General Election rumour

Good. No election. Well, I'll qualify that a little - the relatively short pain of a three week campaign could have seen friend and former council colleague Steve Goddard give Andrew Smith some unwanted leisure time for Christmas, which would have been fantastic - but I'm pleased we won't have to for now.

There may now be three, four, even five more party conferences in which to whip up a storm of revolutionary liberalism to really wow the electorate with a genuine alternative to the "cosy consensus" which, in my opinion anyway, is not evident right now in our policies. Time to give the FPC some breathing space from the poll obsessed campaign strategists to come up with really radical policies and instruct those strategists to sell them, not be hemmed in by what they say they can and cannot sell.

2009 will see the centenary of Lloyd George's "People's Budget" and we can develop a compelling theme in two years around "Liberal Britain: unfinished business" hijacked as the political landscape has been for a century alternately by the socialism and protectionism of Labour and Conservative governments, now merged into one amorphous mass of interfering statism.

That the hysteria of the past few days can be put down to a Tory announcement of a tax shift amounting to not much more than a half of one per cent of the government budget from the super-rich to the merely very rich just proves the paucity of imagination currently pervading both politicians and public. Ming Campbell has been right in suggesting that there's not a fag paper between the two halves of the statist party led by Brown and Cameron, and the past two weeks have seen nothing to disabuse us of that.

The time for radicalism is now. Radical liberalism. We don't merely want the "people to decide" but for the people to be able to take back power over their own lives. The power that once marked us out as British; dynamic, enterprising and freedom loving but which has been subdued, even nearly killed off perhaps through decades of dependency and government managerialism.

There seems to be a spate of group self-abuse going on with excitement at the prospects of a general election. I do not share this excitement. Indeed I look upon the prospect with dread and depression. I'm a democrat, right? So I should welcome the chance for the people to have their say, right? Wrong.

I'm with Winston when he said:

No!
Originally uploaded by Mig_R

"Look at all the power [Mr Attlee] is enjoying today. No Government in time of peace has ever had such arbitrary power over the lives and actions of the British people, and no Government has ever failed more completely to meet their daily practical needs. Yet the right hon. Gentleman and his colleagues are avid for more power."

Nobody currently vying for Mr Attlee's job today even remotely proposes sufficiently to reduce what Churchill went on to call "this idea of a group of supermen and super-planners, such as we see before us, “playing the angel,” as the French call it, and making the masses of the people do what they think is good for them, without any check or correction, [which] is a violation of democracy."

No!
Originally uploaded by Will...

The stakes are abhorrently high. That you and your coterie of friends and sycophants should have control over the better part of half of the entire nation's income. And with it the power to condone or more frequently condemn the personal choices of millions - more, probably, than lived under the Pax Augusta in Rome's entire empire.

I want a revolution. A revolution of devolution. I want power, the vast majority of it at least, held by people I can go and meet at my local civic centre. If there is anything that needs a joint decision between two or more civic centres let them agree on it mutually, and if, in the very last resort, something that has to be dealt with at a national level, let them send representatives to argue the case on an ad hoc basis if possible but with a minimum of permanent representatives - just enough to give every civic centre a voice - if necessary.

No! Not even you!
Originally uploaded by Ming Campbell

And I want to be able to elect some of them every year so that if they are not doing a good job we can make our views plain on a sort of a "1 year moving average" basis to which they will necessarily have to react by forming and reforming their power sharing agreements to reflect the true will of the electors.

I find it repugnant that anyone believes they are so much greater than any of the rest of us that they believe they can run the country and our lives better than the Almighty gave us the free will to do for ourselves. They should humble themselves to recall again what Churchill said:

"Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters."

We seem to be at the last roundabout on the road to Serfdom (probably courtesy of some new town super-planner). We must decide to go right round it and head back the way we came.

Coincidentally, overnight I've been pointed to this article by a fellow Georgist, Fred Folvary, on a similar issue on the other side of the pond.

I don't normally do gossip on here. But I guess this is not really gossip as much as a "make of it what you will" fact.  And I'm sure that all MPs are currently geeing up their activists just in case but anyway, I thought you might be interested to know...

I hear from a friend that Oxford East MP Andrew Smith has sent an email to Labour activists in the constituency to the effect that a General Election could be as little as nine weeks away.

Andrew was/is reportedly a confidante of Gordo; indeed he was his first Chief Secretary. This was an email to activists as far as I can tell, rather than all supporters. He's certainly already sent out personalized letters to constituents over the past few weeks and another friend the other week (not a party activist I am sure, but likely on a supporter list somewhere) had had a phone call from him discussing "issues".

As I say - make of it what you will. I merely report what I heard.