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May 2, 2010
Democracy?
I've said before that a feature of the elections on May 6 is that one would hardly know that there are council elections going on on the same day. And when senior politicians talk about 'local' politics- it is the councils to whom they are referring. I could not tell you who the candidates are for our council election, and I have tried to find out.
I would add to that now that one would also hardly know that there are parliamentary seats being re-elected, such is the level of emphasis being placed on the performance of the three party leaders. Where we live we just discovered that the parliamentary boundary has been moved since the last general election and our MP for the last couple of years was someone completely different to the person whom we thought was the MP. I don't think anyone ever told us. It is the kind of thing we would have noticed. There is very little attention being paid to the candidates in our parliamentary constituency.
Never mind the way this is handled to keep things simple by focussing on just three men, I do believe that the democratic structures are too complicated. Leaders, MP's, Mayors, Departments, Primary Quangoes and Secondary quangoes*, large councils and small councils (to say nothing of the institutions in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) all seem to run independently of each other without anf grown-up attempt to agree on what they should do for the public. This arrangement gives each of them the opportunity to avoid responsibility for anything. It doesn't work.
I think MP's should be tied to local councils-- the MP should be the leader of the local council amd fully elected into that position.
*Incidentally Secondary quangoes merit attention - if primary quangoes have been created to avoid a ministerial department from having to make decisions and run operations, secondary quangoes are those bodies which, in their turn, do the same thing for primary quangoes. If the primary quango doesn't want to take responsibility for a recommendation they employ either a secondary quango, or a firm of consultants, to make it for them. No wonder we have no money!
Posted by Perkins at May 2, 2010 11:02 AM