory on the rest of the local authorities, continue funding them and so on. I suggest that this gradualism is an excuse for the centre holding on to power. Each successful initiative dictated from above is a reason to keep these trough feeders where they are. Any ubnsuccessful ones of course are the fault of local authorities themselves or even ourselves, showing us not ready for such freedoms in their eyes.

But far better to my mind is actually reinventing our democratic structures fit for the modern era. Hari, I think, is wrong to say that nobody talks about government and politics. I hear people all the time complaining about politicians. It is, perhaps, comforting even for people to moan about government and politicians - we are able to assign responsibility for cock-ups to someone else. Someone far away in Westmonster and usually, since only about one in six hundred of us actually gets to vote for the individual who will become Prime Monster, someone we didn't put in power. Even local government does it, though often this is with half an eye on political gain at that higher level - persuading your Tory borough's population that something is Labour's doing at Westmonster is part of the "game" of getting a Tory MP elected next time, or vice versa. It is no wonder people are cynical and disengaged, if that's what they are.

And so I'd like to introduce you, if you haven't already heard about it, to the idea of "cellular democracy". Some commentators in the US (where they already have substantially more local freedoms than we do to innovate and compete with other localities of course), in what I see really as a modern development of Hume's "Perfect Commonwealth", suggest that democracy is no longer at a "human scale". Because we elect to remote bodies people we are likely never to meet (at least for more than their allotted ninety seconds on your doorstep when they want your vote) the system itself inflates the cost of democracy. Parties have to spend lots of money getting a nationwide message out. We rely on people like Hari, whom we don't know, to provide commentary and interpretation. Most importantly, perhaps, parties form their policies not around what is good for particular communities but around what is acceptable to the floating voters in a small number of marginal constituencies.

The idea is that we turn our system on its head. We say, as so many politicians like to claim to believe, even if their actions speak to the contrary, that government literally comes from the people, that we cede only so much of our individual sovereignty to some collective body as is necessary to meet those needs we are incapable, for reasons of economic efficiency usually, to provide for ourselves. You have the principal tier of government at a local level. A very local level. A street or small neighbourhood. Usually of no more than a few hundred residents. Candidates are likely to be known, approachable - you bump into them walking the dog or standing at the bus stop. They get their message across to you through real local contact - not some party worker umming and erring for a few seconds on your doorstep or increasingly over the phone, facelessly. Some even suggest that, like a party caucus in the US, these elections could be by show of hands once a year at a local meeting. In a sense, to the successful candidate, knowing who didn't vote for you gives you an incentive to find out why and work with those neighbours, for they will all be neighbours on whatever issues put them off voting for you.

And that's the only vote you get - except for the right of each five hundred strong neighbourhood to recall their representative. By default it is in the remit of those very local authorities - perhaps twenty members each elected by five hundred residents to meet all the needs of that community that must be delivered through collective action, voluntary co-operation. When they find that they cannot possibly meet some need for their 10,000 strong community - they couldn't, for example, justify building a large general hospital just for their small community - but they could decide to join up with other communities to form a second tier of government, to whom a representative will be delegated by the first level authority and a by-election held, or the runner up, or an alternate, would take their place on the first tier authority. These higher tiers need not even be geographically linked. They may decide to join up with others on particular functional issues. Take the hospital again, here in Oxford the John Radcliffe hospitals serve folk from Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire, Berkshire and so on so even ceding more control to a body based on the boundaries of Oxford or Oxfordshire does not serve all its users.

If a higher tier wants to raise some money, that request is passed down through the various levels and discussed in these local caucuses. People can really decide whether these higher tiers are offering them value for money, or whether they could meet those needs for themselves better. Each higher level authority, however, is only ministering to the needs of its member authorities in turn so it should be easier to follow the money trail and identify whether something is in fact good value for you, the individual, or your small neighbourhood.

Some will say this gives rise to all sorts of problems about "free loading" - communities that decide not to participate in higher level authorities but gain the benefits of their collective efforts. In such a case, perhaps the authorities that have collaborated could decide to charge more for people from the community that didn't collaborate on a particular facility or policy to access that facility - they will, I am sure, soon find it would be better to join to get the "members rate". But ultimately, one has to ask whether "free-loading" is any worse a problem than the egregious rent seeking and bloated costs of our existing system.

Wouldn't Barrie's Palace of Westminster make an interesting "novelty hotel" - just like Oxford's former prison has here. Or perhaps just a prison. That would be quite fitting, considering everything its occupants have stolen from us for decades. David Hume said that we ought to be ready with new ideas of government for the day when, perhaps, by common consent the existing system is seen as broken. I suggest that the epochal changes in communications and trade that have been made in the past twenty or thirty years is just such a moment, and if we are not to lose our democracy through lack of interest on the part of the electorate, it is more urgent than ever.

We are always told that the Olympics should not be political. Our government refused to mandate a boycott of Beijing because they have no control over the British Olympic Association. The Iraqi team last I saw was waiting to hear whether they could go because the Iraqi government recently sacked the entire national Olympic committee. We're not supposed to score political points over this "greatest show on earth" of "amateur" sporting prowess.

So why are so many politicians spending fortunes of our money falling over themselves to be in Beijing? Troughs...pigs...hmmm, spare ribs!

...to think that, in a few short weeks , it looks possible that party activists of all political colours will be expected to trudge the streets once again asking people to believe a lot of spin, unachievable promises and heartfelt apologies and vote for for a "change", or maybe that should just be "vote, for a change".

Actually, I tell a lie, it doesn't completely overwhelm me. Sometimes there is a little frisson of excitement at the possibility that the people of Britain might just once collectively call time on this comfy carousel of political clap-trap. Just say no! as the song went...

No, Gordon! No, Dave! No, Jack, Hillary, Harriet or whoever! No, not even you Nick!

We've had quite enough for these past decades, nay centuries, of being shunted up the gary glitter by folk who think they know better than us but whose ambitions so clearly exceed their abilities.

What would happen if we all got up one "Good Morning" Polling Day and simply voted "no"? At what point would the Westminster clique conclude they had completely lost our confidence and call a halt to their corruption and crookery? Or at what point can we refuse, with impunity, to submit to their authority?

And then, how do we create a new, bottom up, rather than up its own arse, democracy? This has much to commend it.

If, as the media and certain politicians seem to want us to believe, we have a "broken society " (whatever on earth that might actually mean), surely it is just reflecting how "broken" its leadership, government, has become. And I don't mean just the current Labour government. I mean government as an institution, even our democracy itself, if you will.

The state and its agents and those who act with its protection have routinely perpetrated force, violence and coercion, against their own citizens, against other countries, for aeons. The whole model is based on us surrendering some of our personal sovereignty. Some would no doubt rather say "pool" than "surrender" but look around you; "pooling" implies much more of a consensual relationship than reality attests to.

From cradle to grave, as they once promised, the state imposes itself on our lives and choices by more or less coercion. From compulsion in education, via criminalizing consensual or victimless behaviour (even thoughts and opinions) and right through to prosecuting wars "in our name", commanding our young men and women to kill or be killed. And most of all perhaps through taxation - it never hurts as hard as on the pocket!

In turns the state seems to infantilise and nanny us, to absolve us of personal responsibilities, and then, moralizing, blame us for all our own ills. Those who would rule us cynically play on our fears and talk up our aspirations according to their need to gain and retain power. And a tiny minority of us in our broken system can make or break that power for them, so have disproportionate influence over our fellow citizens.

That this has always gone on need hardly be stated. The biggest mystery, as Milton Friedman said, is why human-kind seems collectively to submit to authority - especially remarkable really when you consider that every step of human advance has actually arisen from someone stepping beyond the current conventions, bending the rules, exceeding the norm.

Supposedly benign regimes create instruments to comfort us, to fool us into thinking they are prepared to limit their own authority, whether we call them Geneva Conventions, Human Rights Acts or Data Protection, and then seem to break their own principles when it suits them, call it Guantanamo, pre-charge detention and control orders or ID cards and state databases.

It is often said that ("successful") politicians display many characteristics of psychopathy. How much more "broken" can we get than to submit ourselves to being ruled and represented by smooth talking, self centered, pathological liars? How much more scary than that such people have their hands on both our wallets and on the nuclear triggers? Is it any wonder that life on some of our streets can be vicious?

The Home Affairs Select Committee has apparently published a report suggesting that we may be wandering unaware into a Surveillance State. Just where have these people been for the last decade and more?

When I was on Oxford City Council we used to receive applications for new CCTV cameras and we were often cautious about permitting them. To be fair to the Greens on the council at the time it was usually they who made most noise about the civil liberties connotations (maybe they were on the wrong side of the "If you have nothing to hide" argument!).

I also tried to have put into the council's constitution a condition to make any surveillance under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (the one that the newspapers are now braying that councils are using to snoop on dogs shitting not terrorist catching - for which it was never explicitly intended) subject to scrutiny and approval of elected councillors and not just officers, at whatever level.

Around the time the News of the Screws started campaigning for "Sarah's Law" in 2000 already there were academics implanting their daughters with chips to find out where they were all the time and already there were people, including me, questioning this as an invention that ought to be lost because of the implcations for civil liberties.

It is not just astonishing, but a dereliction of their duties in my opinion, that those who purport to represent and lead us at the highest level of government to have taken till summer of 2008 to come up with a similar suggestion, that we are sleepwalking into an all pervasive surveillance state. Absolutely amazing.

This need not be a case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted though. Much of the technology is, at least superficially, comforting, with its claims to be able to prevent crime or find our loved ones in trouble, and much of it has benign application as well as potential for abuse. More importantly it's not a good reason to get all neo-Luddite about technology.

Surveillance can and is used to protect public safety for instance that need not be able to identify individuals at all. You can monitor the flow of crowds, such as might have prevented the Hillborough disaster, through thermal imaging (indeed it's easier for a computer to pick up just body temperature hotspots in order to be able to enforce, say, a safe numerical capacity in a building or trace someone missing in an emergency, than it is for them to pick up visible light images with less contrast in the image).

Databases can and are used to enhance our experience of all sorts of services without being linked to any super database providing nefarious users access to all data anyone holds on a person. And modern communications can and are used to ensure timely delivery of information that will help us, even save our lives, without needing to be centralized.

Even tracking systems can and are used to help us find our way around, or even to help others find us if we are in trouble, without actually tracking our every move when we don't need them.

So why is it that when this technology is touched by the heavy hand of government it nearly always seems that it is being used against us?

Well first of course, Lord Acton's dictum applies. And information is power. Those who seek power over us, seek information by which to maintain that power. Because even with the best will in the world, they think they know best, and what's best of all is if they manage to stick around to implement it. There can be no other explanation for o'erleaping political ambition.

Second, they are easily corruptible in this search for power, whether it be over individuals or power over whole markets and systems - which "progressives" at least seem to feel they require in order to enable their interventionist policies of "robbery" and "redistribution". With nearly half of the nation's income to spend, government is a huge target for someone to sell their "stuff". If some of the comments about it are true, the Lib Dems, with their latest road pricing policy, on which more in another post , have fallen victim to this. Companies who invest in technology want to make money out of that technology. If they can use it to land a great big fat government contract they have hit the jackpot.

Third, I always reckon that the people who "integrate" the individual technologies of others, mostly morally neutral and benign, don't much care about the outcomes beyond their own "problem domain". They too are after making a bit of money by finding innovative ways of putting others' work to use. And that means being "first to market" with the ideas. Corners are cut. In the process of producing something useful first to get that sale, they don't have to think too much about consequences outside of their own field. They are only selling a database system. It's the uses it is put to or what it is mixed with, out of their control, that can make it intrusive or benign, and that is for the future to boot.

Now don't get me wrong. I am an optimist about most modern technology. Because of modern communications methods and the sharing of certain data, I do believe we are entering an epoch in which discovery of all sorts will be speeded up. Cures for diseases will be discovered in double time. Technology that will enable the poorest third of the world at last to access some of the benefits of the past couple of hundred years, or education, health care, industry and the growth of material wealth, even to ensure they have enough to eat. That our ability to communicate, and trade with, individuals and enterprises right around the planet has the ability to spread wealth and peace more widely than ever before. That it is about to unleash a truly "giant leap for mankind".

But that threatens government. It threatens those who, having attained power, need to justify their own existence, and expense accounts. But the good news is that the market, the producers and integrators of those technologies still have to make money. So they continue developing, and this is where our influence can come in. Our pressure, our reaction to their previous attempts, can shape the factors that will go into their next research. At some point, perhaps when they understand that the technology has only made a minute difference, opinion will swing against the untrammelled benefits of CCTV and the manufacturers will look for ways of delivering the benefits without the snooping.

And it's up to those of us with half an interest in the technology, amateur or professional, to think for ourselves and propose possible solutions that resolve the problems we ourselves have with the systems currently on offer. Those whose job it is to scrutinise and hold government to account cannot be trusted to do so if it has taken them all this time to state what has been bloody obvious to anyone with all synapses firing.

Most of all, it is government itself that is the problem. To roll back the surveillance state, we need to roll back the state itself. Never before have governments had so much power over us. Yet they continually fail to make the differences they promise at election time. It's time we woke up to this and stopped listening to their spin, excuses and lies and stopped putting our trust in them.

What is the world coming to? You know, I may have very grave concerns about our own democracy and the things our elected dictators are imposing on us, but it behoves us daily to thank whatever deity, sprite or inspiration we believe in, that we are not in Zimbabwe. The inhuman brutality of Mugabe is an affront to mankind. And this is a man who professes to be a Christian.

Leviticus is not my favourite tome, but Chap 23 verse 22 seems quite apt: "And when you reap the corn of your land, you shall not cut it to the very ground: neither shall you gather the ears that remain; but you shall leave them for the poor and for the strangers." There's no conditionality in there. It doesn't say "so long as they vote for me.

This posting has been a very long time in the making. In fact, as is usual, I've been more than normally ponderous about our political system since the local elections and it has prevented me doing anything else. I wanted to be careful about what I say, lest I be seen simply as having sour grapes at having lost - but I hope you will see that far from it, I am hopeful of achieving more, and for others moreover, outside the formal government structure than inside it.

I have fallen out of love with democracy; at least the corrupt, broken, power-hungry, centralizing, suffocating, nanny state, infantilizing political game we seem to have wandered into at some point.

Whether it's Labour's desperation to beat me that made them put out a leaflet that can only have been intended to damage my personal standing and reputation negligible though it may be already, the various tit-for-tat accusations that ran right through the Crewe by-election and the London mayoral elections, Westminster's divorce from the rest of the country as regards how much they get to spend of our money feathering their personal nests and how much we should know about it, it stinks.

I was watching again the "Open Minds" interview with Milton Friedman the other day and when it was put to him, as in J S Mill's formulation, that democratic government is the way in which we put good, ungreedy and unselfish people in charge to prevent bad, greedy and selfish people from taking over his response was simple: "government is an institution whereby the people with the greatest drive to get power over their fellow men get into the position of controlling them".

And who can argue, in the system we now have. The prize is enormous. Whoever lies his or her way to number 10 has the prospect of controlling nearly half of our entire national income. The mechanism of getting the top jobs is a sham - none of them in my opinion are competent to claim more wisdom than sixty million others of us that makes them able to take such a responsibility and they're only ever elected by a few thousand of those sixty million. Even in local government, tied up as it may be in red tape and Whitehall edicts, still the unscrupulous seem to make it to the top - look at Oxford Labour's own little lotacracy.

Tony Blair seemed to think he was virtually messianic, and now he believes apparently that he can solve all the world's problems now that he is no longer encumbered with such a small salary as the UK Prime Minister and the petty problems of Britain. But it doesn't matter who it is, Blair may have brought it to a head but neither Brown, Cameron, Clegg, Blair or whoever else may come next, has the capacity or competence to decide so much for so many.

And I don't think that I can suffer under this system much longer. If I was a young Muslim I'd probably be rounded up and accused of being "radicalised". Well I am radicalised. Radicalised and angry. It's a good job they've imposed a ban on unauthorized demonstrations outside of parliament, else I would hire a bunch of JCBs and lead a crowd to dismantle the Palace of Westminster stone by stone and cast its occupants into the river and hope they all wash up somewhere halfway up the Amazon where they would not be found for half a millennium - well actually I probably wouldn't, because I don't have that sort of courage, but I curse Guy Fawkes for having failed his opportunity!

In the local elections, nearly 70% of people did not vote. Even in generals, nearly 40% didn't vote last time. The Libertarian Party believes that this is a vast pool of voters who would readily switch to their, and my, image of a new Britain, with renewed freedoms and less state intervention. But I'm a Liberal, if not especially a Democrat, and my party is one of the three larger parties the LPUK blames for the lack of imagination in political discourse that has created this situation. And indeed, our regular flirtations with vaguely socialist redistribution policies rather than liberal level playing field policies, do seem to make us bed-pals with the two conservative parties trying to maintain their duopoly. Do I have to make that leap into the unknown of the Libertarian Party in order to have some hope for change? Or can I pursue change, with a reasonable hope of getting it, through a party so deeply embedded in the political "game" as the Lib Dems?

In 1745 David Hume suggested that one day we may come to the conclusion that our current system of government needs complete overhaul. I for one have reached that point. And David Hume's prescription in the "Idea of the Perfect Commonwealth" seems to me to be vastly superior to the decrepit institutions and structures we currently have to endure. I'm not sure any of the current setup is salvageable. That current setup is coercive, corrupt and centralized. It is now clear, more than ever before, as Rousseau said, "The English think they are free. They are free only during the election of members of parliament."

ID cards, the surveillance state, the lost war on drugs, the uneven playing field allowing monopolization and exploitation, drinking on the tube, detention without charge, foreign wars in support of oil hungry allies, petty bureaucrats spying on our every move, raiding our bins, taxing us through the nose. Is this what J S Mill was suggesting? Our parliamentary system was created in times when communications were difficult. Yet even then they took less power to themselves than now, when we are all a phone call or internet connection away from forging links with millions of other individuals on this planet.

The time has come for mutualism instead of representative government. People getting together either locally or in geographically dispersed interest groups focussing on particular problems in those communities. Refusing to accept that all the answers can come from a clunking fist in London or his puppets in the Town Hall.

But how do we do that, without turning spin into revolution?