The ability to charm is a part of the stock in trade of politicians, but are they representative of those thy claim to speak up for?

Tony Blair had charm in abundance, with his ready smile and his talk of change and progress. Until his credibility was fatally damaged by his messianic support for George Bush and the Iraq war, he had an enthralled public eating out of his hand.

Rather than fly in the face of a lifetime’s experience, surely the test of any leader or political party is whether they actually change anything for the better, and are representative of those who elect them to power.

Take our next prime minister in waiting for example.

David Cameron’s roots are hardly representative of 21^st century Britain. The son of a stockbroker, he went to an exclusive prep school whose intake included the Princes Edward and Andrew, as well as John Paul Getty’s grandson.

After Eaton, up to Oxford, where he was a prominent member of the Bullingdon club, the primary purpose of which was to get drunk and look down on their state school contemporaries.

Then a stint at the Conservative research department, followed by a job as a PR adviser to the boss of Carlton TV, before being elected as MP for the safe seat of Witney.

His total life experience is limited to Westminster and the media. Hardly the qualifications required for the country’s next first minister.

On the other side of the political spectrum, no one seriously pretends that most Labour MP’s come from the class they claim to speak for.

Forget about the political circus and the charm school. Back to the orignal question. Are the leaders we elect to parliament through the party system really representative of society?

To judge by their background and experience, the answer must surely be no.

Why are our party leaders so mealy-mouthed and spineless in dealing with corrupt MP’s who’ve ripped off the public purse?

So far, a pair of disgraced Labour MP’s have been suspended by the party machine, and another disposable junior minister has stepped down. David Cameron has got shot of an aide, and obtained assurances from a handful of greedy backbenchers that they won’t stand again for re-election.

What’s wrong with giving all the miscreants their P45’s and telling them not to report back for work?

The plain fact is so many of them have defied the expenses rules, that our Mother of Parliaments would be decimated if the justice meted out to us lesser mortals were to apply to the political classes.

Just watch Messrs Brown and Cameron duck (if you pardon the pun) the real problem. Our system of government - elected dictatorship - has been exposed as rotten to the core. And the party leaders have a continued vested interest in leaving things as they are. Once elected, they will quickly forget about fundamental constitutional reform, and return to their ideological bunkers.

Rather than have an election and put the very same people and system back in place, we need a referendum on fundamental constitutional reform, so that the party stranglehold of sycophants and career politicians that dominates British politics is broken once and for all.

What we need is fewer MP’s, an elected House of Lords to help curb the power of the executive, proportional representation to reflect the real interests of the people, a public selection system for candidate MP’s, and leaders with guts and determination to clean up the mess they have bequeathed us.

And when do we want a the referendum? We want it now!

Where has the season of goodwill gone?

Last week, a quintet of Anglican bishops set about the Government calling it ‘morally corrupt,’ and ‘beguiled by money.’

But the real villains of the piece showed their hands a few days later.

The British Chambers of Commerce, representing a swath of penny-pinching bosses, called for a suspension in the national minimum wage.

It may not have escaped everyone’s notice, but it is always those who earn stratospherically more than poverty pay that are the most vociferous in championing its suspension or abolition.

Some of the biggest companies in the land exploit two million low skilled vulnerable workers. These companies, mainly in service, catering and hospitality sectors, are not exactly strapped for cash. They make substantial profits by paying their workforce the equivalent of third-world wages.

The current minimum wage is set so abysmally low, that the taxpayer is compelled to hand out millions in tax credits to subsidise the payrolls of shameless Scrooge firms. Distributing a fair share of profits to their workforce is not remotely on their radar.

What amounts to punishing the poor for the mistakes and avarice of the wealthy, looks suspiciously like a hefty dose of moral corruption. The bishop’s may have got the goodwill message right, but perhaps some of the targets are much closer to home.

 

Clearly the nation’s politicos have nothing better to do than whip up a fervour of synthetic outrage about the cops arresting one of their own.

House prices and the pound are dropping like a stone, thousands are being thrown out of work, homes are being repossessed at rate not seen sine the early 90’s, and millions are struggling to cope with the rising cost of life’s essentials.

Whether the police were constitutionally right to enter Parliament without a warrant and arrest a serial whistle blower is of little interest to the majority of citizens.

To most people, MP Damian Green’s arrest is his comeuppance for engaging in the politically irrelevant ‘blame game’ culture that increasingly passes for debate in the House of Commons.

But there is a serious underlying issue that has gone over the heads of our politically polarised national press.

Ever since speaker Lenthall defied King Charles the 1^st and refused to assist in the arrest of 4 MP’s who dared to get up the monarch’s nose, Britain, and the political classes have had an ambivalent approach to liberty and the rights of the individual citizen.

350 years’ ago Charles lost his head in tussle to decide who held the ultimate power in the land. But the resulting bloody civil war, The Glorious Revolution of 1688, the Bill of Rights of 1689, and the Act of settlement of 1701, transformed our nation’s relationship with its rulers.

What it did for the rest of us remains another matter. MP’s got their Bill of Rights insulating them from the exercise of arbitrary power, but the people were literally left to go hang.

But since the evolution of modern political parties, the real threat to the supremacy of Parliament has instead come from a powerful executive, able to manipulate MP’s through whips, promises of career enhancement, and patronage.

True, our rights concerning free speech, assembly, liberty, religion, etc are enshrined in common law, having filtered down across the centuries. But our rulers saw to it they never passed on their binding statutory right to liberty they had attained for themselves.

As a consequence they could be taken away overnight, or more likely eroded by our parliamentarians using terrorism or civil unrest as their excuse.

This is of course already happening. None of us can be complacent, and we certainly cannot wait on the pleasure of our MP’s to guarantee our fundamental rights. They’ve collectively done nothing about it for 350 years, so why break the habit of a lifetime?

Fortunately, we do have something resembling a Bill of Rights, which has curbed some of the excesses of arbitrary executive power. The European Convention on Human Rights is in effect a second-best back-door guarantee that the citizen’s liberties are respected.

MP’s debating their own self-seeking parliamentary interests at a time when the nation is facing a monumental worldwide economic downturn is conspicuously irrelevant.

If they really are concerned with rights, let them look to giving us the same copper-bottomed guarantee Mr. speaker Lenthall helped them win for themselves all those years ago.

Nothing epitomised the vitality of New Labour more than Tony Blair’s oft repeated soundbite: ‘Education, Education, Education…

To voters weary of the Thatcher and Major years, it struck a chord that gave them hope for a promised new world. A world released from the shackles of the ‘nasty party,’ self-interest, and sleaze.

Higher education, the familiar stomping ground of the rich and privileged, would be opened up to the many.

It was not new of course. Blair’s predecessor, Harold Wilson, struck a similar chord in the 1960’s with his ‘White heat of technology’ mantra. Labour would lead Britain to commanding new heights, by educating the young in the ways of science and scientific developments.

How far these promises fell short of reality was exposed at the end of November.

The Royal Society of Chemistry expressed alarm at the dumbing-down of school science examinations, risking a ‘catastrophic shortage’ of skilled workers. Scientists said that the lack of rigour in the GCSE examinations, aided by a culture of ‘teaching to the test,’ was destroying teenagers’ thinking and problem solving skills.

Britain’s top bosses agree. They have been saying for years that the standards of basic numeracy and literacy have been going backwards.

The experience of UK companies across a wide range of sectors is that too many school-leavers enter the employment market with almost nothing to offer potential employers. This is backed up by the fact that more than half of our teenagers do not achieve A-C grades in five GCSE’s, including English and mathematics.

Earlier in the year, a telling survey of 250 admission tutors conducted on behalf of Oxford University and the Universities and College Admission Service, found many students could not spell, were unable to write in sentences, and their elementary mathematics were not up to standard.

The Director General of the British Chambers of Commerce, David Frost, is on record as saying that large numbers of students emerge from university with huge debts, poor degrees, and no lifestyle skills for work.

He believes we need more graduates in science, languages, and technology, not ‘soft’ relatively easy subjects that are no use to a knowledge based economy.

In the late 1960’s and 70’s when only about 6 per cent of the population went to university, possession of a degree was the mark of a mature educated individual.

Now the boom in the new universities following New Labour’s drive for more tertiary education, has led to the creation of some degree courses, which would have been more suitable for elementary first-year night school classes.

The low regard in which many new universities are held, seems to explain why the Association of Graduate Recruiters claims it rarely expects to receive sufficient applications from graduates with the correct skills.

Poor spelling, inadequate knowledge of grammar, and low mathematical attainment, means many graduates often require constant supervision.

This surely is sufficient evidence that our education system is dysfunctional, and lets our young people down. A process driven by political correctness, social engineering, and more concerned with statistical presentation than delivering real achievement and excellence.

So much for New Labour’s education, education, education…

When newsreader Michael Buerke once complained it’s a woman’s world, one of the targets he had in mind was the portrayal of men in TV commercials.

Buerke believed that images of men behaving stupidly are a tired cliché. He’s fed-up with guys always shown as oafish beer-swigging sex maniacs, tramping over newly-cleaned kitchen floors in muddy boots.

Men watching football while downing endless pints of ice-cold lager, or drenching themselves in anti-perspirants to make them irresistibly attractive to the fair sex, are a perennial TV stereotype.

But the truth is in the advertising world, women don’t have it all their own way either.

As advertisers struggle to persuade us to buy new products, change brands, or splash out on a spending spree, pigeonholing the sexes and every-day situations is their secret weapon.

With the television advertising industry on a mission to sell us everything from tee-shirts to tampons, its small wonder that so many commercials set out to catch our attention by parodying people that don’t resemble anyone we know.

Selling products by using images is as old as the hills, but how is it that in the world of TV commercials elderly relatives never suffer from senility, and mums are often harassed but never depressed, unable to cope?

Can it be even remotely true that all men are inherently lazy and slobbish, but all women are innately industrious and sophisticated?

Do we really buy the ridiculous assertion that clothes only come out of washing machines, or anyone at home in the afternoons is in desperate need of a secured loan or a personal pension plan?

And stretching imagination to its ultimate limit, why are women invariably typecast in an endless battle with their weight, because without exception they’re enjoying spectacularly successful careers?

According to the advertisers, both men and women find driving deeply pleasurable, never stressful or boring, and all modern men, own a cat.

 

When it comes to daily chores, cleaning products miraculously remove even stubborn stains in one sweep of a cloth. Men are always left with baby-smooth skin after razors glide over two days’ stubble, and lipstick never comes off.

But commercials are not just guilty of stretching product credibility beyond belief. Many border on the bizarre.

Surely only the advertising industry presumes we are naive enough to accept that babies have serious conversations with each other about the relative merits of their nappies, or the most important application of science is to make hair shiny, and smooth out wrinkles.

Arguably the final insult to our intelligence is that women are unable to remove their glasses without shaking their hair down in slow motion, and men will skip sex in order to watch football or drink beer.

As far as the TV advertisers are concerned we’re all so incredibly hung up with image and bored out of our brains, that they can safely continue to depict us with absolute reliance on repeatedly regurgitated banalities.

Perhaps Beurke was right after all. The pressure on the advertising agencies to keep the cash tills ringing inevitably leads to hackneyed conceptions about men – and women.

In TV commercials men will continue to behave badly, and women who constantly fret about their appearance or have exciting careers, will come out on top. Real people who behave normally simply don’t exist.

 

When I was a kid my favourite party game was 'pass the parcel.'

If you were caught holding the package when the music stopped, your were expected to partake in a seriously ego busting forfeit designed to make you look lower than a snake's belly.

Not politicaly correct perhaps, but a ploy still used by politicians to influence voters about where to put their cross on the ballot paper.

Most people surely realise that the 'blame game' is merely a sterile exercise in playground politics. But MP's and comitted party activists swear by its effectiveness.

Ex Prime Minister Blair was not nicknamed 'Teflon Tony' for nothing. And non-stick Cameron is boldly carrying on the tradition from where Ducan Smith, Michael Howard, and 'save the pound' Hague left off. 

Take the current financial crisis for example. According the the opposition front bench, it's nothing to do with greedy bankers, financial deregulation, or even a rapacious public insulated from financial responsibility by injudicious lending.

 

No, no. It's all the Government's fault.

 

This particular blame game would be much more more convincing if Cameron et al had been shouting warnings of impending recessionary doom from the rafters of the House of Commons. 20/20 hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Admittedly it takes a brave politician to knock down a house of cards when joe public is being handed the banker's equivalent of a royal flush. But neither side of the political divide is deterred from the quick fix of influencing public perception, rather than reality. 

Perhaps the ultimate in the blame game genre is not at Westminster, but in the corridors of the EU Council of Ministers in Brussels.

It's here where elected politicians from the 27 member states of the EU get together, in secret, and agree on the shape of Directives which they will foist on their unsuspecting citizens.

No sooner than they get back home, they're blaming the Europe for everything they'd previously agreed behind closed doors, feeding a media frenzy about unaccountable, and barmy bumptious bureaucrats.

Passing the parcel may be an old party game, but it's devotees know it works. The trouble with our political classes is that far from deflating their pneumatic egos, it only spurs them on to ever more playground politics.





 

Tucked away amidst the skyscrapers of downtown Philadelphia, is a small redbrick building with an imposing spire on top.

Inside, the rooms are spartan, furnished with wooden tables and hardback chairs reminicent of a 19th century school room.

It was here in Independence Hall that the founding fathers of the United States of America declared that 'all men are equal.' You can almost feel their ghostly presence, as they feverishly thrashed out one of history's most famous texts.

Three hundred and thirty two years' later, with the election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States, their noble aspiration has finally become a reality.

President Lincoln echoed the Declartion of Independence in his short but evocative Gettysburg Address. 

The words carved into the marble of his imposing Washington DC memorial, commemorate one of the bloddiest episodes in American history. A war with the confederate southern states that killed more Americans than in all their wars to date, and ultimately cost him his life.

It was slavery that tore the nation apart. As little as 30 years ago segregation of the races was still an accepted way of life for many African American citizens.

Next January there will be a black American in the White House.

That it's taken America so long, and cost so many lives to rid itself of the prejudice of inequality, has been an indelible stain on the national character.

On Tuesday November 4th 2008 the stain was finally erased. Thomas Jefferson and the founding fathers would be proud of every American who cast their ballot for their first black president.

The troubled ghosts of Liberty Hall have finally been exorcised.