Carswell puts a bomb under Cameron.......

Surprisingly, the pit-bulls of the Tory propaganda machine have not been let loose on Douglas Carswell. The house-journal of the Conservative Party, the Daily Telegraph, has published articles by Peter Oborne and Norman Tebbitt  praising him as a man of principle, a conviction politician whose main motivation is service his constituents  and his country, unusual attributes in these days of ventriloquists dolls, party hacks and slippery careerists.

 

Carswell put his finger on what many voters suspect; that Cameron is insincere about the future of Europe and Britain’s place within it, that the referendum is a sham, and that Cameron will feed enough half-truths into the campaign to persuade people to vote on ‘the devil you know’ basis’ rather than launch out into deep and uncertain waters. An older, heavily Tory-voting generation will recall how a predecessor of Cameron’s, Edward Heath, lied and concealed the real truth about what the British were letting themselves in for when they voted yes in the only previous referendum.

 

Heath convinced the majority that they were voting for a ‘common market’ when in fact they were deceived into voting for ‘ever closer (political) union’, the basic principle of Jean Monnet from the very beginning. Monnet also advocated that Europhiles should keep quiet about in case they frightened the horses.

 

As we have seen, the outcome is that the supremacy of Parliament has been destroyed, along with the final  authority of the English courts.

 

But the Carswell thunderbolt is about more than the EU.

 

It is about our broken political system itself; the almost universal distrust of and contempt for politicians. Put simply, the people no longer believe them. Governance has become a cosy oligarchy of the political class which is motivated by ambition and power rather than ideology. ‘They are all the same’ is the common feeling. Carswell summed it up when he said that politicians of all stripes make promises, talk much and when in power do nothing and  casually break promises until the whole grubby round of mendacity begins again as an election looms.

 

The voting system itself has become an absurdity when the winner of an election can be a party that gets fewer total votes than those gained by the loser. It was further debauched when Nick Clegg blocked the revision of constituency boundaries in a fit of pique after losing his AV referendum. And so we continue with the nonsense of the Tories having to get far more votes to win a seat than the Labour Party simply because of population distortions.

 

But God forbid that we should adopt the ‘party list’ system in  which the parties have a pecking order with MPs elected on the total number of votes gained by each party overall. This completely destroys the nexus between MP and voter because there are no longer constituencies as we know them.

 

The solution seems to lie with the second transferrable vote; when a candidate is top of the poll but does not have an overall a majority the second preference is counted.

 

Will it happen?

 

No chance. Any changes will be those that strengthen the position of those in power, and the voters can just whistle.