Bernard Ingham: Abuses of power must be halted to save British democracy

WINSTON Churchill has something to answer for. He once said “democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”.

To this day very few would challenge his assertion. But many would argue that it has become a source of complacency when there is nothing for the democracies to be complacent about.

Indeed, democracy continues to make a very bad fist of preventing abuses of power. You can see the results of its failure in the eurozone crisis and the global financial meltdown that preceded the Greek tragedy.

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To quote only four domestic examples, it lies behind such ills as the Government’s £150bn budget deficit that Gordon Brown and Ed Balls were allowed to run up; the Parliamentary expenses scandal, which has badly damaged respect for our politicians; a public sector that is seriously out of control; and the disgraceful self-indulgence of FTSE 100 directors with an average annual earnings rise of 49 per cent while sacking the poor bloody infantry as the economy stutters.

Government, as the democratic representative and supposed protector of the people, signally failed to curb capitalist excesses that have now produced four years of at best economic stagnation that steadily impoverishes the worst off. Given the global power of the City of London, this was a terrible dereliction of duty.

Parliamentary scrutiny – and the much vaunted adversarial nature of Westminster – did very little to curb Brown’s ruinous spending spree or, put another way, wholesale bribery of the voters with their own money.

It has manifestly failed to keep public sector pay and perks within bounds or to ensure that the people get their money’s worth out of our servants. But is it any wonder when too many Parliamentarians had their noses in the trough?

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Westminster’s porous expenses system may not have been as open to abuse as the European Parliament’s regime, but that is no excuse.

Local government seems to exist not any more to provide basic services to residents but to withdraw them – e.g. weekly rubbish collection – and to offset Government cuts by dinning taxpayers for ever more charges while blaming the coalition for hard-to-justify attacks on front line responsibilities. But then our democracy has allowed the concept of service to the public – where it existed – to go out of the window. The whole edifice of the caring state is crumbling for lack of care – and control. The regular litany of poor standards of care of the vulnerable and NHS failings are cases in point.

Worse still, technology is steadily and spectacularly eroding service to the people. All you get out of the ramifications of the average telephone option system – assuming you can get through in the first place – is rising blood pressure and snorts of derision when a disembodied voice says “your call is important to us”. If it were, it would be answered promptly with an audible desire to help you.

In this respect, our democracy, in its idle complacency, is actively depriving the elderly whose lives have been overtaken by accountants concerned not with consumer service but with the bottom line.

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You may well ask what some of this has got to do with democracy. The answer quite simply is that democracy is supposed to be government of the people, by the people, for the people. It may be the first two but it surely is not for the people – least of all for those it is supposed to defend: the weak.

The longer it fails to recognise this, the worse it will get.

I have no time for the part-time anti-capitalist demonstrators outside St Paul’s Cathedral. They are just troublemakers who have been greatly assisted in securing publicity but not curbing abuse by a pathetic clergy.

But their “ opportunism and cynicism”, to quote Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, is battening on to a problem. Unfortunately, they offer no solution. Only a root and branch overhaul of our – and Western – democracy with an emphasis on prevention of abuse will suffice.

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It might usefully start with the EU which is run by an unelected Commission in cahoots with an anonymously useless Euro-Parliament and a far from independent Euro-judiciary. David Cameron will ignore the recent Tory rebellion over an EU referendum at his – and our – peril. Over time, when democracies fail the people, some of Churchill’s other forms of governance are tried. We must avoid that. We shall only do so if abuses of power are effectively curbed. Action this day.

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