As the FT reports tonight:
Senior Conservatives are plotting an audacious “cash-for-seats” offer to Nick Clegg, where the Liberal Democrat leader would back a Conservative-friendly Commons boundary review in exchange for millions in state funding for his party.
That's corruption by any standard that I know, and I've read a lot.
How low can Cameron stoop?
There's no need to answer that. But feel free if you wish.
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And yet if we want to reduce lobbying and parties dependence on private interests surely state funding is the way to go?
State funding would guarantee the status-quo would remain in perpetuity.
In any case, what is proposed is state funding of the LibDem party….while working away to deprive Labour of union funding (which, by the way, is by virtue of every union member chosing to opt-in to the “political levy”)
Interesting to note that the people/companies contributing to the Conservative party all seem to [now] have developed an interest in the HealthCare industry.
The problem being that corruption in government is now endemic. All are involved in it. Even the last expenses fiddles revelations has not caused “them” to consider themselves as criminals.
Personally, I consider them traitors.
Selling the country down the money-lined road.
‘The problem being that corruption in government is now endemic. All are involved in it.’
Absolutely right, John. Implicitly they all are as so few ever make the effort to speak out about it, much less actually do anything.
Interesting to note that the money is in exchange for supporting the next wave of gerrymandering.
So implicit in that offer must also be rigging the boundaries to guarantee some LibDem seats remain.
I wonder who will lose seats, and who will gain Ermine in exchange ?
“So implicit in that offer must also be rigging the boundaries to guarantee some LibDem seats remain.”
The boundary review is done by an independent body. They are not rigged just as they were not rigged in 2001 or 2005 – the two post-war elections with the most out of proportion results.
One could look at how the hierarchy of said commissions have fared after previous reviews and draw a different conclusion…
But then…the speaker in the commons is the head of each commission…while the deputy head (the actual leader of each separate commission) is a Judge/Justice.
No chance of them being slanted then is there ?
We’ll (well, me) will wait until their “deliberations” yield the results…with the state corruption getting blatant now they may not even bother to care much about any blatant fiddles.
After all….how many people are going to give blood freely now the blood transfusion service is being sold ?
I doubt the Lib Dems will accept this offer as (a) they are reliant on the existing boundaries (and local popularity of their MPs) to return anything more than a handful of Lib Dem MPs in 2015; (b) if they were to accept it would probably plunge them even lower in public support than they are already as they would be seen as even more of a bunch of cynical opportunists than they already are. And the Tories, too, would be reduced in public opinion to a bunch of corrupt sleazebags (they already are that in many people’s view but this would make it much worse).
Both the Tories and the Lib Dems are now very desperate about the next election and this kind of thing is the result. But I don’t think it’ll happen. Having said that, the Lib Dems have “surprised on the downside”, to use financial terminology, many times before so who knows?
This does, I admit, have all the feeling of being a Michael Green scabby deal
That said, Clegg’s just the sort to fall for a con-man
Back to the Rotten Boroughs of old, Richard. It was of course Tories/Whigs who invented and kept that system going so they are simply returning to past form.
The broader question is whether the Lib Dems will go along with this. The Tory assumption must be that they will. On the basis of what we’ve seen from Clegg and the orange book liberals so far that has to be a good bet, I’d say.
This is truly the pits! A Party that couldn’t win a decisive majority against the most unpopular Prime Minister since Edward Heath in early 1974, Gordon Brown (who, in my view, seems ever more preferable to these political looters), now seeks to bribe and gerrymander its way into full power by suborning its junior coalition partner into shedding its last vestige of honour and integrity!
Frankly, there are only two ways forward:
1) The LibDems wake up from their sleep-walk into total abandonment of their historic, and previously deserved, role as the Party of conscience between the two established behemoths, and re-establish that role by withdrawing from the Government, and triggering a No Confidence motion that would see Cameron booted out of Number 10, and the Queen then calling someone else to form a Government. (It’s far too much to hope they’d go all the way, and try for a 66% vote to dissolve Parliament and have a new Election.)
2) The Queen exercises for real the power she has on paper, dismisses Cameron and dissolves Parliament, calling for a new Election. Cameron would, of course, refuse to obey, and so the Queen’s actions might lead to the end of the monarchical system, but it would highlight the reality of this “robber Conservative” Tory administration, in which the lib-Dems are only like Vittorio Emmanuele ll in pre-war Italy – a figment to preserve the apparent legality of a Government lacking a true mandate.
Incidentally, I suspect under Option 2 the British people would be happy to elect Elizabeth ll as either our President, or our elected constitutional monarch, as was the case with Poland in the 18th century. But these Tories really are Nye Bevan’s “lower than vermin”.
Cameron will cling to “power” long enough to rush the Scottish independence referendum.
If they then chose to go it alone it will, with the possible boundary changes, be game-over for Labour in any election other than a massive switch of votes election.
Anyway, who actually rules the country…..this is a “constitutional” monarchy, so the Queen has minimal power.
But.
Who pulls the strings in this government.
Who has contributed most, and who gains the most ?
We can all stand at the side of the trough and see the pigs grunting, but which pig has the snout deepest in the public-services-sale ?
We all read about the virgin patients sleeping in beds of piss…..anything else ?
After all, the press are not free or impartial..
Quite.
Gerrymandering by referendum.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/10/15/david-cameron-alex-salmond-scottish-referendum-deal-autumn-2014_n_1965913.html
UK politics is riddled with corruption. what we need is a system like many other countries have, where politicians have to resign all other posts/boards/columns etc when taking office. They also should have to dispose of any direct investments that they have in listed companies
Not long ago, the candidate who became prime minister, through fair election, was the only figure who could legitimately perform that function. Today this is no longer the case. because two unelected supreme powers trump the prime minister’s mandate – the technocrats of the EU and the financial markets.
These two entities impose their own agendas. The EU demands blind obedience to treaties and EU mechanisms that are quintessentially neoliberal, while the markets tpunish any deviation from the ultraliberal orthodoxy. Thus imprisoned between these twin embankments, the river of politics flows in a single direction with no manoeuvring room whatsoever – or, to put it another way, without power.
We are witnessing an epic battle between the Market and the State in which the market, with its totalitarian ambitions, wants to control everything: the economy, politics, culture, society, and individuals. And now, allied with the media, which serve as its ideological apparatus, the market wants to dismantle the edifice of social advances and what we call the “Welfare State”.
The economic crisis could serve as a shock (in the sense used by sociologist Naomi Klein in her book ‘The Shock Doctrine’) as it is being exploited as an opportunity to impose the neoliberal agenda. Mechanisms have been created to monitor and control national democracies so that savage structural adjustment programmes can be imposed and overseen by a new authority: the “troika” comprised of the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank, all non-democratic institutions whose members are not elected and do not represent the citizens.
These institutions – with the backing of the media, obey the economic, financial, and industrial lobbies – are charged with creating the systems of control to reduce democracy to mere theatre – with the complicity of the major governing parties.
With thanks:
Naomi Klein
Zygmunt Bauman
Orwell’s 1984 springs to my mind or in that direction anyway, not good.
“with the complicity of the major governing parties”
You mean with the help of their paid servants.
Nobody gives money away without something being given in return.
In the case of politicians that would be their souls that they sell, and our bodies.
All you have to do to realise that is look at who is snapping-up the state assets to sell back to us.
The Great and Good of the financial empires revealed as just grubby thieves.
What a surprise: Not.