Gerald Warner: Workers unite, you have nothing to lose but your politicians

MARVELLOUS, is it not, how Germany has emerged from under the shadow of Hitler to become a fully-fledged, model democracy? We saw this paradigm in action last Thursday, when the Bundestag voted to approve an extra ¤440bn to be flushed down the Eurozone pan to bolster its zombie currency. Surveys showed 82 per cent of German voters opposed the measure; 84 per cent of parliamentarians voted for it.

This was the latest manifestation of the unbridgeable chasm that now yawns between rulers and ruled, between unaccountable parliamentary “representatives” and the increasingly disfranchised public. Theoretically, if the electorate is dissatisfied with the governing party, it can vote the incumbents out of office at the next election. Where that theory falls down is that, in last week’s Bundestag vote, the members of Angela Merkel’s ruling coalition were joined by 208 Social Democrats and Greens in frustrating the will of the electorate. How does a German voter punish those parties and install an alternative government? When even mavericks such as the Greens are joining the establishment consensus, where can voters turn?

There is no salvation within the parliamentary – or at least the party – system. It was our own Westminster parliament that first made the intoxicating discovery, when it abolished capital punishment in 1965 against the wishes of the public, that by uniting across party lines it could assume dictatorial powers and reduce the electorate to impotence. Enforced mass immigration and a host of other unpopular measures followed in the subsequent four decades, so that today the alienation of the public from the political class is irreversible. This is an international phenomenon and the backlash has begun. In Greece, where violence and even civil war are now possibilities, the recurrent vox populi last week was: “It will be very dangerous for politicians.”

When the New York Times, the house magazine of totalitarian liberal consensus, runs the headline “As scorn for vote grows, protests surge around globe”, it is evident something is stirring. The accompanying article highlighted the anti-corruption protests led by hunger-striking Anna Hazare in India, unprecedented street demonstrations in Israel, the Greek unrest and the crisis in Spain, where a 27-year-old girl told a reporter: “We’re the first generation to say that voting is worthless.” No wonder. The European Union, having siphoned the power from national parliaments, is now breaking its own laws. The ECB’s purchase of bonds to defend debtor governments is illegal under Article 123 of the Lisbon Treaty. The Eurocrats are out of control.

Nevertheless, we should not romanticise national parliaments: it was those chambers of traitors that surrendered sovereignty to Brussels. It is with domestic parliaments, however, that any reform must begin. Telling young people today they should be prepared to die for democracy – meaning one-forty-millionth of a say, once every four years, as to which gang of scoundrels gets its turn to plunder the country – has as much resonance as reheated king-and-country rhetoric from 1914.

Is small beautiful? When devolution was introduced in Scotland, big claims were made for Holyrood as a “listening” parliament. That bubble burst in the second year of its existence when more than a million people voted in an independent referendum to retain Section 2a but the parliament ignored them and repealed it. The Scottish Parliament was supposed to attract independent-minded people from all walks of life; but the party managers, from day one, were the door-keepers, maintaining it as an exclusive preserve of hack politicians and public-sector pondlife.

To restore freedom it may prove necessary to abolish parliaments. First, however, an attempt should be made to reform them. They must be radically restructured to become representative. The priority should be to abolish the gang culture, ie the party system. The invention of political parties, beginning with the treasonable Green Ribbon Club, remote antecedent of today’s Liberal Democrats, in 1679, was Britain’s poisoned legacy to the world. This toxic cell form subsequently hosted both the Communist and Nazi bacillus. It is the enemy of freedom. Party whips should first be outlawed, then parties statutorily dissolved. Only independents should be allowed to stand for parliament.

Simultaneously, a new Bill of Rights should remove entire areas of people’s lives from political intrusion. Parliament’s legislative powers should be restricted within constitutionally defined limits and many existing laws, particularly politically correct impositions, repealed. The intruder state must be excluded from all but the most necessary functions of government: no more bans and PC diktats. The obvious objection is that this transformation would have to be effected by parliament, controlled by political parties. The outcome depends on the public will: if a few hooded hooligans can paralyse the authorities, would a resurgent nation reclaiming its rights encounter insuperable resistance? Economic collapse could prove the catalyst for political regeneration.