Dear Roy and Clare: we are moving on

Last week I caught Roy Hattersley on Newsnight dismissing the possibility of more independents in Parliament as a waste of time because we would finish up with a load of single cause campaigners who could decide nothing. Party politics was what was needed, not celebrities. In similar vein Clare short had a go at Lynn Faulds Wood on Womans Hour. She in effect dismissed Lynn’s possible candidacy to stand for Parliament as naive, by asking whether she was right or left wing? This is all arrogant nonsense from yesterday’s people.

Thinking that only political parties have the answer is misguided. With the richer getting richer and the poorer getting poorer and the world going to hell in a sieve, I don’t think they do. Why should political dogmas derived from the 19th century, whether from Marx or Adam Smith still be thought to hold the solution to our growing problems. If they do, they seem to be taking a long time about it.

Traditional politicians think that the move to have independent people in the political fight would achieve little. Political parties are no more than structures for organising a list of objectives which individual candidates must adopt when presenting themselves for election. In fact it is from within this idea that the contradiction arises. What or for whom is the voter voting? In practice it will always turn out to be the alleged wish list from which the leadership will draw from when forming a government. It is a convenient way of both organising and funding the bid for power by those who have rallied round the manifesto. Unfortunately the individual within this group is seen as a threat.

Those who might now seek a place in Parliament might think that their judgement will be better than many of the present members. Let’s face it; some of them seem to have no judgement at all as to morals or even political sensitivity. A new intake would have to work hard to adopt worse judgements than those who took us into a war on the incompetent reading of so called intelligence, all in the face of the largest demonstration against government policy in the history of political action in these islands.
Dacier