52 per cent is more than 48 per cent - get used to it

We Brexiteers or, as we used to be known, Eurosceptics are, according to a good many Remainers are stupid, ignorant and have a very low IQ. In fact, we are all bears of very little brain. Somehow we all seem to have grasped one elementary fact that not all Remainers have and that is that 52 per cent is more than 48 per cent. Or, in other words, if 52 per cent voted on the Leave side, that side won and that is the policy that will have to be put into effect.

This was certainly not understood by the marchers in London on Saturday who were shouting we are the 48% and other suchlike interesting facts. Yes, you are, and that makes you the minority in a referendum of fairly high turn-out. It's not quite clear whether the march really did have tens of thousands as the original story was just thousands but it seemed to improve with the telling of it.

“Un-Fuck My Future”, “No Brex Please, We’re British”, they read. Pictures of Whitney Houston with “I Will Always Love EU”, “Europe Innit” and “I wanna be deep inside EU”. “All EU Need Is Love”, “Fromage not Farage”, “Eton Mess” and, more seriously, “Science Needs EU”. “Hell no, we won’t go!” they shouted, rounding Piccadilly Circus.

At the end of the march, in Parliament Square, protesters listened to speakers including Bob Geldof and Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker as well as politicians such as the Labour MP David Lammy, and Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron.

Geldof urged Remain campaigners to take to the streets, speak to their neighbours and work to stop the UK’s exit from the EU. “Let’s get real,” he said. “Going online and tweeting your indignation is only venting into the ether. It achieves nothing. Come out. Take action among your friends, work colleagues and in your neighbourhoods. We need to individually organise ourselves. Organise those around us and do everything possible within our individual power to stop this country being totally destroyed.” .

Cocker, in a recorded a video message for the rally, held up a world map saying: “You cannot deny geography. The UK is in Europe.”

The co-organiser Mark Thomas said the march was to address the “anger, frustration and need to do something”. “We would accept the result of the referendum if it was fought on a level playing field. But it was full of misinformation and people need to do something with their frustration.”

The list of speakers and their comments tells you all you need to know about this bunch of sore losers. Jarvis Cocker? Bob Geldof? These are the political geniuses of the movement? Do they even understand what they are saying, what they are advocating? Going on the streets to stop the democratic process is something Europe has seen before and it was not a healthy time. And, yes, as a matter of fact, I would say the same if, as expected, the Remain side had won. I expect the other side would not have been all that interested about the misinformation given out by both campaigns or about the percentage if that had happened.

A fine mess we would be in if elections were annulled because politicians, winning or losing, had misinformed he electorate. We would do nothing but have elections, elections, elections.

Take Hizonner the Mayor, for instance, who has done little except make meaningless statements about matters outside his control (no, Mr Mayor, you cannot detach London from the UK) and participate in selfies like a demented teenagers. His campaign was run mostly on the unarguable facts that his father had been a bus driver and he had grown up on a council estate. Unarguable but, I should have thought, irrelevant. Occasionally he made statements about making London a world city and a hub for just about everything as well as a centre for tolerance blah-blah-blah. London already is most of those things and is not going to change because Hizonner the Mayor. The one definite promise he made was to freeze TfL fares. Within a couple of weeks of his election he admitted that he could not do that fully and tried to weasel out by specious arguments. A good many people were annoyed. But did this invalidate his election? Well, speaking as someone who would never, in a million years, vote for that numpty I have to point out that no, it did not. Nobody even suggested it.

Social networks are full of people who have been posting links of varying importance to prove that the Brexit vote was wrong and should be annulled. In fact, it ought not to have happened because, obviously people who voted Leave are all stupid, ignorant etc etc. See above.

In a way, it is understandable why so many Remainers are demanding the annulment of a perfectly valid referendum vote, which had been called because of a promise in the Conservative manifesto that helped them to win the election. This does not apply to the majority of Remain voters but those who are getting hysterical now are clearly supporters of the anti-democratic nature of that organization. It is hardly surprising that their attitude should be anti-democratic as well.

Some opinion poll now tells us that 7 per cent of those who voted Leave would now vote Remain and 3 per cent of those who voted Remain would now vote Leave. I have no doubt the same opinion poll had predicted a Remain victory and a Coalition as the likely outcome of last year's General Election.

The young people are particularly upset, apparently, because 70 per cent of them voted Remain and now they do not know what to do except that Germany might offer them special EU passports so they can go on working across the EU. Since we do not as yet know what kind of arrangements will be made about labour rights this seems rather premature. Even sillier is the comment made by German vice chancellor and economy minister Sigmar Gabriel:

It’s a good sign that the youth of Great Britain are more clever than their bizarre political elite.

As it happens, most of the political elite were on the Remain side. As to the young voting on that side, that, too, is questionable. There has been a great deal of debate about turn-out according to age but even the estimates most anxious to prove that the "young" did turn out in large numbers to vote Remain have had to admit that the number of those voting tended to be considerably lower than average in areas where the population age is lower. That makes the famous 70 per cent who voted to remain a somewhat misleading figure.

In an earlier post I expressed the view that our side missed a great opportunity by not concentrating on the fact that the young are or should be looking out beyond the EU to the rest of the world. I still think that but I am also rather amused by the closed-minded lack of imagination of those young who are weeping about their "future having been taken away from them by the old" because there is, apparently, nothing beyond the EU. Are these really the people we ought to be listening to?

So where are we? Lots of Remainers still screaming about the need to overcome democratic decisions if they do not go the way the right-thinking people want them; various discussions about whether Article 50 should be activated or whether it would be better to start negotiations around that; no Armageddon and most economic indicators moving in a positive direction; a number of countries expressing interest in trade agreements with post-Brexit UK and chaos in the political parties.

Nigel Farage's resignation (presumably for longer than three days this time) has simply added extra spice to the brew - after all UKIP was important only during the Brexit campaign. Astonishingly, the party that has succumbed to a civil war, between the parliamentary party and the membership, was not the Conservative but the Labour Party and we are being provided with a great deal of entertainment. The Conservatives are indulging in their favourite pastime of ferocious fighting for the top job not to be resolved till September. To be fair, it would not be possible to start negotiations with the rest of the EU till then, anyway, because slowly but surely Brussels and the rest of Europe will close down for summer.

Meanwhile, in between watching the entertainment we, bears of little brain, must start putting together ideas for the negotiators. They might listen.

A counter blast to people's will and blind faith in "the people"

I was reading a review of Shami Chakrabarti's recent book, which, apparently equates freedom and rightness with whatever she seems to think is right, including advice to the Leveson inquiry that there should be some control over the media (or some of it, anyway, though certainly not the Grauniad).

The reviewer then quoted the author of the original On Liberty, John Stuart Mill:

Protection against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs to be protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development… of any individuality not in harmony with its ways.

Or, in other words, just because the demos wants something at any given time it is not a sign of democracy to make that opinion law.

Odd concepts are emerging in British politics

Back in the days of the numerous People's Democracies and People's Republics (one or two of which are still with us) it would have seemed bizarre to envisage a time when similar concepts would be used by a political party that claims to be serious (i.e. not one of the numerous Communist, Stalinist, Trotskyite entities) but that is exactly what has been happening. Yes, indeed, I am once again referring to our friends in UKIP or as they sometimes decribe themselves, the People's Army. Presumably, even their political strategists (a.k.a. friends and drinking cronies of the Dear Leader, Nigel Farage) shied away from the People's Liberation Army. Even without that, the naming is not, in my opinion, a happy one.

The people's this and the people's that figure largely in UKIP's pronouncements. One can only assume that knowledge of recent history is not required by its Central Committee NEC.

Not so long ago (about a week or so) I saw comments about UKIP being unique in British politics in that its policies are for the people and are created with the people in mind. I could not help recalling the great Louis Armstrong's comment in response to some dumb-fool question as to what he thought about folk songs and folk music (a big concept in popular political music in the 1960s: "All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song." For whom do other parties create policies? Horses? Dogs? Pandas? Nightingales, perhaps, though that appears to be a UKIP policy, as Mr Mark Reckless has realized.

However, the most frightening term that has emerged recently and is being used by supporters and quasi-supporters of UKIP is the People's Will. UKIP, apparently, represents the People's Will, unlike the other parties. The argument that the other parties still get more votes than UKIP is irrelevant here because the People's Will is not to be measured in votes or support by individuals.

The history of the term is sinister. Its origin is the concept of the General Will, made popular by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and used to devastating effect by the Jacobins in the French Revolution until the General Will was turned against them. The most important and to tyrannical rulers most useful aspect of the General Will or the People's Will is that there is no appeal from it: there is nothing higher either in the state or in political morality. What the General Will or the People's Will (or, let us be clear, the Working Class) wants and requires is absolute and is to be imposed on all. It is the complete denial of democracy, which is based (however we define the details) on the concepts of individual rights, duties and liberties. Or, as far greater people than I said: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happines, all of which is denied by the concept of the General or the People's Will.

The most famous or, rather, infamous group that called itself the People's Will was a Russian terrorist organization whose greatest or, rather, worst achievement was the assassination of Alexander II on March 1, 1881 as he was about to sign a limited constitutional document, thus setting Russia's political development back by a number of decades. In fact, one could argue that the country never recovered fully from this set-back.

The expression works better in Russian as Народная воля (Narodnaya Volya) means both People's Will and People's Liberty. As it happens the group had no interest in anybody's liberty as their political, economic and social ideas were almost as oppressive as the ones imposed on that unhappy country by the Bolsheviks. Lenin was contemptuous of the idea of individual terrorism but that does not mean he disliked other aspects of the People's Will. Not least, he agreed with them and with such theoreticians as Pyotr Thachev about the need of a closely knit organization at the head of the revolutionary movement and, subsequently, the state that would interpret the People's Will (or the Will of the Working Class) with complete disregard for individual members of the People or the Working Class.

Could it be that UKIP political strategists do not know anything about this? Not anything?

Democracy

I have just read a collection of essays by Adam Michnik, a man I admire enormously: an historian, a dissident who was imprisoned in Poland, a thinker and somebody who, after the fall of Communism, decided not to fall into the trap of becoming a politician but took on the editorship of Gazeta Wyborcza, though he is now a less than active Editor-in-Chief.

Before I get attacked (something that has not happened for a little while about which I am a little peeved) for talking about politics being a trap, let me point out that in my opinion politics is essential and, sadly, politicians are needed but experience tells one that intellectuals, particularly "public" intellectuals make rotten politicians and tend to incline towards personal authoritarianism.

His latest collection is called The Trouble with History and, having been published first in the Gazeta Wyborcza, has now been translated into English. To some extent it is disappointing: the political essays are of great interest but the historic ones, which seem to be an obsessive analysis of Stendhal and his disgust with post-revolutionary and post-Napoleonic France made me recall how often I have thought of Central European intellectuals as having a somewhat hysterical way of writing and dishevelled way of thinking.

Nevertheless, I do think that book contributes a good deal to our understanding of East European history in the last few decades and gives one food for thought on the subject of democracy and historic attitudes. As such I do recommend it to people. I should also like to know what Polish reaction was to the essays when they were first published. I can see that a few things Michnic writes may not have gone down particularly well with some of his readers.

Unusually I read the Foreword by James Davison Hunter and John M. Owen IV as well and was very glad I had done. Here are a couple of paragraphs from it that might interest people who do not think that democracy consists of elections and nothing else or that elections somehow create democracy.

... contemporary democratic politics can never be understood as only about the interests and actions of political economy or power alone. The moral and ethical dimension of modern democratic politics is intrinsic: not only impossible to disentangle from the actual actions and procedures of the state, but foundational to any government that calls itself democratic. Freedom, tolerance, hope, and respect for human dignity are not secondary, then but primary. As we witness among democratic revolutionaries everywhere, they matter absolutely. Such ideals have made it possible to endure not only the indignities and suffering impsoed by oppressive powers but also, often enough, the world's indifference to their struggle.

The conditions that make for vibrant democracies are fragile; all the more so in populations divided by wealth, race, ethnicity, religion, language, and tribe. Whatever else might be entailed, they require some minimal understandings of justice that are shared and binding across all differences. This is the foundation of any legitimacy a regime can hope for. But those understandings also have to be credibly and consistently approximated within its political institutions and practices. Without those shared commitments and credible enactments, constitutions will become hollow speech acts, emptied of authority and, in the end, a "parchment barrier" to tyranny. Democracy may retain certain formality, but the authority that underwrites it loses its humanizing constraints, leaving a political machinery capable of the crudest expressions of domination on behalf of some factional interests against others.

These are thoughts to be discussed as are some of Adam Michnic's subsequent ones, to which I shall return in other postings.

Goodness me, how generous

Apparently, the EU is suffering from "democratic legitimacy shortcomings". Gosh. No-one tells me anything. There I was thinking that the election for the Toy Parliament tomorrow was the acme of democracy and democratic legitimacy. Well, apparently, it ain't so. Or not much.

Anyway, Eva Kjer Hansen, Chairman of the European Affairs Committee of the Danish Parliament and formerly agriculture minister and social affairs minister has noticed this and decided to do something about it. She has come up with a proposal that, in her own words, the EU "can't refuse". Well, they probably can or, even more probably, they can accept it and turn it to their own advantage but who are we to blight Ms Hansen's eagerness to "restore" democratic legitimacy to the European project?

Let’s imagine that Europe’s national parliaments all had the right of initiative. Each member of a national parliament could go to his or her constituency and invite citizens to bring forward good ideas that could, if they have local, regional, national and pan-European support, be turned into EU legislation.

Right now, national parliaments can only obstruct European legislation by handing the Commission a “yellow card”. But why not let the EU’s national parliaments participate in the legislative process by issuing political opinions that EU institutions are obliged to take into account. Why not let national parliaments propose new initiatives just as the Council and the European Parliament can already do today?

Well, I am overwhelmed. You mean having taken away the right to legislate the EU should now hand back to the national parliaments the right to make proposals all by themselves that could be turned into EU legislation? That will give the EU democratic legitimacy? My word, there is a bold proposal. The odd thing about this article is that, apparently, Ms Hansen thinks that it really is a bold and controversial idea that many will criticize and in the second part of the article she goes to great lengths to justify and defend it.

The right to vote

Readers of this blog have noticed, no doubt, that I have not commented on the vote in the House of Commons yesterday. The main reason for that is that as far as I am concerned the only important news in this country of the last several days was the definite identification of Richard III's skeleton. Chris Huhne? Vicky Price? Who on earth cares or will remember them in a month's time let alone five and half centuries later?

Still, it is time to turn to matters nearer in time. Well, sort of, as I intend to go back to the seventeenth century in a minute.

I shall not discuss the rights and wrongs of same-sex marriage, being more interested in some of the other issues around it. Firstly, I should like to point out that the Bill has not been passed. It has merely had its Second Reading in the House of Commons and because of that MPs, as the Boss said,"MPs allowed (nay, encouraged) to vote". They usually vote on Second Reading but not necessarily in a general non-legislative debate. (Before we go any further, I should like to point out that the Lords very rarely divide on Second Reading, preferring to do so at the later stages. I have no doubt, that, too will be wrongly reported.)

The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill is now going to Committee stage. It will not be debated by the Committee of the Whole House but the Public Bill Committee, which has been instructed to present a report by March 12 or before. So far neither composition of the Committee nor the date of the sittings have been announced but there has hardly been time for such matters.

If you scroll about half-way down this page you will read the future programme for the Bill. It comes almost immediately below the vote on the substantive issue.

Why bother to go into these picky little details that are of little interest? Why not spend time roaming through the emotional and other arguments that surround this whole question? Why not follow up the hint given by the Boss in the same posting that this Bill is merely fulfilling obligations to our real government in Brussels? The last of these I shall follow up at some later stage but the other questions answer themselves. It is because people do not know or understand these picky details of parliamentary procedure that it is so easy for those who wish to undermine the process to do so. I am extremely weary of people who whoop with joy or dissolve into tragic tears because some controversial piece of legislation "has been passed" when it has had its Second Reading in one House or another.

This brings me rather neatly to the seventeenth century and an article in History Today by Philip Baker, co-editor of The Agreements of the People, the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution about the Levellers, possibly the first political organization in England that called for political rights and, particularly, the vote for all men.

There is a tendency among some political groups to claim the Levellers as their predecessors, often inappropriately. In particular the various Occupy movements whose main slogan seemed to be more control by the government which is the exact opposite of what the Levellers wanted, a move away from the gathering of power centrally that had been happening in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century.

The Levellers were what we might call on the Left of Cromwell's New Model Army and had a good deal of civilian support. They were, men and officers, well educated and could speak and write clearly and cogently. The Putney Debates of 1647 - 49 that followed the First Agreement of the People, that is the first attempt of a more or less democratic constitution are a pleasure to read. The fact that these took place at a time when the English language was at its most glorious heights, helps.

Among other matters under discussion was the question of universal male suffrage. The Levellers were not radical enough to extend this to women despite the relatively high level of education and political involvement among women of those groups.

Philip Baker quotes one of the best known officers of the group, Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, a vehement opponent of any deal with the King:

For really, I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it’s clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first, by his own consent, to put himself under that government.

That raises a number of issues, with which we are more familiar than the constitutional theoreticians of the seventeenth century were, quite apart from the question of women giving consent. What of the men who, having been given the right to consent to the government, that is to vote, refuse to do so or cannot quite be bothered? What of those who, having voted and whose candidate lost, then announce that the elected ones do not represent him? Does the mere voting indicate consent to the government? What of those, no doubt unthinkable individuals for Colonel Rainsborough, who vote not according to their conscience but according to what benefits they might receive?

In a way, Philip Baker shows the problems that lie within the admirable views of the Levellers, problems that we, some centuries later, have to face and are, apparently, unable to deal with.

Although the Agreements have long been lauded for their influence on modern constitutionalist debate, recent research has sought to relocate them within their immediate historical context. The result has been to shed important new light on their origins and influences, such as the way in which the everyday contemporary practice of oath swearing provided an important model for the attempt to reformulate the social contract through a literal agreement of the entire adult population. Meanwhile, the common perception of the Agreements as, in some sense, ‘forward-looking’ has been challenged on the grounds that it ignores the extent to which their authors were arguing for constitutional reformation and the restoration of historic, native birthright.

Closer study of the documents themselves also has much to tell us about contemporary perceptions of political life. For example, their desire to ensure greater political accountability can be related to the new freedom surrounding the reporting of parliamentary debates and investigative journalism and their revealing of corruption and factionalism. Similarly, their demand for the devolution of power to local communities was a clear reaction against the increasing centralisation and growth of ‘big government’ that was an intrinsic feature of the Civil War period but can be traced back to earlier decades, too. The corollary of decentralisation was the notion of political participation and active citizenship that lay at the heart of the Agreements. This was clearly seen as being central to political life, both in terms of the duty incumbent on the individual to serve in local office and the need for the collective and continuous oversight of those holding public positions of trust. In this fashion the Agreements combined successfully the language of civic responsibilities and duties with that of popular rights and liberties.

Our problem is (and this was foreseen by a number of post-Leveller political thinkers) that while we persist in using the language we have long ago lost the meaning; what might have worked for the few people Colonel Rainsborough really had in mind (would he really have accepted a freely voted in pro-Stuart government?) does not seem to work when spread across the many who find it difficult even to understand the very simple facts of Parliamentary procedure.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more

Henry V had it easy - he didn't have UKIP to deal with and, anyway, he would have known what to do with them. We, however, need to discuss them and their performance in politics, such as it is.

I am delighted to say that the Boss on EU Referendum has commented at length and very knowledgeably (here and here) on my previous posting. I shall, in due course, respond to some of the points made and to comments on this blog.

In the meantime, I should like to pick out just one aspect of the discussion because it has shown up on the EURef blog as well and has become a mantra among UKIPers and their supporters (of whom the Boss is definitely not one).

Whenever I pointed out that UKIP has now been in existence for twenty years, that it gets a great deal of media attention and that the political situation in this country and over the water ought to be immensely helpful I was reminded by people who are too lazy to check their facts that new parties need time. How long did it take the Labour Party to achieve anything?

Here is the answer to that question and I have produced it on other threads for the benefit of UKIP.

The Labour Party was formed in February 1900 and was first called the Labour Representation Committee. As such it sponsored fifteen candidates and won two seats in the election of October 1900. In 1903 there was a secret electoral pact between the LRC, represented by its Secretary, Ramsay Macdonald and the Liberal Party, represented by its Chief Whip, Herbert Gladstone. (The idea of an electoral pact has been discarded by the UKIP leadership but is, in any case, unlikely to be proposed by either of the big parties seriously.)

One outcome of the Lib-Lab Pact was that the LRC won 29 seats in the 1906 election, that is six years after it had been founded. The new MPs then formally adopted the name of the Labour Party. Despite the odd set-back the Labour Party managed to win 42 seats in the 1910 election, ten years after it had been founded.

The First World War produced a split in the party as it had produced one in most socialist parties across Europe between those who supported the war and those who opposed it. There were further splits and splinterings after the war and the revolutions in Russia. However, the Liberal Party emerged from the war rather battered as well, so the Labour Party managed to win 142 seats in 1922 and 191 in 1923, forming the first Labour government in 1924 with, admittedly, support from the Liberals. There is a more detailed history here.

Curiously enough, as soon as I produced some of these facts I was told by the same people who had been challenging me on the subject that it was irrelevant because the situation is completely different. Of course, it is different. It always is. For one thing, there is no major war being fought. Nevertheless, some similarities do exist.

We have an electorate, large parts of which feels disenfranchised and disenchanted; we have serious crises in this country and across the Channel, which affect this country; we have a new(ish) party that is supposedly producing new ideas and new directions and that is getting more publicity than the early Labour Party did. Yet, not only does this party not perform as well as the other one did, it does not come anywhere close to performing well.

Or as the Boss puts it:

Looking to our history here does not help at all. Going back to the 1920s, and the emergence of the Labour Party as a force in politics, which eventually displaced the Liberals, cementing in its prominence in the 1945 election, we had a situation where a disaffected electorate switched loyalties.

Now, we are seeing the same disaffection but, instead of switching loyalties, the electorate is progressively opting out of the political process altogether.

This could and probably is the sign of a greater malaise in the system. Let us not forget that democracy in its present form, which is, according to some people a holy of all holies, is, in fact, a very recent experiment in political systems and may have already proved itself to be a failure. There is nothing sacred or, for that matter, necessarily intelligent in crowd sourcing (to use a very modern expression) policy and we may well  have to face up to the fact that the constitutional liberals who opposed it were right.

Or, alternatively, it is a good enough system and could be fixed but, at present, we do not have a clear idea how to do it. One thing is certain: as long as UKIP and its supporters refuse to acknowledge that the fault is in themselves and not in the stars (to paraphrase the Bard) they and we are going to get nowhere.

Well, what is democracy?

A blog by Dr Eamonn Butler on the Adam Smith Institute site raises some very pertinent questions. Is democracy really just mob rule by a majority, however acquired, against any minority it happens to dislike? I seem to recall the question coming up when the Labour government gleefully announced in effect that it had a majority and therefore could go after a minority it disliked, that is people who hunted.

There are other cases, as Dr Butler points out and these tend to be less likely to inspire indignation:

it is possible for quite small majorities to dominate the agenda. That is why we have such absurdly high tax on businesses and on people who earn a lot by creating jobs and prosperity. There are simply fewer of them than the majority, who enjoy the benefits of the taxation.

When it comes to taxation we do have only one chamber and no other control on their activity. The idea of being governed by petitions or referendums (let us not spend any time discussing the Swiss system, which is applicable to one country only, Switzerland) or, in other words, vested interests and very small majorities that are easily swayed by the news of the day is equally difficult. It is representative government we need to mend and a balance of powers we need to introduce.

It goes without saying that none of that can be done while we are inside the European Union and are governed very largely from Brussels through are so-called legislators.

It will reopen as a museum

It seems that the rodents are a problem in the Palace of Westminster. We are not told whether the beasties in question are four-legged or two-legged and whether they are to be found under ground and behind the plaster of those fine walls or actually in the offices and on the benches. But, wherever they are, they may force Parliament to close down, according to this news story.

Would that be such a terrible thing, I hear my readers (well, some of them) ask. After all, what on earth is Parliament for these days? We do not, however, speak of the institution, which has been somewhat lacklustre in the last few decades, but of the building.

The Houses of Parliament may close for up to five years for refurbishment, under plans being discussed by MPs. Parliament could be convened in a replica chamber or a conference centre for the duration of the repair work, which could start in 2015.

2015, incidentally, is when the next elections is scheduled and the elected House of Commons will sit for the five years of the repair work, assuming that this is agreed to and assuming that those builders will break all the rules of the trade and complete their work on time (and, perhaps, within budget).

It seems to me that many problems could be solved in these circumstances. First of all, do we actually have to have Parliament assembling while the building works are being carried out? Why not simply go through the election, a process that is dear to the heart of all who is interested in politics in this country and then suspend the sitting for five years or until such time that the Palace of Westminster is functioning again.

Naturally, in the meantime, honourable members of the House of Commons will not be paid or given expenses as they will not have to appear in Parliament so they will have to think of some way of earning money. That can have a very good effect and their minds will be concentrated.

Moreover, I am not convinced that the newly refurbished Palace of Westminster needs to see the present-day activities resumed in it. Why not re-open it as a Museum of Democracy with actors performing debates of the past when such things mattered and visitors paying entrance fees to watch it all, to wander through rooms where, in the past, important decisions had been taken and important events had occurred and to take refreshment in the various bars, cafes and restaurants. Menus of former days could be reproduced and, at a price, dinners of past politicians could be prepared and consumed.

Think about the income that would generate.

Another one has come back

In 2007 I wrote about Sir Hayden Phillips's report on how political parties should be funded. Sir Hayden was using the argument of voters being worried about lack of transparency in funding of political parties and spending as well as the fact that the self-same parties were losing members and money to propose that there should be some complicated formula through which they would receive state funding.

One of the comments Sir Hayden makes repeatedly throughout his report is that all parties are losing members, votes, money from subs, and it is this that causes the hyperinflation of donations and spending. But might there not be a different correlation? The more the parties spend needlessly, the less anyone wants to have anything to do with them. In which case, the voters are not being bought. Far from it.

Sir Hayden suggests various caps on donations but recognizes that the Labour Party might find this difficult to introduce immediately because of its historical links with the trade unions. Also, at the moment it is experiencing greater difficulties in raising money than the Conservatives and this might affect the responses of both parties.

The same applies to a proposed cap on spending and, indeed, its control. Once again, it strikes me that if political parties foolishly spend, spend, spend their way into bankruptcy, well, so be it. They will not do it twice.

While a mature democracy cannot survive without parties (the alternative, as I said then, is a situation like the one in Russia) there is no reason why the parties that exist now should go on existing in perpetuity.

Sir Hayden comes up with a complicated formula of how parties should receive state funding according to the number of votes cast for them in elections, that being the surest way of showing how much support they can garner. As it happens, he is wrong. Support for parties is shown in votes, in membership, in voluntary activity and in the money they can raise. If they cannot get any of that, they had better start thinking of doing something else with their time.

What this report will achieve, if put into legislation, is a freeze on any political change or development, the very opposite of what it intends. A stronger democracy does not need "sustainable" funding of political parties but a true marketplace for them. Let the people decide and not through tax money being parcelled out by the Treasury.

And while we are at it, let us get rid of the underhand funding parties are already receiving from the state.

While it is not unreasonable to spend taxpayers' money on the smooth running of elections, there is no rational argument for such things as the Policy Development Grant or "Short Money".

Time has gone by and we have a different lot in Downing Street and on the Treasury Benches in the Commons. Yet what do we find? The Committee on Standards in Public Life has come up with a very similar proposal.

In a letter to Prime Minister David Cameron setting out the proposed changes, committee chair Christopher Kelly said it had ''come to the conclusion that the only safe way to remove big money from party funding is to put a cap on donations, set at £10,000''.

He conceded that it was ''hard to imagine a more difficult climate'' in which to suggest the public should pay more towards political parties.

''We would not have made it if we thought there was a credible alternative. We do not believe there is.

''If the public want to take big money out of politics, as our research demonstrates they do, they also have to face up to the reality that some additional state funding will be necessary.''

The sum required should be ''kept in perspective'', he said, as it was ''little more than the current cost of a first class stamp'' for each voter per year.

With respect, it is not the question of how much taxpayers are going to be paying to keep the parties they like less and less in place (the sum is bound to go up, anyway) but the mere notion of subsidizing what ought to be private organizations, independent of the state, that is so noxious. Do these people really not see the problem? Luckily, the usual greed-soaked arguments are about to set in. In the meantime, we should all start campaigning to take state funding out of party politics altogether.

Use it or lose it

It is always nice when great men (no, for once, I do not mean the Boss over on EUReferendum) say exactly what one has been saying in one's own modest fashion. Roger Kimball (whom I actually met recently and who turned out to be a delightful dinner companion) writes about democracy, Bill Buckley and Glenn Reynolds in his column on Pajamas Media and says precisely what I have been saying to all who would listen and many who would not: Democracy: Use It or Lose It. I was going to quote but really the whole column is worth reading.

I am trying hard not to laugh

Well, not all that hard. A friendly correspondent informs me that today is International Day of Democracy, presumably because there are so many democracies around the world and because we have international democracy. I suppose it could have been worse: it could have been called International Democracy Day, implying just that.

The link on the parliamentary website (which, incidentally, I cannot recommend highly enough as a source of information) tells us helpfully all the many things we can do to get involved in democracy. Curiously enough, it does not tell us how we can control our political process, for sure as eggs is eggs, petitioning the House of Commons is not the way to do so. Nor is viewing Parliament on-line. In fact, until we restore its legislative powers and, at the same time, strip them of their rights to interfere with our lives more than is necessary for the protection of life, liberty and justly acquired property, we shall not have that control.

But what is International Day of Democracy and what does it do apart from, presumably, giving large salaries to some transnational officials?

First things first: the Inter-Parliamentary Union is (or has been in the past) a perfectly respectable organization. I have my doubts about the efficacy of conferences about democracy in Africa but, I suppose, they have to try to extend the hand of friendship, as it used to be said in the dear old unlamented Soviet Union. Its history is respectable enough and it does not do a great deal of either harm or good, which is all one can hope for.

At least, it was relatively harmless until it decided to establish closer links with the United Nations, an organization that cannot be called harmless by anybody. So now we have an International Day of Democracy, which was first celebrated last year.

It was established by the United Nations, to be precise by its General Assembly, the majority of whose members are not democracies and would do anything, including torture, imprisonment and murder to prevent such a state of affairs from passing.

In fact, the United Nations, by its very existence is the greatest enemy of democracy in its unaccountability and pretensions to override democratically elected governments. Its subsidiary organizations spend their time pandering to tyrannies and attacking Western democracies, particularly the United States and Israel. Endless resolutions are passed to control free speech under the label of fight against hate speech or Islamophobia. And, as I mentioned above, its members are largely undemocratic in any, even the widest, definition of the word.

It is, therefore, entirely appropriate that there should be a day dedicated to democracy around the world, decided on by the largest anti-democratic organization in the world.

Just remember: "War is Peace", "Freedom is Slavery", "Ignorance is Strength".

A difficult problem

I have just taken part in a discussion on the BBC Russian Service about the elections in Afghanistan. This was a general talk about the problems of trying to run democratic elections in a basically undemocratic country and whether democracy can grow where there are no democratic traditions.

My immediate point was that the problem with Afghanistan is the war going on there and just recently the military situation had deteriorated. There was no time to suggest that one reason for that may have been that Iraq is a good deal more stable and some of the erstwhile insurrectionists have gone to Afghanistan. Also, the Pakistani government has announced that the Taliban is leaving their country. We must wait and see how true that is but if it is, they must be going somewhere and Afghanistan seems the obvious first port of call. Rehman Malik, the Interior Minister, has suggested that "foreign al-Qaeda fighters were now leaving Pakistan for Somalia; others were returning to their home countries in Sudan and Yemen".

As it happens I do not think all countries with less than democratic histories are hopelessly lost to the concept of liberal democracy, though that does involve considerably more than just elections. Just look at post-war Japan, suggested I cheerfully.

The Russian interviewer and interviewee, a professor of political science in Moscow, were less sanguine as they referred to the example of Russia in the nineties, where elections were fixed because otherwise Zhirinovsky's Communists most probably would have won and the first free election would also have been the last.

The problem of building civil society and liberal democracy in Russia appears to have no immediate solution and under President Prime Minister Putin and his mishka, President Medvedev, the process has suffered severe set-backs.

Another piece of news, that can be related to this topic, was that one of the largest railway stations in Moscow, the Kursk-Kol'tsovaya Station has been refurbished to its pristine 1950 look, which includes carved slogans that glorify Stalin, including the famous war-time cry: "За родину, за Сталина", "For Stalin and our motherland". (You can see the pictures here.)

A number of humanitarian organizations are planning to go to court, to demand that the slogans be removed. The assumption must have been that the station will be refurbished without those words. The big question is, therefore, what will the courts decide and will financial considertaions prevail over people's sensibilities. An even bigger question is what sort of public reaction are we likely to see.

And while we are on the subject of Russia and nostalgia, Sergei Mikhalkov the poet has died at the age of 96. He was a very well known and fairly talented children's poet. If pushed, I could probably recite some of the poems I learned as a very young child even now. He was also a writer of prose works and film scripts, some very successful. I find from the Russian Service website that he was a war correspondent who was wounded at Stalingrad.

His greatest claim to fame, however, is that he wrote no less than two (well, two and a half, since he had to remove references to Stalin in 1977 from the original) versions of what was first the Soviet, then the Russian national anthem, both to the same tune. Amazingly enough, the new words refer to the great country protected by God and Mikhalkov cheerfully explained that, of course, he had always been religious but could not admit to it in the Soviet period.

He was, of course, a good party apparatchik who led the attacks on Boris Pasternak, Andrei Sinyavsky and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, among others.