"A Crisis of Trust".

With the passing of Stuart Wheeler yesterday I was reminded of The Bruges Group's 78 page publication he wrote back in 2010 called "A Crises of Trust" which highlighted the extent of the MPs 'Expenses Scandal' of which he was rightly extremely critical of MPs from all parties but was especially condemning of David Cameron and Michael Gove.

Just as a reminder this man holds the record for the largest donation to a political party when he donated £5 million to the Conservative Party in 2001. In 2009 he was expelled from the party after announcing he would be making a large donation to UKIP for the forthcoming European elections.He was you can gather a staunch Eurosceptic.

In the final paragraph of his booklet he wrote :-

"The case for having MPs at all is that they are there to test the executive. To do this, we need MPs who do not see being in parliament as a career, who do not see life in the Commons as merely an extension of life in civil service with added television appearances, and who see virtue in being independent of their parties, in being able to excercise their own judgement, and in not being beholden for their livelihoods to their party leaders. These are the MPs whom we can trust to give their first allegiance to their constituents. Please let us have more of them".

 More independently minded MPs is the primary aim of our third demand 'A Separation of Power' which calls for the executive(Government) to be separated from the legislature (Parliament).

A further check on our MPs would be covered in our second demand 'Real Local Democracy' as it would allow each constituency to hold their politicians to account by setting up recall procedures should they so desire and even set their individual levels of pay and expenses.

Only being able to hold our elected officials to account during periodic but infrequent elections is not 'Real' democracy.