baldysblog.co.uk

If you ask most people and regardless of their political affiliations, age, race, sex, or religion, what frustrates them most they will probably answer that they don’t feel that they are being listened to and nobody understands their concerns on any topic that impacts upon their personal life.

Now whilst it would be easy for me to pick on the awful Labour Governments of these past 11 years and the lick spittle meanness of so much of the legislation they have introduced that has poisoned the atmosphere in the UK, I cannot in all honesty say that it would have been very much different under a Government of a different political persuasion.

A Game of Imagine…

Although I am right of centre on most issues and do hope that David Cameron with a working majority will be our next Prime Minister come May 2010. If I am honest and conjure up a different “recent history” whereby in 1997 it was a Tory Government who came to power after years in the “wilderness”, would the “today” be very much different under a Tory Government that had been in power for 11 years and was looking distinctly “past its sell by date”?

Yes of course some things would have been different, no ban on fox hunting but broadly speaking, I suspect that by and large, not that much would be radically different today. Even a Tory PM under pressure from the awful Tory Europhiles like Ken Clarke and the usual Civil Service and Foreign Office suspects, would also have denied the British people their promised referendum.

It is not the political parties as such despite their being so out of touch with the electorate, there is a fundamental problem the seeds of which lie in the not so distant past but regardless of who you are, the problem is that none of us thinks that we are being “listened to”.

It Is Not Just within the UK

A classic recent example of people “not being listened to” is Gordon Brown’s refusal to hold to the Labour Party Manifesto promise and give the British People a Referendum on the EU Constitution/Lisbon Treaty. Now regardless of how people would vote, the simple fact was that a promise has been broken and the excuses given for this are unacceptable and obvious lies which politically will and has already damaged the Labour Party.

However, the damage that New Labour has inflicted on the body politic is far worse than many, journalists seem to comprehend. Parliament itself has lost the respect of the electorate right across the political spectrum with Speaker Martin, Blair, Brown and Derek Conway, John Lewis lists etc. being just “illustrations” through their actions to the public at large of a major disconnect between the inhabitants of the Westminster Village and the rest of us out here in the real world.

The “expenses claim” for Ed Balls and his wife Yvette Cooper, also a Cabinet Minister on £120k pa the same as her husband, is a combined £300,000 or roughly, £6,000 per week last year. With the economy going into reverse, house prices falling, fuel, food and interest rates rising, households with a combined income of £800 pw before tax and National Insurance might just find £6k per week in expenses, just that bit difficult to swallow as “reasonable”.

Even Presidents

Ultimately and although the EU will try to rail road them with a second vote, it was the Irish who saved the day with a big fat juicy NO, just as the French and Dutch had 3 years previously. Apparently and on hearing this, the French President was incandescent with rage towards the Irish which will do Sarkozy no good at all I suspect, bullying the Irish will be counter productive. But this little cameo illustrates the basic problem quite well. The EU was and always will be a carve up between France and Germany neither of whom could give a rats arse for any other country but even Presidents can’t get the answers they want.

However, whilst in many ways one can point to this sense of frustration and impotence not being purely a “British Problem”, how it has come about within the UK is of particular interest which may reflect the experience of other nations.

I would suggest that the real issue behind all of this is the combination of the expansion of the electoral base – those eligible to vote, combined with the death of deference to others based upon a class system. It was a chain of events that has resonated from 1918 right up until today and I will expand on this theme in my next essay.