Parliamentary Problems
Mar. 6th, 2006 10:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thessalianHas anyone seen this?
I found out about it via![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
draxar, who is surprised that there is no rioting in the streets over a Bill that essentially cuts Parliament out of the process of lawmaking. Under this Bill, ministers can take decisions made by Parliament and change them, provided that they don't raise taxes or create new crimes punishable by more than two years in jail. Anything under two years, though, is okay. And, as is pointed out by the guest contributor to the Times, this applies to the Bill itself, so that these two limitations could easily be changed with no Parliamentary debate or recourse. So the question is, if this thing is put into effect, what the fuck is the point of having a Parliament? Others are asking this too, calling it the Abolition of Parliament Bill. Of course, it's really called the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, but AoPB is more to the point.
The depressing thing is how little press it seems to have got. This made news in late February and I hadn't heard of it. Two weeks later and it's only just now getting an airing by the more politically minded of my LJ friends. The government is preparing to throw its democratic process entirely into the bin, and no one seems to care. Look, people go out and they vote for a Member of Parliament that they trust to speak for them on the issues that matter. That MP and the others debate matters and stand a chance of representing the majority view at least. So if this passes, people's political voices are essentially reduced to meaningless white noise as government does whatever the hell it wants. And nobody cares that this destroys the people's voice in government. This may well be because people do not believe that they have a voice in government. They've been trained out of it, more than ever in the last few years. Tony Blair stands up in Brighton and says, "I know the people have spoken, but really, you don't understand so I'll do what I want anyway", and people accept it.
For the love of all that's holy, people, think of what this could mean. Human Rights Bills don't apply to this thing. Do you want to see people going to jail for two years for peaceful political protest? Do you want to be saddled with whatever ID card technology they want to throw at you, however buggy and unreliable, and be forced to pay for it? Do you want things like the boy in Kent being fined £80 for saying the word 'fuck' in private conversation to be a regular occurrence, possibly with worse consequences? How much censorship do you want to risk?
Yeah, Parliament is a weird thing. Parliament seems, from the outside, to be a lot of grown men and women screaming and jeering at each other across a big room. Yes, I agree that it needs some work and some streamlining (maybe lose the screaming and jeering?). However, what it does not need is abolition, because it's all the voice the rest of us have in government. We need them as a sort of a buffer zone between us and a government that has proven not to give a good goddamn about our needs and desires, or indeed the benefit of the country as a whole. It's about time we start making our cogs in the government machine work for us and for themselves, or they're going to be reduced to meaningless cyphers and we're just going to be living in Orwell's nightmare.
The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill is going through Parliament right now. Those of you who live in England, write to your MP. Remind them of what this Bill could mean -- for them, for us, for everybody. Speak out; tell the world, or at least that part of it in which you live, that you do not want this, as loudly and eloquently as you can. Keep a lookout for news spots and anything else you can find on the subject, and keep talking about it. Don't let this stupid Bill be yet another horror that makes a sidebar on page 2 of the Metro and then disappears to be flagged up only as a fait accompli a few months later. It's about time we stood up and forced people to remember that a democratic government is by the people, for the people and as the people giveth, so can the people taketh away. We are not just numbers and Parliament is not just a bunch of grown men and women acting like small children and making our decisions for us. Nor are we stupid peons with the attention spans of goldfish -- or at least, we don't have to be.
If this keeps up, we're democracy's last hope. Let's short-circuit the destruction of the democratic ideal before it's too late.
I found out about it via
draxar, who is surprised that there is no rioting in the streets over a Bill that essentially cuts Parliament out of the process of lawmaking. Under this Bill, ministers can take decisions made by Parliament and change them, provided that they don't raise taxes or create new crimes punishable by more than two years in jail. Anything under two years, though, is okay. And, as is pointed out by the guest contributor to the Times, this applies to the Bill itself, so that these two limitations could easily be changed with no Parliamentary debate or recourse. So the question is, if this thing is put into effect, what the fuck is the point of having a Parliament? Others are asking this too, calling it the Abolition of Parliament Bill. Of course, it's really called the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, but AoPB is more to the point.The depressing thing is how little press it seems to have got. This made news in late February and I hadn't heard of it. Two weeks later and it's only just now getting an airing by the more politically minded of my LJ friends. The government is preparing to throw its democratic process entirely into the bin, and no one seems to care. Look, people go out and they vote for a Member of Parliament that they trust to speak for them on the issues that matter. That MP and the others debate matters and stand a chance of representing the majority view at least. So if this passes, people's political voices are essentially reduced to meaningless white noise as government does whatever the hell it wants. And nobody cares that this destroys the people's voice in government. This may well be because people do not believe that they have a voice in government. They've been trained out of it, more than ever in the last few years. Tony Blair stands up in Brighton and says, "I know the people have spoken, but really, you don't understand so I'll do what I want anyway", and people accept it.
For the love of all that's holy, people, think of what this could mean. Human Rights Bills don't apply to this thing. Do you want to see people going to jail for two years for peaceful political protest? Do you want to be saddled with whatever ID card technology they want to throw at you, however buggy and unreliable, and be forced to pay for it? Do you want things like the boy in Kent being fined £80 for saying the word 'fuck' in private conversation to be a regular occurrence, possibly with worse consequences? How much censorship do you want to risk?
Yeah, Parliament is a weird thing. Parliament seems, from the outside, to be a lot of grown men and women screaming and jeering at each other across a big room. Yes, I agree that it needs some work and some streamlining (maybe lose the screaming and jeering?). However, what it does not need is abolition, because it's all the voice the rest of us have in government. We need them as a sort of a buffer zone between us and a government that has proven not to give a good goddamn about our needs and desires, or indeed the benefit of the country as a whole. It's about time we start making our cogs in the government machine work for us and for themselves, or they're going to be reduced to meaningless cyphers and we're just going to be living in Orwell's nightmare.
The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill is going through Parliament right now. Those of you who live in England, write to your MP. Remind them of what this Bill could mean -- for them, for us, for everybody. Speak out; tell the world, or at least that part of it in which you live, that you do not want this, as loudly and eloquently as you can. Keep a lookout for news spots and anything else you can find on the subject, and keep talking about it. Don't let this stupid Bill be yet another horror that makes a sidebar on page 2 of the Metro and then disappears to be flagged up only as a fait accompli a few months later. It's about time we stood up and forced people to remember that a democratic government is by the people, for the people and as the people giveth, so can the people taketh away. We are not just numbers and Parliament is not just a bunch of grown men and women acting like small children and making our decisions for us. Nor are we stupid peons with the attention spans of goldfish -- or at least, we don't have to be.
If this keeps up, we're democracy's last hope. Let's short-circuit the destruction of the democratic ideal before it's too late.