May 11, 2005

The Guardian misunderstanding

The Guardian seems to have a missunderstanding about the Tyrant Blair's use of the House of Lords to create ministers without them having to face an electorate.
There are so many things wrong with this appointment, it is hard to know where to begin. Let's start with the most obvious one. Was this a spur-of-the-moment appointment, or had it been in Mr Blair's mind for some time that Mr Adonis might have a future in frontline politics? If the latter, did it occur to either man that Mr Adonis might submit himself to the electorate, as is common in most parliamentary democracies? If not, why not?
Because under the Tryant Blair democracy is what he says it is, remember most of the bills that this man pushes through will be because of Scottish votes where education bills do not apply, Labour recived less votes than the concervatives in England, if the laws do not have any democratic legitimacy why should the minister? From the postal voting scandal we already know that in a choice between democratic legitimacy and what Blair wants, what Blair wants goes.
Next question: what does the appointment tell us about Mr Blair's views on the future of the second chamber?
Exactly what we already knew from the appointment of Lord Falconer in the first term and the Tyrant Blair's repeated refusals to allow demcracy into the second chamber when he can simply fill it with cronies.
Scanning further down the list of new ministers, one's eye is caught by the appointment of Lord Smallpox, aka Paul Drayson, whose enoblement last year was swiftly followed by a cheque to party funds of half a million pounds. The noble lord is now a minister at the Ministry of Defence. It may be unkind to Lord Drayson to suggest that he effectively purchased a seat in parliament, but if the same thing happened in an African kleptocracy we might find it altogether less amusing.
Well thanks to the Tyrant Blair we already have an electoral system that would disgrace a banana republic, so why not have ministers of a similar quality.

Then onto the final misunderstanding:
Backwards or forward? When it comes to constitutional niceties, the prime minister seems to have no problem locating his reverse gear.
This is not the use of the reverse gear, he is going forward to his goal, and pushing the accelerator. The fact that his goal has nothing to do with democracy and is instead authoritarian rule is perhaps why the, clueless but well meaning, Guardian is having problems.

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