Where Betrayal Means Profits!

Politics is a dirty business. Why do you think people think of politicians as they do prostitutes or ambulance-chasing solicitors?

Right: A typical politician, Mr. Hain has jettisoned any convictions he once held in order to get his snout in the trough.

Hilaire Belloc and Cecil Chesterton (GKC's brother) wrote all about many decades ago, about how the system works, how it promotes sycophants, how it curbs anyone who may start off wishing to "change things for the better" or who seeks what is right, as opposed to what party whips dictate.

Of course the media has a huge role - much more so even than in their day: who can hope to be a Prime Minister without first attending a private audience with His Smuttiness Rupert Murdoch.

basically between the party structures, the media, the business backers and the Trade Union bosses the system is pretty much sewn up. Throw in the old school tie brigade (how can you ignore it - how many MPs are ex-public school boys as well as trained lawyers?) and you have it.

Left: Obama promises change, yet he has already sidled up to the same old vested interests and is unlikely to rock the boat once in power.

It's not a big "Jewish conspiracy" - though again how can anyone ignore the role of Freemasonry, and on the upper echelons you have groups like the Bilderbergers and the sheer power of international banking cartels - this is a multi-faceted, often conflicting, hydra.

There is a constant internal battle for the upper hand in the constituent parts which is also played out in the left-right dichotomy which we all, pushed on by the media, take part in.

However, this world of turmoil is, (whilst being haphazard and open to all kinds of upsets) pretty much sealed off from the rest of us.

A political class sits at the top table and unless they try and do something good which upsets the media, the banks etc. they will sit there playing out their role. Those with a rebellious edge will have it whittled away especially if they want to feed at the trough and/or further their career.

Look at Peter Hain. A "radical" leftist in the 70s, anti-apartheid activist not afraid to take 'direct action' against South African interests, even sporting events.

You might not agree with his cause (unless you are a lefty spy peering in on FC in order to get some decent political thought away from moribund Marxism!), but at least you could say he believed in something and was prepared to get up of his duff (for American readers!) to achieve his questionable ends.

We can argue whether someone who does something political, no matter how misguided, is preferable to the mindless morons who feed off a diet of Eastenders, The Sun and Big Brother reality TV.

Yet look at Hain today and you see someone mired in New Labour betrayals, an apologist for the war in Iraq, and now someone embroiled in dodgy donations as he sought to win a place in the Labour leadership.

Where is the idealist? Where is the anti-establishment rebel? Where is the direct action agitator?

He's replaced by a bloated, perma-tanned, weaselly, mealy-mouthed, Capitalist apologist, war-mongering, Blair-crony New Labour creature foisted on an "old Labour" electorate in Neath, South Wales.

Right: Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dummer politics is alive and well in the land of the pregnant chad.

The former may not be to our liking as racial nationalists, but how much more preferable (for his honesty if nothing else) than the canape-munching career politician we see today who has sought to excuse every New Labour betrayal and sell-out.

An apologist for sell-out, betrayal of ideals, money-grubbing and a cover-up supremo is never liked, no matter his political hue.

Still, though he was sufficiently disliked by his fellow MPs to flop badly in his bid to be Labour Deputy Leader, he knows that he won't lose his seat. Neath is one of those places where you could stick a red rosette on a monkey and they'd vote him in (no offence to any residents of Hartlepool!); the same could be said of areas like Kensington & Chelsea where a Peugeot 207 in a blue finish could get in for the Tories.

The cattle vote to keep "the other lot out" more than they do for any one or two policies of their preferred candidate.

Even worse, many people (when they can be turned away from Eastenders) now cast their vote for the best-looking politician, or the one who is spun as honest.

Left: If voting changed anything they'd ban it.

Remember Tony Blair? He started an illegal war, espoused Christian values whilst continually passing laws for "gay rights" and much more - yet with his folksy style (tie less, shirt sleeves rolled up, enjoying a mug of tea in the kitchen...) he insisted he was "a straight kind of guy."

Enough idiots believed the spin to vote him in, again and again.

We, as a mass, are cattle. Do we really deserve any better?

The politicians lie, cheat and steal. They indulge in buggery and adultery. They fill their pockets in office via multiple jobs and expense accounts. They walk into nice advisory roles after their stint in parliament.

Yet at each election we all get suckered into the party political charade.

Look at America.

Look at the meaningless slogans.

Look at the empty promises.

Each one promises things like Change. Or Progress. Maybe they promise to be Different.

Those who promise to Conserve and Protect do neither. Those who promise to be Different are shackled to the same vested interests.

Right: Can the land of the pregnant and hanging chad really teach the world about freedom?

The "competition" is closed to those who can raise enough filthy lucre and get enough TV coverage to "appeal" to the voters.

Yet the morons will still vote to "keep the other lot out" like the pathetic lefties in France who voted for Chirac with their pegs on their noses.

The more moronic still will vote for the one with the nicest smile, or the "honest Harry" with the finest quaffed hair.

We all thought Blair was bad, but remember America voted in Bill Clinton! And the defendant of "stained-dress-gate" (aka zippergate) is still "popular."

(I must point out at this conjecture that I'm keeping my vomit bucket close, just in case...)

America is the leader of the Free World (so we're told) yet we get a war-mongering president (personally I think Arabs should have their own Monroe Doctrine and tell America to keep the hell out) who got in via the hanging-chad and the pregnant-chad via an electorate too idiotic to be able to make a small hole in a sheet of paper!!!

Which explains how Hillary Clinton can pull off the most pathetically stage-managed event of the year (to date) when she peeled an onion in her pocket, blinked back the tears brimming in her eyes and appealed to the electorate.

(Damn, there goes my vomit bucket again!)

Lo and behold the voters of New Hampshire gave her a lifeline, as good old Bill looked on with a glint in his eye. He clapped politely as his wife (still!) smiled on at her sheeple.

Spin, lies, TV appearances, a compliant media (via the moguls) and an incredibly gullible public (to the point of incredulity) are all she needed.

Meet the new boss... same as the old.

Plus ca change...

Link:
Order Belloc & Chesterton's book on Westminster politics

Parliament: Can it be Mended?

Can It Be Mended?
by Hilaire Belloc and Cecil Chesterton

When the question is asked: "Can a dying institution be revived?" it is in the whole tendency of modern learning to answer that it can not. The House of Commons has ceased to be an instrument of Government. Its ancient functions have been killed under the prolonged and continuous action of hypocrisy. It affords to-day (if we except the three Irish parties, which have a definite political object and pursue that object) no more than an opportunity for highly lucrative careers. That career is founded upon the bamboozlement of the public (whose faculty for being duped these professionals hope to prey upon indefinitely), with the complicity of nobodies content to write M.P. after their name as a sufficient reward for supporting the Party System: to whom, of course, must be added the lawyers and business men for whom Parliament offers definite financial rewards, and that in proportion to their indifference to their representative duties.

All modern scholarship, we repeat, would tend to say of any institution which had fallen into such a condition that it was past praying for; and history is there with a hundred examples to support this modern conclusion.

We have in history case after case of a national institution falling into contempt and some other more vigorous organ supplanting it. The greatest case of all is, of course, the slow substitution of the Empire upon the ruins of the ancient Roman system of government.

It is here precisely that the crux of our problem comes in. Nothing is appearing that can take the place of Parliament. In its decay and futility it still makes our laws, and makes them and unmakes them at a greater rate than ever it did before. True, most of those laws are the work of the permanent officials; but some of them, or some parts of them, are due to the professional politicians.

In other words, the House of Commons, though fallen into a universally recognised decay, is still our only instrument for making laws. Nothing is rising to take its place, and in its decay it continues to work very appreciable evil.

The progress of the disease is now so rapid, its probable future effect so menacing, that, desperate as it must always be to attempt to revive a dying institution, it is the business of every man who cares for his country in the crisis through which it is passing to ask whether some remedy might not be devised.

Electoral changes will do nothing. A mere extension of the franchise, if the party machine were left as it is, would make little or no difference. Where to-day ten thousand apathetic men are seized by the paid agents of the machine and worried to the polls in groups as nearly equal as can be arranged by the managers of the show, to-morrow twenty thousand would be similarly drilled and run. The abolition of plural voting is common sense, but it would go nowhere near the root of the trouble. If it gave to one of the two teams a permanent preponderance over the other, the honour which obtains among gentlemen would compel the two in combination to devise some cry which should make the parties more nearly equal again.

To forbid canvassing would have the effect of course of enormously reducing the number of voters, the vast majority of whom vote under a sort of moral compulsion, and after several days of heavy badgering, concluded by a forced march to the polls. The bulk of men can never really care for the issues, either false or unimportant, which the bosses provide them with: nay, in the last election there was no issue at all, and the people were too weary to invent one for themselves, as they had done in the Chinese Labour Agitation in 1906.

But this decrease in the actual number of voters, though it would show up the nonsense, would have no practical effect: the game would still be played just as it was played before, and the actors would be of the same general competence in human affairs.

Payment of election expenses and payment of members are measures obviously desirable in themselves, but they would do little to break the Party System now, though they might once have done much to prevent its coming into existence in its present form. The official expenses of an election are a very small fraction of what the candidate has to find, so that their payment by the State would still leave the independent at a grave disadvantage as compared with the party hack, who could draw without limit on the Party Funds. The payment of members might make it easier for an honest man to remain independent, but it would in no way restrain the Front Benches from corrupting members by the promise in the future of pecuniary rewards larger and of a far more stable character. To the contractor, the merchant, the newspaper owner who enters politics with an eye to their corruption, the little sum thus guaranteed is insignificant. The great press of lawyers are looking for posts, the least of which will be a matter of 800 a year, the highest of 10,000 and 15,000. The professional men, to whom this or that permanent job as an inspector or departmental chief is the bribe, would not be the less eager to take money because he had already received it.

It has been suggested that the auditing of the secret Party Funds might undermine the Party System. To inaugurate such a practice would certainly deal the Party System a heavy blow, but the success would not be final. Side by side with the officially audited Party Fund another secret fund would at once spring up. A drastic penalty might indeed be attached to any such form of secret bribery.

But the law would tend to be a dead letter in the absence of an alert public opinion behind it; for secret bribery, when it has become a national custom, is not so easy to eliminate. Nothing is less easy to prove, since all parties to the crime are concerned in defending it and in hiding it, and no one person can feel himself aggrieved. It may further be urged that the very high expenses of an election remaining what they are, the depletion of the Party Funds, which would probably follow the publication of their accounts, would advantage the wealthy candidate as against the poor one. The independent candidate would indeed benefit, for his funds would be no less than now, while those of his official opponents might probably be reduced; but the poor man financed by the Party System would probably suffer. Whether or no this would be an advantage in other words, whether the direct rule of the rich is better or worse than the rule of their hired dependants may be an open question. In any case, with the payment of official election expenses by the State, and the stricter limitation of unofficial expenses, this tendency might be checked.

From The Party System

Link:
Buy The Party System by H. Belloc and C. Chesterton