This week, Simon Alexander MP examines the arguments for abolishing his own job and Westminster as a whole
Once again Remembrance Sunday comes round at the end of the first week of November, and we pause at 11am on the 11th day of the 11th month to remember an Armistice that only a handful of people alive in 1918 can mark in 2026. Even the World War Two fighters, who are or are almost centenarians, are close to the end of their lives. We must never forget the blood, sweat, toil and tears of those magnificent men in their flying machines who kept Britain safe against Nazism and their allies.
Exercising the Chancellor, as it always does, is how much of the pie that represents 100% of the national Gross Domestic Product we should allot to defence and foreign aid. How much money should we ringfence, in preference to funding schools, building houses and modernising hospitals and roads, to protect the realm against the enemy? When do we buy a tank or a torpedo in preference to tackling rough sleeping? Mr Healey, the Army will see you now. Knives to gunfights.
Meanwhile, Adam Ramsay has declared war on me and my 649 friends! Let me explain: the man who was once president of the Edinburgh University Students’ Association has become a professional campaigner, which is of a piece with a man who literally had a Campaigns Show on Fresh Air, the university student radio station. He has just brought out a book called Abolish Westminster, which builds on the work of Isabel Hardman and Ian Dunt, who have both concluded that, after close inspection, our Parliament is no longer fit for purpose.
Here’s the bumpf for the book, which came out on Faber & Faber on (of course it did) November 5: ‘Go to any street in Britain and ask people what they think about politics, and most will tell you that it is broken, that they “don’t trust any of them” – our politicians. In other words, they believe our system doesn’t work, or that it works only for a chosen few, the elites.
‘Lifting the lid on the British state and society, Abolish Westminster explains why. Examining the lack of accountability faced by our major governmental departments, the pliancy of our cultural institutions and the malleability of national identity, it reveals how power and money are often bent back to the powerful and wealthy – and how, historically, this has almost always been the case, producing disastrous effects. And so, Adam Ramsay points to a radical possibility in an effort to re-establish democracy: breaking up Britain.
‘Abolish Westminster defines the democratic deficit that plagues Britain’s political system at a critical moment for the country. In the face of this, it confronts a crucial dilemma with a hopeful clarion call: do things have to be this way, and what might the alternative be?’
Ramsay is still based in his birthplace of Scotland, so that desire to ‘break up Britain’ includes going back on the Act of Union. Hence his argument, as per the book’s subtitle, ‘for a new democracy’. Although he says Abolish Westminster is mainly a diagnosis, not a solution, Ramsay suggests that Scotland and Wales draw up their own constitution and the two bits of the Irish island undergo a ‘refounding’. Three centuries after the Act of Union, Ramsay thinks being Scottish, or Welsh, is akin to ‘being a passenger in a car watching as the driver has a nervous breakdown’. Good line, very Monbiot.
‘You’re not going to make me read another book that you can’t be arsed to,’ Vish said rather than asked, having polished off a croissant last Thursday.
‘What else are you doing this weekend? Got some fireworks to watch out of patriotic duty to This Place?’
‘Gunpowder and treason,’ Em trilled. ‘It’s so much more out in the open these days.’
‘Imagine having to keep the plot secret that you were going to blow up Parliament. It’d be like The Traitors,’ I said. ‘Quick, quiz time: who were the other blokes who were executed?’
‘Oh one of them’s a weird name,’ Vish said. ‘Babington thingy?’
‘Babington was the guy who wanted to get Mary, Queen of Scots on the throne. Em?’
‘Pass,’ she said, busying herself with one of the newspapers she pores over every day to help me formulate opinions about the issues of the day, and also the answer to the question: How much is a loaf of bread?
‘Oh you’re so dull! The answers are Robert Keyes, Thomas Wintour and Ambrose Rookwood.’
‘I told you one of them was a weird name.’
‘Vish, you don’t get any points for that. Now could I have some coffee, and I’ll go and buy the ebook for you.’
The coffee was excellent, by the way. Vish really has perfected the caffeination, which is what happens when you put your 10,000 hours in. Ambrose Rookwood, though, what a name. Nigel Farage and Robert Jenrick just aren’t the same.
And so, as of today, Vish is completing a summary of a book written to put me, him and Em out of a job. As I was writing some emails yesterday evening – ‘looking forward to this year’s Carol Service’ etc etc – I tuned into Ramsay’s appearance to plug the book with the progressive site Left Foot Forward, which was incepted by Will Straw, son of Jack. Given that progressives are back in control of the legislature, it seems bizarre that they have let Ramsay on to try and make sure that nobody can control it by getting rid of it entirely.
Astutely, he ticks off a list of grievances shared by other members of This Place: the Chamber is too small; there is no transparency in where the cash from all the lobbying goes; some of the Lords seem only to exist as intermediaries to get money to MPs; First Past The Post isn’t fit for purpose; and there are disagreements with the Royal Prerogative, which is exercised to appoint ministers of state (as you may know, I cannot criticise the Windsors as an MP so I will plead the fifth, as we don’t say over here). And what’s all this about the PM wanting to roll back neoliberalism?
In conversation with the current Editor-in-Chief of openDemocracy Aman Sethi (Ramsay used to investigate for them), the author continues to chat about what he has discovered in clinical observation of UK democracy, and indeed democracy in general. In Laos, people cannot even discuss politics for fear of arrest, but in the UK trust has torpedoed further down into the ocean of chaos than in other countries. Sethi came to the UK from India, and he is aghast that nobody can pinpoint where power lies (hint: it’s not with me, your friendly constituency MP).
I’m not sure if it’s gangrene or cancer or fibrosis that blights what Ramsay dubs ‘its absurd empire state system’, but it’s not good for This Place. Don’t worry if you think this week’s diary entry is too short: the BBC is up next week, and that’s always an Oxbridge essay.