Anybody Want to Buy a Government?

What a lovely time everyone has had over the last few days dissecting Giddy's plans for stabilising the UK economy. And none more than the Misters Miliballs. The 40p a unit booze decoy only worked for a few hours and then came the spectacular Tory own goal...

Brain-Farter of the Century

But to be fair to Osborne - and he's struggling to be fair to the rest of us -  he'd have been lambasted by what masquerades as a left-of-centre opposition no matter what he came up with in the budget or whatever decoys were deployed shortly afterwards. Of course, it's not him that comes up with the budget at all.  The tinkering with the economy and associated legislation that follows and ends up in the brandished red case, is actually put together by twelve-year-old policy wonks at Tory HQ. And then they have a brief meeting with the ten-year-olds at Liberal Democrat HQ to tell the latter children what they must agree to. Before that happens, though, policy headlines are dictated to the child-wonks by the people who have paid enough money to enjoy the "Come Dine With Me" experience at Number Ten. Seriously wealthy businesspeople were able (according the Sunday Times) to wave a chequebook or an envelope full of used tenners in Cruddas's direction and before you can say "PFI", the NHS is privatised over a dinner of super-rich brain-farting with Dave and Sam.

While I'm an all too rare mood to be fair to Tories, it has to be acknowledged that New Labour worked in pretty much the same way, except that the dinners were sans-Cherie, as she was usually too busy having orgasms over her off-shore bank statements...probably, and those dinners were rarely a "pie-an-a-pint" with Len McCluskey and Bob Crow a-la Wilson era. Government [policy] has ever been up for sale and levelling electioneering and party funding will not stamp that out.

Ashcroft - Regular Dinner
Companion?

The main political parties in the UK exist on private donations (or bungs) and there's millions of pounds involved. Of course, these days, with the transparency demanded by a media that used to be so "holier-than-thou" but is now more "sleazier-than-thou", we can all get access to information on how the funds are donated, by whom, and what use the money is supposedly put to. The received wisdom is that the Tories gete theirs from the "business community", Labour from the Unions and the Liberal Democrats from...well, from me and other liberal-leftie idiots that thought, foolishly as it turns out, that Nick wouldn't turn into the wimpy, Tory toad that he has. A bit further down the political food-chain, UKIP, BNP and the likes of the SWP receive survival money from people and organisations from right and left that are disenchanted with centrist ideologies.

Clearly, the Tories are going to get the most money seeing as the post-Thatcher Unions are short of membership and, if we're honest, seriously short of the political will to enable donations to support a party that appears to be unelectable right now. That said, the Tories spend more - these lavish dinners don't come cheap and then there's the junkets that donors expect as part of their spend.

Is the system worth changing? Francis Maude was at pains to point out this week that we were "so close" to getting a joint resolution of party funding back in 2007 but, conveniently for Maude & Co, Blair had become a 'lame duck' and the negotiations failed.

Who's In Charge?

Various systems are available. There's the US approach where you can only become President if you've access to the riches of Croesus (adjusted for over 2,500 years of inflation, naturally). This is inappropriate for us in the UK. Cameron and Osborne (and, latterly, Blair come to that), may be rich and privileged toffs but couldn't even get an invitation to the Romney / Santorum political funding poker table. Then there's the Kim Jong system. All disposable wealth of the population which, in the case of North Korea, is about a pound, is given direct to the state. The state then appoints a supreme leader and this supreme leadership passes down through the family to whichever son appears to be the most idiotic and 'ronery'.

Somewhere in between these ideas is something that would work for us and it would probably work best as a 'Reality TV' game show, seeing as that would engage huge swathes of the electorate that generally can't be arsed to vote and, if it was on the BBC, then the cost would be subsumed into the licence fee. But that's just bollocks.

The present system doesn't work because we have a "political class". Forget the royals, the upper, middle and lower brackets and, indeed the Unions, for a moment. The country is run by a new class altogether; a group of people that is so divorced from the reality of how the rest of us live that it is like a parallel universe. Almost all of our senior politicians in both the coalition and in opposition have never had a proper job and the wonks that sit behind them have no fucking idea either. We can pretend all we like that we live in a democracy from the point of view that our electoral system seems, on the face of it, to be fair(ish), but the more important issue is that of just who it is we are democratically electing to government (as opposed to the many excellent, back-bench constituency MPs in parliament who try hard to make a difference but usually fail as a result of their respective party regimes - but at least many of them have had proper jobs).

So Dave and Ed will be wearing temporary hair-shirts while they admit to whom they have been entertaining. Nick doesn't have to because he's so unpopular he can't find anyone to have dinner with him. Even Miriam. He dines alone on humble pie filled with broken promises. And then everything will go on as before. Plus ca change.

For a truly hilarious view on our political system in the UK however - check out Henning Wehn