There are many people in the freedom community that want nothing to do with politics. For them, politics is, and has been for a long, long time, irredeemably corrupt and filled with venal, self-serving parasites. Difficult to argue with that characterisation in general.
However, Edinburgh University’s own Professor Bernard Crick, in his book, ‘In Defence of Politics’, argued that reaching a post-political state was impossible. Humans would always have different interests and perspectives that would bring them, if not into conflict, then into a need for negotiated compromise via some sort of political system.
Unless people change and attain a higher state of psychological consciousness or spiritual awareness, then the need for politics will remain. And with it, the requirement to have institutions that preside over, enclose and resolve opposing agendas. And, as this is the case, and since the higher realms of mental and non-material attitudes remain outwith the reach of the bulk of humanity, the likelihood that manipulation, deceit, greed and ideology will exist within the political process is a certainty.
Although that might sound like a pessimistic view, it is a position that allows for more practical and hopeful steps, I think, than simply withdrawing from an inevitable feature of human life, only to sit on the sidelines, castigating, denouncing; paralysed by an ideal that has never been and will only be when people start to address their own deepest fears (I’m not holding my breath).
Any sort of step forward is welcome, especially now, in the aftermath of the execution of the greatest criminal act in history - Covid and all its attendants. Our politicians are corrupt, obedient to money, riddled with careerism and stupid. They need to be replaced.
But who can replace them? Another identikit pol from the Uniparty as equally offensive to decency and common sense? Or by a smaller party which, forgive my scepticism, is usually seeded in the political soil to be just another weed, despite us being told it was a blooming flower? (Syrizia in Greece is a prime example - it was a left-wing socialist party, arriving from nowhere and proclaiming to fight EU financial repression after the banking crisis of 2008 and the collapse of the Greek economy. It was elected on a crest of populist hope, and who, in power, applied all the budgets the EU required of it.)
The situation requires a new method of politics, beginning with its actors and moving onto the structure of political parties. This is beginning to happen. The march of the Independents is to be welcomed. Their diversity and their dependence on the Will of The People, not of a Party, should, ideally, allow a whole new range of voices to reach and excite different elements of the masses. In a well-balanced society, they would herald a renaissance of the democratic ideal. Citizen-politicians accountable to all parts of their geographic locus.
Yet, we have to mute our celebrations of this development and eye them cautiously to a certain extent because history teaches us that a parliament of individuals can form groupings as easily compromised and unaccountable as overt political parties; or it can be so disparate, each axis so self-regarding and jealous of their independence, that agreements are difficult to reach, government is partial and ineffective, and thus provides temperate conditions for the most talented to seduce a frustrated people in order to become a Caesar.
What is the solution?
Well, one possible solution, proposed by Marc Wilkinson, the founder of Edinburgh People, is to have political parties that are entirely local to a given area and which funds the standing of candidates within that area; the candidates having been elected by a one member, one vote process. Membership is by donation and a free membership does not impair your right to vote.
The candidates are independent and not career politicians within a larger party, which we know is rarely beholden to its members but to its big donors. They can vote with their conscience if they feel passionately on an issue (it’s in the constitution). They are restricted from building a national power base by limits of the party itself, therefore their sole focus is on the needs of the people in their constituency. This should attract only those who wish to stand for their communities and not for themselves.
What is possibly the most attractive feature of the idea, however, is that it begins to usher in a decentralisation of power. Political parties built on immediate residents’ support would demand the tools required to implement the policies upon which they were elected. A centralising authority would be, at first, run ragged to the point of dissolution, trying to appease all the claims to its executive functioning and its legislative outcomes, and then, by inexorable necessity, capitulate to handing back more money, resources and know-how to the regions. From that point on, as the palsied institutions of provincial governance are re-invigorated with the elixir of power, people could really see the impact of politics on their lives.
That’s the ideal.
We will see how it goes. Nonetheless, Edinburgh People are making a huge effort to create an imprint on this election and the consciousness of Edinburgh’s voters. They offer a meaningful vote in what must be the most meaningless election of the past fifty years.
I will be voting for my Edinburgh People candidate.
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