The re-birth of British democracy

Over the past few weeks the British public have witnessed endless revelations by the media concerning, among other items, the second-home expenses of members of both the Houses of Commons and of the Lords.

The nature of the expenses claimed and the outrage, anger and disgust of the British public at these revelations were unprecedented. It led some political analysts to suggest that restoring confidence in the British political system will require nothing less than the re-birth of British democracy. The fundamentals need to be restored in public life: transparency, responsibility and accountability.

The abuse of the British taxpayer’s money by some MPs has effectively ensured that corruption can no longer practically be used as an effective tool of foreign policy to criticise leaders who fall out favour with a British government or fail to see eye to eye on political issues such as Saddam Hussein. These revelations have clearly shown that, given the opportunity, those who practise democracy are no more immune from corruption than are tyrants and dictators and others in government in the developing countries..

The loss of civil liberty in Britain over the past ten years or so and some of the draconian measures embodied in the anti-terrorism legislation will make it much harder for British politicians to appropriate the moral high ground on principles of human rights in foreign policy.International politics may now be played on a more level field. The doyens of democracy may therefore continue to support autocratic regimes such as that of Saudi Arabia in the absence of any genuine moral authority in their own human rights record, their obvious vulnerability to corruption and the absence of transparency in the British political system.

Described in some media circles as the most corrupt in the world, the pro-Iranian puppet government of Nouri al-Maliki was recently welcomed in Britain to conduct the business of Iraqi politics and commercially. Here, the British public should take serious note of whether any “re-birth” of British democracy will entail the shedding of old political practices, addressing not only domestic matters but the moral issues of foreign policies as well. This is because some of the discredited MPs and executives who were or are now still in government are the same individuals who lied to the British public, the Labour party and parliament in the process of dragging Britain into an illegal war against Iraq. This programme of deception by our Government placed British soldiers in harm’s way and inflicted untold pain and suffering on the Iraqi people.

In any new domestic legislation, there is a need to make the distinction between taking Britain to war for the noble cause of defending national interests and security and going to war for a personally motivated agenda. In a report published by the Guardian on 4 May, 2009, Nigel Inkster, former deputy head of MI6, said, “Britain was dragged into a war in Iraq which was always against our better judgement”.

The absence of a judicial process in the British legal system that would hold the executive accountable for war decisions has meant that a prime minister can leave office safe in the knowledge that he has literally got away with murder.

By forcing the allegedly corrupt MPs to stand down and walk the plank, the British public has a unique historic opportunity to embrace the newly elected MPs with a democratic political system based on truth, transparency and accountability, a system whereby the MPs share the moral values and concerns of the British public. Given this reform of the British system, never again could a prime minister and his closest aides take Britain to war through deception, disinformation and misinformation; never again should any nation suffer the death and destruction experienced by the Iraqi people. The British public, for example, will never know the truth of the country’s progress into this futile and illegal war until there is a fully independent public inquiry into the whole sorry affair.

So far, the British public are used through their generosity and compassion to pick up the bill of moral guilt for wars launched on their behalf when truthfully neither they nor their head of state, the Queen, have had no say in the decision to go to war.

Today Iraq, because of the invasion and continued occupation, is a lawless country replete with orphans, widows, the bereaved, the maimed and refugees. Death, destruction, ethnic cleansing and corruption are the order of the day, a political model of exported “democracy”.

The report by Lord Bingham, the Law Lord, published in the Guardian on 18 November, 2008, stated that the Iraqi people’s human and civil rights were….and remain.... swept aside by the acts of war and the continuing acts of occupation.

Therefore, the British public owe it to the Iraqi people to ensure that a newly elected British government will right the wrongs of the war and invasion of Iraq in the spirit of President Barack Obama’s promises of the need for change, in particular of the U.S. image internationally. A good start is to withdraw the support from the present corrupt Iraqi government and help establish through the UN an honest political process to free Iraq from the current US-Iranian occupation---in other words, to give Iraq back to the Iraqis. Given the opportunity, Iraqis would rather rebuild Iraq than kill each other to appease the occupiers.