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 -
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.
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.
4 comments:
When was the last time that several cabinet members resigned over a point of principle? Asquith's cabinet of 1914?
dearieme - I don't know if it was the last time, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't. Boris lost quite a few, but of course that wasn't a point of principle. It could be worth looking up the history of cabinet resignations over a point of principle.
The party system will inevitably lead to blatant lying as people back their own side and denigrate the others. It's why at times of severe crisis the public often call for a "government of national unity" and suchlike.
But avoiding those lies seems to lead to some sort of centrist technocracy, where power is virtually unopposed. That's even more terrifying.
It's a bit like the adversarial system in law, where we currently pay a fortune to have someone misrepresent facts in our favour, and our opponent does the same. It's very ugly, but the alternative is the state acting as sole investigator, and every trial becomes a mini public enquiry.
Sam - yes, we need some level of adversarial politics, but the current state of affairs attracts people who are not suited to rational debate and just seem to prefer lying because it works. Voters are at least partly at fault for adopting the adversarial approach themselves, instead of behaving more like a jury.
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