Jury Team Commentary

Will Parties ever see past their own interests?

At the end of another working week, it seems timely to note that we have been confronted once more by some maddening examples of politicians misappropriating the issues of the day solely to gain party political advantage.

Perhaps the two most exasperating instances in the past seven days have been the Green Paper released on Monday by Jack Straw concerning the Rights and Responsibilities of British citizens and Gordon Brown’s ongoing approach to the pending G20 summit in London.

For a start, it should be noted that much of Jack Straw’s Paper is redundant. The rights included are predominantly a reaffirmation of the 1998 Human Rights Act and the inclusion of responsibilities such as paying taxes and obeying the law induced in this writer a slightly perplexed and incredulous shake of the head. This exercise achieves nothing, so what was the point?

The Independent speculated that the Paper was merely an attempt to stockpile rhetorical ammunition with which to shoot down Tory accusations that existing human rights legislation both obstructs our ability to deal with immigration and places an unhelpful burden on business. Few could argue that using the sacrosanct issue of the treatment the British people are owed by their government solely as a mechanism with which to get one-up on the opposition demeans the standing of what is at stake, not to mention the potential long-term detriment such an attitude could have for all our liberties.

This week we have also watched our economic well-being being increasingly pushed to the second violin section of Gordon Brown’s G20 orchestra. The Prime Minister has spent much of this week in the Americas talking up the importance of the summit and attempting to construct some sort of agreement on his plan to continue stimulating the global economies by taking on more debt. But with the vast division between him and the rest of the European leaders painfully evident on this issue, the chance of achieving any signficant consensus is now non-existent. So why does he continue in his vain attempts?

With none of Labour’s efforts to extricate Britain from this economic pit making any positive difference (some may argue they have had quite the contrary effect), I suspect that this masquerade of an attempt to build a consensus may be intended as a sort of party political “toxic-bank”. When the G20 ends with no significant agreement, Labour can then pile the blame for all its economic failure into this toxic-bank in the hope that it will leave the Party unsullied by the country’s ongoing economic woes. “The worsening economy is all the fault of the international community for not agreeing to coordinate with us,” they will say. So Gordon Brown’s frantic jet-setting is once more for his own benefit, and that of his Party: the interests of Britain are again not his concern.

These two examples provide further evidence that the needs of the Party are coming before the needs of the country. Something needs to be done.

Martin

Has Tony McNulty no shame?

In a neatly-written piece in the Telegraph today, details emerge of the shameful manipulation of MPs housing expenses by DWP Minister, Tony McNulty.

Mr McNulty lives with his wife in her house in Hammersmith (3 miles from Westminster). However, he also claims £14,000 each year for a house near Harrow in which his parents live. He has claimed around £60,000 for a second home in his constituency that he does not, it seems, use as a constituency base at all.

After having had this misuse of allowances detailed in the press, Mr McNulty said that he would no longer claim the money, and that no MPs within commuting distance of Westminster should claim the second homes allowance. Whilst that may be an admirable sentiment, it rings a little hollow from a man who has been effectively defrauding the taxpayer for the last four years, and who perhaps lacks the moral authority to lecture his fellow MPs on expenses management.

At very least, this was a flagrant breach of the spirit of the second homes allowance, and nothing short of returning the money (which should not have been claimed) should suffice.

Tony McNulty was (ironically) the Minister responsible for cracking down on benefit cheats, who take money from the taxpayer wthout due cause or need, and expect to get away without getting caught. I’m sure some particularly ironic quotes about benefit cheats could be found without Googling too hard.

My favourite statement from the Telegraph article is a great candidate for understatement of the year:

“Mr McNulty accepted that his use of taxpayers’ money for the property looked odd.”

I wouldn’t have said it looks ‘odd’. Regardless of whether he was within the rules or not, I would have said it ‘looks’ both criminally sly and morally reprehensible. In times gone by, a minister would resign for a lot less. Unfortunately, the shamefaced acquisition of our money to pay for his parents’ living arrangements sort of indicates that perhaps this minister isn’t as honourable as we might hope.

Morus

What did they think?

The United States is one of the countries leading the way in terms of direct participation in the democratic process. For all its faults (and every country’s political process has them), the primary process allows almost every registered voter the chance to select their candidates.

American voters can vote for a much broader range of positions in government, and in some states are able to recall politicians who have not satisfied expectations. Many states also allow citizens to demand a referendum on a given issue if it has enough support in the form of a petition.

For those reasons, I didn’t expect that the Jury Team would get too much coverage in the US – what we are proposing is somewhat radical here, but I thought it would be considered fairly unremarkable across the pond. Nonetheless, TIME magazine – that august journal of American political life – have written about the launch of the Jury Team last week.

Take a look at the article here

The media still seems to be reserving judgement on the concept, which is fair – much of what we are trying to do is experimental, and this election is proving that the concept can work before we come around to the Westminster elections.

From the comments on previous posts (and apologies for not having the time to respond to them all), there are clearly a lot of people thinking about standing. We’d obviously encourage you to do so! It is interesting comparing the numbers of completed applications now available to view on the website, and the numbers of people who we can see are working through the forms at the moment. The more people prepared to put themselves forward, the easier it will be to demonstrate that there is an appetite for a different way of selecting candidates and conducting politics.

If anyone needs help with their forms, please get in touch using the Contact Form, and we’ll do what we can.

Morus

Are you ready to serve?

This country has a remarkable history of service – from the sacrifice that men and women have made in the military, to the compassion and humanity shown in the volutary sector. Not one of us has grown up independent of the influence of citizens of this country who strove to make this a better place to live.

Many of our politicians became involved in politics because they saw it as a noble path of public service, and many of them still do what they can to live up to the designation of ‘public servant’. Unfortunately, that number of people is decreasing every year, and those who follow that path seem less and less to be the paragons of civic virtue that this country deserves.

Today, the Jury Team launches the first national open primary election to select candidates who will appear on the ballot. This is a bold experiment, a prototype that we hope will capture the imagination of the country, to make Britain more democratic, and to re-engage the generations who no longer feel that politics is relevant to them.

Many people have claimed this is doomed to failure. They claim that there is insufficient public appetite for change, and that the political class is a symptom of the disengagement rather than the cause. We believe that their cynicism is at best misguided, and at worst contributory to the problem.

Everyone involved in the project understood that stones would be thrown at the idea – many decent people have reasonable objections to parts of the Jury Team project, and we welcome their input. Plenty of others cannot help but see what we are trying to do through a partisan prism – wondering how our efforts affect the likelihood of their party succeeding at the polls, or feeling concern about how issues might be affected. We appreciate those concerns, but are also disappointed.

Independent of where people stand on the issues, and which party they support, all of us should recognise that there is something wrong with British politics. We know that turnout at elections is falling almost as fast as the exodus from political party membership. We know that the barriers to becoming a candidate are high – too high – especially for women and ethnic minorities, and that the major parties haveno better answer to this than tokenism and shortlists that are undemocratic because they exclude a certain section of society.

Regardless of what people believe and whom they support, we hope that the idea of Open Primaries and getting regular people involved in politics is something upon which we can all agree. We think that the fear of failure is no excuse for this experiment not to be conducted. Britain is a democracy, but at the moment it struggles to justify calling itself truly democratic. That must change, and change soon.

Many in this country criticised the US Presidential elections in 2000, over the issues of hanging chads and voter registration fraud. Those problems were considered a failure of democracy by many. But in spite of that, over 50 million Americans were able to take part in the selection of their Presidential candidates last year. The system of open primaries, the use of referendums when demanded by the voters, the chance to recall senior politicians who fail to do a good enough job – there are many aspects of the American democratic process that we have so far failed to emulate.

Britain needs to awake from its slumber into oligarchy – where only a few thousand control the political machine, and the remaining tens of millions have only very limited impact. We need to reinvigorate our democracy by showing the political class that there is both an appetite for change, and that there are good people who are outside of that system who feel that they could contribute.

We need to prove that this experiment was worth conducting, and to show the other parties that greater democracy and involvement of the people in choosing caniddates is something that the country demands. If you feel as we feel, if you want what we want, then please go to the home page of this website and sign up to be a candidate. Many of us complain that our politicians are no good and that they don’t care about the concerns of the people. But unless we are prepared to put ourselves forward as potential replacements, we have little grounds for complaint.

In politics, decisions are made by those who step up. We need you to step up, if democracy in this country is to be restored.

Morus