Hanwell Systems

England is the country of the Party System, and it has always been chiefly run by public-school men. Is there anyone out of Hanwell who will maintain that the Party System, whatever its conveniences or inconveniences, could have been created by people particularly fond of truth?

G. K. Chesterton - What's Wrong With the World (1910)

 
Hanwell -

Lying to the west of the River Brent and so actually in the precinct of Norwood Green, the Middlesex County Lunatic Asylum was commonly referred to as the Hanwell Asylum because it was closer to the centre of Hanwell than either Norwood or Southall.

As Chesterton wrote over a century ago, the UK political party system has not served us well. It is not only leaders who fail but the party system itself. Political parties cannot do veracity, they cannot provide honest political oversight of the machinery of government. They promise but can’t deliver.

What’s the answer? To begin with, only believers in systems have clearly defined answers and implied guarantees. Unfortunately political system failures and the failure of those guarantees all appear to have similar root causes - human behaviour is easily corrupted. No system is safe from that.

We are not only suffering from the breakdown of our democratic system, we are suffering from crimes, broken political promises, official lies, crowded cities and so on. That’s human behaviour coupled with weak political oversight.

Party politicians know they can’t fix it, but they are comparatively free to lie about it. So they do what they are comparatively free to do, not what they can’t do. Hanwell systems are easier.