Expenses and Constitution.
This gets a complete Part in my book 2010 A Blueprint for Change. The reforms I propose would, if in effect, have made the MPs Expenses scandal impossible and, should they hit on some other scam to deceive us, would give the Crown not only the power (which it now has but has ceded to Downing Street) but the statutory duty to dissolve Parliament and give the people a chance to vote in a new one. It is called democracy.
The more I delve the more alarmed I become at the utterly ineffective and ramshackle collection of ceremonies and precedents at the heart of our nation. The safeguards and rules that order the process of government and protect the people from exploitation, erosion of freedom and general ineptitude and which, above all, enshrine the very fabric of democracy and which every other free state around the world save Israel and New Zealand has, is missing here. I refer, of course, to a written Constitution.
In my book, I stopped short of this, believing that most urgent reform was needed now and setting up a new constitution would take too long. I still believe this in the short term, but in the long term we have to go that way. We cannot go on as we are. The worst thing of all that I have encountered is the total disinterest in the media. Mention the c word and you are greeted with an ill concealed snigger. Another nutter. Up the same old nutters cul de sac. We are clever savvy people who deal with the real world, not the broken dreams of silly old men.
Well times are about to change. Because the pennies will shortly drop, not as now, here and there now and again, but in a geat cascade like a vomiting jackpot in Las Vegas. There can be no such thing as a Constitutional Monarchy without a proper, accessible, open and understood constitution. Instead we have ended up with an Unconstitutional Democracy.