It’s because he has been generally heralded as a great
constituency and parliamentarian that my thoughts turned to what the role of
our MPs actually should be and what they are paid to do?
Whether he was that upstanding, as there is an increasing
amount of evidence that he wasn’t, is not for this post to cover.
Something which I doubt many MPs understand is that their
official role is both to make laws and to scrutinize the Executive or
Government.
It is because they have moved so far away from their primary
role and become quasi social workers to their constituents that our governance
is so lamentable as evident by the many bad laws rush through parliament on the
‘something must be done’ basis.
The reality is most constituents’ problems and concerns
could be solved by local councillors or Citizens Advice offices but the later
are very stretched having been reduced from 1074 in their heyday to around 316
today. This reduction was as the result of government cuts with little long
term thinking about the consequences.
Implicit in our Second Demand 'Real Local Democracy' is that
our national MPs would only concentrate on the issues of national importance
such as Defence, Home and Foreign Affairs and of course the overall budget for
the country. In their reduced role, concentrating on national issues, there is
absolutely no reason why MPs should have to work every day of the week and
indeed secondary employment would be encouraged, giving every MP a much broader
outlook. Also, in such a way would their work life balance be improved.
Meanwhile local politicians, in a much-enhanced role, would
take care of all local issues on a county basis with the powers to raise taxes
a proportion of which would be sent up to Westminster to finance central
government. This is of course a complete reversal of our current system where
central government largely controls local government expenditure.
Interestingly my county of Somerset with a population of
560,631 is served by 55 County Councillors and, over four Districts, 214
District Councillors. That’s a total councillor count of 269 which gives you
one councillor to 2084 citizens. Albeit councillors are currently part-time I
really do wonder what they actually do but with a complete overhaul of local
government and a greater role their value and worth would be enhanced.
Given the current thinking is that MPs should do constituency
work it should be noted that around 200 MPs, by being either government ministers
or Shadow front benchers, have responsibilities that take their focus from
their constituencies. Our second demand clearly address this point as well.
THA is also very clear with enhanced local government and
MPs concentrating on national issues we do not need 650 and could easily reduce
the number to around 400. That would mean there was one MP for every 167,000
people which compares to 750,000 for each member of the USA House of
Representatives.
The Executive or Cabinet would, under our third demand ‘A
Separation of Power’, be separated from parliament along with all other ‘ministers’
thus leaving parliament free to hold them to account.
In addition to the reductions in the House of Commons the
House of Lords, renamed The UK Senate, could also be reduced from 788 to around
300 with a third each appointed, elected and selected by sortition.
THA's demands set out a whole new way to govern this country
in which the 'People' have real power, local politicians become important
figures making real decisions and dealing with constituents’ issues thus
leaving national politicians to concentrate on the key issues of State.
As Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa wrote in his novel The Leopard "everything
needs to change, so everything can stay the same"