Ed Hallam is the editor of the successful YoungConservative blog. Here, he writes exclusively for the YBF website about his thoughts on liberty, and the rotten state of politics.
There is nothing special about MPs. 646 laymen and women, sitting on green leather sofas, be they crooked or clean, well-intentioned or socialist, they are no better equipped to dictate our liberty than each of us is individually. So why do we persist in believing otherwise?
In the wake of recent events, and for as long as politicians have sought votes, the buzz words have been ‘reform’, ‘change’, ad nausea. But all this is just so much window-dressing. Brown can fiddle with how they’re elected, and Cameron can fiddle with their roll call, but none of this gets close to the heart of the problem: Government is the problem.
Britons have never been offered a say on genuine change. Rousseau, during a break from painting roseate pictures of the State of Nature, said, “The people of England think they are free. They are gravely mistaken. They are free only during the election of Members of Parliament”, and never was a truer word spoken. When our politicians speak of change the conversation essentially turns on legislating more (or legislating more wisely, as the opposition would have it), or spending more (or spending more wisely), our way towards some utopia on the horizon. From the way they speak, one could be forgiven for thinking that politicians genuinely believe the secrets of good governance have been revealed exclusively to them in some Damascene moment, circa the parking of their posteriors on those aforementioned green couches.
Britons deserve a direct voice on the countless pieces of legislation that have either been passed without their direct approval, or which have simply never been tabled at all. They deserve a vote on our membership of the EU, the legalisation of narcotics, abortion rights and euthanasia, to headline but a few topics.
One common objection to the idea of direct democracy and giving the public a vote on all legislation, or even just major legislation, is the impracticality of getting a sufficient amount of electors to the polls to give the result any legitimacy, let alone doing so frequently, and quite aside from the cost and technological obstacles.
But the truth is there is no one-size-fits-all perfect society. One only has to recall the fallacy of Gaunilo’s ‘Perfect Island’ to prove that. But governments of all creeds are, wilfully or otherwise, blind to this, as typified by their penchant for ‘constitutions’, ‘charters’ and even ‘Bills of Rights’. Consistently they all miss the point – a constitution, a Bill of Rights, is meant to be the people telling the government what its limits are, and not the government telling the people where the boundaries of their liberties lie.
The genius of the American system is States’ rights. Some legislation, such as the First and Second Amendments, rightly, are inalienable rights, if with some tinkering around the edges being permissible so as to represent prevailing local proclivities. But much more legislation, from gay marriage to levying of many taxes, is left to the discretion of the State and its citizens.
It is this system we ought to import. So, speeding ahead for brevity, if the good people of Worcestershire wish to legalise cannabis, let them. If the people of Nottinghamshire do not, let them not; but stop permitting the twin tyrannies of mass democracy and Westminster to trump individual liberty.
This is of course a superficial analysis – many ancillary aspects need consideration on an issue-by-issue basis. But none of that delivers a body blow to the concept itself of devolving democracy to a local level. Doing so would create a market in liberty, allowing those who wished to live free to move to areas which best suited them, and for those with a taste for a more authoritarian life to be sated, too. Our counties could become laboratories of liberty.
In essence, then, it’s time central government took its hands out of our pockets, its noses out of our private lives, and its preaching out of our personal morality.
Let people vote directly on all matters pertaining to the private individual and local affairs, while letting central government stick to providing and managing in trust for us that which we cannot provide or manage for ourselves, and nothing else.
This year’s must-go-to YBF Summer Party is, thanks to the generous support of Peter Stringfellow, being held at Stringfellows Angels, 201 Wardour Street, Soho, London W1F 8ZH on Wednesday, 22 July 2009 from 9pm.
