Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Change

This post is a wide ranging view of the meaning of change, looking not just here but also in the U.S.

Cameron is busy campaigning that if you want real change, go with the Tories, yet not only has this not worked, but the notion has been snatched by the Lib Dems and become their clarion call. The Tories current poll ratings are barely higher than their score in the last General Election. Why should this be? It is something to do with the muddled messages and controversial proposals they are putting forward, but there is a much more fundamental issue now in play. People do not just want a change of government. They want real and fundamental change of how we are governed, by whom, with what objective and by which method of democratic selection. Voters sense Clegg, his party untainted by government for nearly a hundred years offers this. Not everyone thinks this way, but so many now do, they may well call the shots on May 6th.

In the Presidential election in 2008 Americans went for change. The Democrats could have chosen Hilary Clinton, but in the end they did not because she was not enough change. Had she become President the country would have been led by a Bush or a Clinton since 1988. This was not real change, although Hilary would have been the first woman. Obama was a black African American. He really was change.

To understand how fundamental that change was we need to go back to the founding of the United States. The Union which lived from 1789 when George Washington was sworn in as the nation’s first President, was not quite the same as the one which rose from the ashes of the American Civil War, on a foundation laid in blood by Abraham Lincoln. The first saw itself as a Union of independent states; the United States are… The second saw itself as one country; The United States is …. Both versions saw the State as a sovereign entity, but the old version saw that sovereignty as supreme, where the new saw it as subsidiary. Philosophically Americans are against big government, high taxes and federal authority.

The old Confederate interpretation of the limits of the powers of central government is surprisingly in evidence all across the U.S today, though in a different form. Its champion is now the Republican party, which was founded to oppose it, and its challenger is the Democratic party which fought to defend it. Its manifestations are the Tea Party movement and Christian fundamentalism, both of which lean into the Republican party. By electing Obama, America turned from the federal laxity of the Bush years and the ham fisted foreign policy which made their country the most unpopular in the whole world, to a new disciple of Lincoln to pull the country back from the brink of calamity. At every step of the way, his big government we can change things programme has been harried and blocked, not just by Republicans, but by conservative Democrats too. But the tide, though ebbing somewhat, remains with Obama.

Here in this country our problems run very deep, though they are quite easy to solve. Unlike America whose democracy was born of two wars and a written framework, ours just developed over the centuries and is still not based on a defined, written Constitution. It remains  in its basic form, as it began, an absolute Monarchy working through Parliament, but with a few enfranchising acts to give an element of quite crude democracy. Parliament is divided into two Houses. One for the aristocracy or ruling class, the Lords. The other, the Commons for the ordinary people, often represented by the gentry, but certainly not the ruling class. Both are there to check the power of the Monarch and her Government, to whom all her Royal Prerogatives have been assigned.

The people now know for certain as the result of the historic expenses scandal, that none of this is working as it is supposed to, it is a hopelessly out of date structure, power has been userped, to exercise at will by a ruling elite in both the established political parties and if this is ever going to improve, it will not do so until a people’s champion rises to engineer root and branch reform to create a modern inclusive democracy. At the moment voters think they may have spotted a champion. The next few weeks will reveal whether Nick Clegg is equal to the greatest historic shift in the tectonic plates of our government since the Glorious Revolution.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 27th, 2010 at 1:06 pm and is filed under Malcolm Blair Robinson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.