Democracy in Britain leaves a lot to be desired – like actual democracy, for example. Governments secure unconscionable power with 33% of the popular vote; parties run multi-million pound election campaigns, ensuring they owe some millionaire or business, something, sometime; the anachronism of the constituency MP is still firmly in place and not going anywhere – I could go on.

But we should recognise what’s of value in our political system, and I can think of nothing more valuable than Prime Minister’s Question Time (PMQs) and the adversarial zeal that it epitomises.

Think of it. The PM has to stand before the dispatch box, in front of a crowded chamber filled mostly with political enemies, and face half an hour of questions for which no preparation can really be taken. We can boot these people out of power with little pencils on strings once every five years or so, but the public standing of a PM can be destroyed by one bad performance (as they well know). Harold ‘Supermac’ Macmillan, that unflappable Tory, recounted in his memoirs that he would often have to pop to the gents’ to vomit with nerves before a performance at PMQs; a First World War veteran, he compared the experience to ‘going over the top’.  Who doesn’t want the PM to experience that kind of terror on a weekly basis?

The principal value of all this is that it makes the holding of the executive to account worth watching. This is something remarkable and very rare: compare those theatrical half hours on BBC Parliament with the legislative processes of most other countries, and you’ll see that this needs defending. Most European countries have hopelessly dull, ‘consensus’ – based affairs to sit through, and the goings on in the houses of America’s Congress could almost have been designed to make the savvy American voter change the channel.

C-Span, America’s main public service broadcaster (and a phenomenal aid to democracy and transparency in the US) broadcasts this half hour live to an American audience; it is one of its most popular shows. We can all feel rigid with pride thinking of Americans, living in a country racked with infantile consensus politics, sitting in their living rooms thinking, ‘Why don’t we have this?’ Image the chimp-president George W Bush subjected to this treatment for eight years. (Footnote: Proposals for an American Question Time, on the British model,  have been suggested since the days of Abraham Lincoln. Indeed, it was a little commented upon electoral pledge of John McCain, though sadly far outweighed by his choice of an illiterate demagogue for running mate).

PMQs, and the adversarial nature of Parliamentary proceedings in general, have their basis in a very British form of public culture, which has been termed a ‘boisterous democracy’. We argue in pubs, argue in our courts, argue in the street. We gravitate towards writers who don’t give a shit and have a sturdy tradition of ‘English Troublemakers’,  as A.J.P Taylor called them, who stand at the back and shout ‘Shame! Rubbish!’ at elected heads of state. Let the yanks make soothing noises about ‘bi-partisanship’, their Congress is boring.

Nigel Farage (a degenerate righty, I know) exported a bit of this spirit when he confronted our European overlord, Herman van Rompuy, in the EU Parliament. I’d encourage you to watch the short video below, and feel proud:

Nigel Farage harangues EU President Herman van Rompuy

Look how the Dutch-speakers boo and hiss!

Here’s one of the great parliamentary performances of the late Michael Foot, berating the then Industry Secretary Keith Joseph:

Michael Foot\’s Magician

This tells you all you need to know: in British political culture, it is quite acceptable for an MP to publicly humiliate a member of Her Majesty’s Government, providing the flowery language is kept to and some wit is on display.

Here’s the paragraph about how this wonderful thing is under threat: John Bercow – a lurid misogynist as it happens – has stated that the ‘abusive’ nature of PMQs needs revising. From the BBC website:

‘Mr Bercow…suggested the prime minister and opposition leaders of the day agree a “common understanding of behaviour” among their MPS, enforced by the whips, which would allow the Speaker to operate “the parliamentary equivalent of yellow and red cards…if that were to prove absolutely necessary” [My emphasis]‘

Never mind the fact that members can already be suspended for failing to keep to protocol; never mind the fact that this would constitute a great increase in power for the already over-powerful whips; and never mind the fact that the drama of PMQs  - in particular watching two grown men insult each other in fancy language – is its main appeal. David Cameron talked about ending the ‘Punch and Judy politics’ of Westminster: you know what a slimy bastard this man is when he references one quintessentially English institution to attack another. Swine.

Now that Brown’s promised to step down, it’s looking increasingly plausible that our next government will be a centre-left coalition of some kind. No doubt if this actually happens the rightwing press will go into a frenzy about how illegitimate and unfair it is for the Tories not to get into Government, but they can safely be ignored. Despite what many, including Salman on this very blog, have been claiming, a party which got 36% of the vote and 46% of the seats is not entitled to run the country if there’s a majority coalition who are willing and able to give it a shot instead. The Tories tried and failed to get majority support, so they should stop whinging and get used to the fact that nearly two thirds of the country made it very clear that we don’t want them in office.

But the problem, as so many have pointed out, is getting enough support in the Commons for an anti-Tory alliance. There are 650 Commons seats in total, but what everyone seems to have forgotten is that Sinn Féin (who have 5 MPs) don’t take up theirs. This means that a coalition would need 323 MPs or more to have an effective majority, not 325 as some people have been claiming. The breakdown in seats for the left of centre and liberal parties is as follows:

Labour and the Lib Dems have 315 seats combined, so they need 8 more for a majority. The SNP and one party out of Plaid and the SDLP would do fine. This shows that it’s doable, at least in principle. But a coalition – or even an informal agreement – between four parties like this probably wouldn’t hold together for long, especially given how rude Labour were when Alex Salmond suggested precisely this. So my solution? Form the coalition, but for as short a time as possible. Try and hold it together for just long enough to bring in the change our political system’s been crying out for. Just long enough to ensure the Tories never get to impose their bastard rightwing policies on the left-leaning majority of us again. Just long enough, in short, to bring in electoral reform. As I’ve said before, I’m agnostic as to which version of electoral reform we should favour (though Reuben’s arguments against AV are pretty convincing), but it needs to happen and needs to happen soon. And once it’s in place? Call another election. Yes, I know it’ll be difficult to get people out on the streets campaigning so soon after this one, but at least with some kind of PR in place everyone’s vote would actually matter at last. And how much better would it be for an uneasy four(or more)-party coalition like the one I’m proposing to split at a time of its own choosing rather than to disintergrate from petty infighting? It’s a long shot, I know. But I think it’s our best hope.

Ian Kennedy – the man in charge of overhauling the parliamentary expenses – has done a good job of encapsulating all that I dislike about post-expenses scandal attitudes. In a speech to the IPPR he suggested that parliamentary expenses are inflated by the house choosing “work its own idiosyncratic hours” and that costs could be slashed by a 9-5 regime.  This would save on bills for taxis and overnight stays.

There are certainly areas of the state in which a degree penny pinching might be justified. But the operation of our democracy is not one of them. The passing of legislation should be subject to long and extensive debate – going on into the night if necessary – by our elected representatives. The idea that this should be curtailed for the sake of saving a few thousand pounds really does treat Parliament as though it were just another civil service department.

Yet Kennedy’s proposal is fitting for an age in which the lines between government and management have been blurred, in which policy making has become just another discipline, and in which commentators – both left and right – like nothing more than to defer to experts, and go orgasmic at the mention of “evidence based policy”. If some people desire nothing more than parliament that is efficient, then current parliamentarians too must take some blame for doing all too little to demonstrate what is special about the supposed epicentre of our democracy.

Tom Harris is being silenced. At least according to his latest blog post, entitled ‘Silence those who dare to disagree with us!’. He has taken exception to an advert in the Guardian, posted by constitutional reform activists Power 2010, which attacks 6 MPs for opposing electoral reform. And Tom is deeply aggrieved to be on the recieving end of such opposition. “Hang on”, he writes,

I actually oppose PR because I think it’s A Bad Thing. I believe it would be bad for our country and bad for democracy. Disagree with me by all means, argue against me, but allow me to have my own opinion. Do Power2010 believe that I should vote for something, support it in public, even against my better judgment, just because they disagree with me? Is that what constitutional reform has come down to – silencing parliamentarians with whom you disagree?

Except nobody is attempting to silence Tom. What they are in fact doing is attacking him for the positions he has chosen to express. It seems pretty obvious that this is how democracy is meant to work: Tom Harris, as a parliamentarian, has the right vote and speak as he wishes, and groups of citizens have the right to oppose him for how he votes and what he says.

What Tom Harris seems to want is not simply the “right to express his opinion”. Rather he wants the right to advocate what he wants without being held to account, or politically attacked by those who disagree with him. Perhaps he would be more at home in another parliament… I’m thinking North Korea.

After 4,500 submissions and 100,000 votes, the POWER 2010 pledge has finally been revealed.

1. Introduce a proportional voting system.

2. Scrap ID cards and roll back the database state.

3. Replace the House of Lords with an elected chamber.

4. Allow only English MPs to vote on English laws.

5. Draw up a written constitution.

I, and others writing for this site, have drawn some criticism for our broad support for the deliberative process of the POWER2010 campaign. However, for me, this moment was always going to be crunch time. Can I comfortably put my name to POWER2010’s finalised pledge as chosen by members of the British public? Well, let’s go through each in turn.

1. Introduce a proportional voting system: By far the most popular suggestion. Indeed it formed the core of my idea for POWER2010. Any democratic reform has to start with proportional representation. A two-party state is only twice as democratic as a dictatorship, after all, and if we are to see a new kind of politics in this country, it has to include new voices from across the political spectrum. There are those who would argue that proportional representation will only let the extremists in. But curtailing democracy to keep the likes of the BNP out is not the correct answer to their challenge. Rather it is part of the problem as people feel increasingly alienated from the political process when forced to choose between two parties whose policies often appear indistinguishable. Red, blue and yellow just won’t cut it anymore. I want to see a rainbow Parliament and in this, I fully support POWER2010’s aim.

2. Scrap ID cards and roll back the database state: Whilst not so much a reform of the political system, this is still, in my view, a very necessary demand. At best ID cards are a pointless expense. At worst they are part and parcel of New Labour’s systematic erosion of civil liberties and human rights. Together with DNA databases retaining the records of thousands of people never convicted of any crime, anti-terror laws, detention without trial and an explosion of CCTV, they represent an alarming trend. I am not paranoid enough to suggest that they amount to a police state, or even that in and of themselves ID cards will curtail the everyday freedoms of the British public. However, in a democratic society, it is important to resist these small steps towards the removal of basic freedoms while we can. Because once they’re all gone, it’s too late to speak out. For this objective, POWER2010 gets another tick from me.

3. Replace the House of Lords with an elected chamber: It is a startlingly anachronistic aberration that in a democratic society with a bicameral Parliament, we can have an upper house that is unaccountable to the people. The second step to mending Britain’s broken political system, I have always argued, is to have a directly elected upper house and I am behind POWER2010 all the way on this point.

4. Allow only English MPs to vote on English laws: Devolution has done wonders for the Scottish and the Welsh. However it has left the largest part of the United Kingdom without its own legislative body. Banning non-English MPs from voting on English laws, however, has always seemed to me a messy and incomplete answer to the problem. Moreover, it sends the message that the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is primarily the Parliament of England. It would be better, in my opinion, to have a separate English Parliament, or to devolve powers regionally. In any case, this issue has never been high up on my list of priorities. I was surprised by the number of votes the suggestion received, but mine certainly wasn’t among them.

5. Draw up a written constitution: Always a tricky issue if one’s not sure exactly what would be in this written constitution. Historical example, however, and in particular the American case, tends to show that written constitutions are more a means to constrain democracy rather than enable it. Often used to prevent the ‘tyranny of the majority’, written constitutions, with a few notable exceptions, reign in the power of far-reaching reform. In any case, I do not believe that the problem with British politics, and the public’s engagement with it, is our lack of a written constitution and I would be tempted to say, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

Well, that’s my humble opinion on the POWER2010 pledge. And to paraphrase Meatloaf, three out of five ain’t bad. I have, therefore, decided to support the POWER2010 pledge, with a few caveats. None of these reforms will come easy, however. Unless we see a hung parliament with Labour desperate to court the Lib Dems, it may well take more than one election to see the most important democratic reforms through. And the true test of POWER2010’s effectiveness will be in its staying power after the General Election. It cannot afford to be another Make Poverty History, or a flash in the pan playing with people’s expectations. In politics as in sex, no one likes a quick finisher.

The Third Estate is brought to you today by the letters DEMOCRACY and the number 2010. In just one month the Power2010 campaign has received over 2000 ideas to reform our political system. To highlight their launch, I invited Guy Aitchison to set out the campaign’s stall in a piece that was met with mixed reactions, and some head banging from Dave Semple who has just written a detailed rebuttal of the campaign’s approach, alongside a picture of Wolfie Smith praying for the glorious day. Last week, Guy returned the favour by tagging me in his new meme to encourage bloggers to post their own suggestions for Power2010. I would have responded to it sooner had I not been writing up my interview with Nick Clegg who, amongst the usual policy platitudes, said: “One of the great things about Power2010 is that it’s asking for your ideas, from people well beyond the bubble at Westminster. I’m really looking forward to reading what people come up with after November 30th. Politicians don’t know it all, and we have to ask people directly if we’re to know what they want.” That’s how big it’s got.

Do I think Power2010 is the answer to the millions of British people who are rightly disenfranchised with a broken political system? I don’t know. But then, I didn’t really think we were going to stop the war either and I gave that my best shot too. So here goes, my grand plan come that glorious day!

When I am king, you will be first against the wall

The Lords have got to go. Almost a century has passed since the Parliament Act and we still have an unelected upper house. No serious approach to democratic reform can begin without addressing the Lords.

What do we want? Democracy! When do we want it? Erm. Now!

The crucial stumbling block for leaders trying to reconnect people with politics is the first-past-the-post method, which essentially leads to a system based on voters choosing the major party they dislike the least. When, as in the last decade, the difference between the two main parties appears to have evaporated faster than Gordon Brown’s popularity, people begin to believe that their vote won’t make a difference. That’s why they stay at home. That’s why Nick Griffin ends up on Question Time. The answer to both problems is, quite simply, to introduce proportional representation. Not only will it ensure that people can vote for who they want to run the country, rather than just voting against who they don’t want to run the country, but it will turn the House of Commons from a tricolour into a rainbow, giving people a genuine choice and reconnecting politics with ideology.

Please sir, I want some more lollipop ladies outside my school

The biggest potential drawback to proportional representation is that it might remove one of the most popular elements of British democracy: the local MP who hears the concerns of their constituents, represents them to Parliament and faces losing their seat if they fail to do so. This is where the Lords come in. I propose an upper house composed of constituency politicians directly elected by the alternative vote system to sit alongside a lower house that proportionately represents the wider passions of the people. All neatly tied up? I think so. Why am I not Prime Minister yet?

For some strange reason I can’t quite fathom, other people have different (some might even say better) ideas for democratic reform. So I’d like to tag a few of them. Some may be sympathetic to Power2010’s aims and objectives. Others may prefer to bang their heads. It’s their choice. That’s democracy.

Jim Jepps – The Daily (Maybe)

Andy Newman – Socialist Unity

Phil BC – A Very Public Sociologist

Derek Wall – Another Green World

Carl Packman – Raincoat Optimism

Left Outside

Walking through security at Portcullis House, the fabulously expensive building standing adjacent to the Houses of Parliament, is a bit like going through any airport anywhere in the world. But making your way through the spacious courtyard, past green trees and sun-dappled water features under the enormous sparkling glass dome towering overhead, you could be forgiven for thinking that this is still the seat of power of a great empire. The man I’m here to see, however, is one of the country’s most vocal critics of imperialism. George Galloway rises from his computer to shake my hand as I enter his office. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he says. I remind him we met once before when he came to destroy a pro-war American politician at the Cambridge Union many years ago. “You’re far too young to say that,” he laughs.

Born in 1954, Galloway joined the Labour Party at the tender age of thirteen and has been a Member of Parliament since 1987. His strident opposition to the Iraq war, describing Bush and Blair as wolves and calling on British troops to disobey orders, led to his expulsion from the party in 2003. “His comments were disgraceful and wrong,” Tony Blair said. But Galloway has never been one to lie down in the face of his enemies. The following year he formed a new left-wing anti-war party, Respect, and in a stunning victory overturned a Labour majority of over 10,000 to oust Blairite Oona King in Bethnal Green and Bow. Since then, however, Respect has suffered a disastrous split, whilst Galloway has found himself having to fend off a barrage of media criticism for his famous decision to appear on Celebrity Big Brother in 2006. With a general election just months away, I ask George Galloway what he thinks his chances are of holding his seat.

“Well I’m not standing again in Bethnal Green and Bow,” he tells me. “Because I promised last time that I’d stand only once and if the people elected me, the next MP for the constituency would be a Bengali.” It’s a straight fight between Labour and Respect in Bethnal Green and Bow, Galloway explains, and with both parties selecting a Bengali candidate, his promise looks set to be kept. “For the first time, the Bengali community will have a member in the House of Commons and that’s something I’m particularly proud of.” Galloway has instead chosen to stand in the neighbouring Tower Hamlets constituency of Poplar and Limehouse. “We have a fighting chance of winning both seats,” he says. Galloway also believes Respect has a chance of breaking through in Birmingham – where the party came a close second in 2005 – and of Salma Yaqoob becoming the first ever Muslim woman MP. “If we could pull those three off, I could retire a happy man four years later.” Respect was founded in 2004 as a coalition seeking to bring together the disparate strands of perhaps the greatest mass movement in modern political history. In practice, what emerged was an alliance between George Galloway, a few prominent anti-war activists and the Socialist Workers Party. In 2007, for absolutely no reason that seems at all relevant, the party split in half and the SWP walked out. I ask Galloway if the split has harmed Respect’s chances of achieving the breakthrough he hopes for. “I don’t know if it’s damaged our electability. Certainly not if we do win three seats. Even having one seat in 2005 was almost unprecedented. It had been 60 years since a left of Labour party last won a seat in Parliament in 1945. And in the same constituency by the way.” Galloway has to admit, however, that the split has definitely affected the party’s power outside of Parliament. “The departure of key activists and leaders has weakened us. About half the members left.” I ask Galloway how many members Respect still has. “I don’t have the exact figure,” he says. “It’s a small number of thousands.”

In an interview with The Third Estate in June, Mark Steel told me that the feud in Respect was about nothing that anyone can work out. It has often seemed to me that whilst the left sits on the steps of the amphitheatre shouting splitters at each other and arguing about what society should look like after the revolution, it is failing to speak to ordinary people about the everyday issues that affect their lives. I ask Galloway how he would explain the split to voters who care about social justice and jobs and housing, but have little interest in sectarian squabbling. “With respect to you, and I don’t mean at all to be offensive, I wouldn’t care to explain it to anyone,” Galloway says. “I think that the arcane disputatious nature of the far-left in Britain is of interest only to the cognoscente and the cognoscente already know the reasons.” Galloway pauses as his phone rings. Sorting out a quick bit of business in ten seconds, he apologises before continuing. “For the rest of the public, Respect was always me, Salma Yaqoob, Ken Loach and so on, and it still is. So we’d rather go forward than look back.”

Respect, of course, will not be standing in every constituency at the next general election. “There are 649 seats, that’s beyond any small party of the left. We will be standing in more seats than just those three, but they’re the target seats.” In the constituencies where Respect is not standing, Galloway explains that they will back other progressive candidates. “Brighton, for example, where Caroline Lucas is standing for the Green Party and has a real chance of winning. I expect that we would support her, we haven’t made final decisions on these constituencies yet. Similarly Peter Tatchell is standing in Oxford, we would probably support him. There may be one or two other places where we would support a left, anti-war candidate.” I ask Galloway – who has branded the three main parties as “Tweedle-Dee, Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee and a half” – whether he would call for a vote for Labour to keep the Conservatives out, and am genuinely surprised by the firebrand MP’s response. “We definitely want the Tories to be defeated, so for the most part that would mean that we ask people to vote Labour.” It was understandable that Respect backed Ken Livingstone against Boris Johnson in last year’s election for London Mayor. But would Respect really ask people to vote for an arch New Labourite who voted for the war? “Most of them are arch New Labourites who backed the war, so we wouldn’t be able to have that as a hard and fast rule. It’s unlikely that the worst of the war criminals would attract our support, but we wouldn’t be able to use who voted for the war entirely as a yardstick.”

It’s surprising to hear Galloway say this – not least because he is Vice President of Stop the War Coalition and perhaps the most outspoken critic of New Labour’s neo-conservative foreign policy in the country – but because in June he called for an immediate election, arguing that the current Parliament is “utterly bereft of credibility.” I ask him if it’s possible that a Labour defeat at the next election could help bring back the party he once called home. “No, I don’t,” he says. “In any case, it would be too high a price to pay. The Tories will be a catastrophe for ordinary people in Britain, for the working people, the poor, the old, the sick, the disabled. So I want to see them defeated.” Galloway has to concede, however, that that’s not very likely. “Looking at the opinion polls, reading the runes, it would appear that the Tories are on course for a big victory. And if that happens, then we’ll have to see what happens to the Labour Party that I spent almost forty years in.”

Labour’s abandonment of the left goes part of the way towards explaining the success of Respect. But it is Blair’s utter betrayal of British Muslims, incensed by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which explains why so many Labour voters in East London and Birmingham have turned to Respect. Not least because of Galloway’s standing amongst Muslims. When housemates on Celebrity Big Brother were asked to rank themselves in order of fame, he mused: “If we’re talking worldwide fame, I’m most famous. Virtually every Muslim in the world knows who I am.” Whether or not that’s true, George Galloway has done perhaps more than anyone else in the country to help politicise marginalised Muslim communities, introducing to them left-wing politics as an answer to racism, Islamophobia, imperialism and neo-conservatism. But there’s another, more reactionary, current amongst Muslim communities that seeks to present itself as the sole representative of Islamic identity. I ask Galloway if Respect could do more to challenge religious fundamentalism and social conservativism amongst the communities it represents? “No,” he says, “I think the first part of our agenda is big enough. The question of social conservatism within Muslim communities is a matter for them largely.”

It’s a contentious point, and one that many on the liberal left will disagree with, but Galloway has never been afraid of courting controversy. In 1994, he flew to Iraq to meet Saddam Hussein in an effort to prevent war and end the sanctions which were bringing further immiseration to the Iraqi people, saluting their courage, their strength and their indefatigability. More recently he has spoken out in support of Ahmedinejad in Iran following the disputed elections, attacking the protesters as class enemies and drawing a comparison with opposition to Chavez’s reforms in Venezuela. But despite the similarity in their anti-imperialist rhetoric, is it really fair to compare the ultra-conservative, fundamentalist Ahmedinejad with the democratic socialist Chavez? “I’m not sure that Chavez would describe himself as a democratic socialist,” Galloway says. “But I do think the comparisons between them are stark. Not just in their international rhetoric, though that is a very significant thing for me, but in terms of their social base. The social base of Ahmedinejad is the poor masses; the enemies of Ahmedinejad are the English speaking, highly-educated, well-off elite. I’ve been several times to Venezuela, and that’s exactly the polarisation that exists there.”

Galloway concedes that Ahmedinejad is not a socialist, whilst Chavez is. But both, he argues, are populists. “I do think you can measure a man by his enemies, and both have the same enemies. My main interest in Iran is that is should remain an independent country and not a puppet of the West like virtually all of the Muslim countries already are, and to that extent I’m glad that Ahmedinejad won over Moussavi who, whether he liked it or not, was riding a wave of people who wished to see the return of the Pahlavi dynasty and who wished to see Iran as an outcrop of the United States. And I’m sure that he did win.”

It’s an uncomfortable prospect, that the left must lend its tacit support to tyrants opposed to Western imperialism, and even though Galloway has described Ahmadinejad’s denial of the Holocaust as “a disgrace”, I ask him, if the enemy of my enemy must always be my friend? “No,” he says. “That’s why I could never line up behind the dictatorship in Burma. It’s anti-American, but I could never say that that enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Nevertheless, Galloway tells me that Ahmedinejad is the president of an important country and we’ll just have to accept it. “Iran is much more important than the sort of knuckle-dragging ignoramuses in the British media have realised. Its geo-political position is strategically significant, it has a very young population, it has an ocean of oil and gas and soon will have a nuclear power industry, famously as we know.” It is for these reasons that Galloway argues Iran must be treated with more respect. “Ahmedinejad is the president, that’s why he was speaking at the United Nations a fortnight ago, there’s no point in second guessing other people’s choice of their leaders. I believe strongly that every people have the right to choose their own leaders and not have them chosen by their adversaries.”

It’s a position to which Galloway has remained consistent throughout his opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But with violence surging in Afghanistan, what is the answer to the country’s problems now? “The opposite of what we’re currently doing,” he says. “The war is doomed, it cannot be won. No one has successfully occupied Afghanistan, not even Alexander the Great, and Bob Ainsworth definitely isn’t Alexander the Great. No matter how many soldiers they pour in there, they’ll never pour as many in as the former Soviet Union did. That occupation failed as this one is bound to.” Galloway believes that a negotiated withdrawal is inevitable. “It’s better that that starts now rather than later. Many more people will be alive, the radicalisation of the Muslim world, which is a real danger, will be lessened, we’ll be able to spend the money we’re burning in Afghanistan on our own people at home, and we’ll begin to defuse the tensions that exist in our own country between Muslims and non-Muslims.”

But withdrawal brings with it its own dangers, not least the possibility of the Taliban returning to power. I ask Galloway what he thinks will happen to Afghanistan? “The first thing I need to say, and it’s a contentious point, is that it’s none of our business what happens. British people, after several hundred years of empire, have become used to the idea that we have some right, maybe even some duty, to determine what happens in other people’s countries. I never believed that and I certainly don’t believe it now when we’re an almost bankrupt set of islands off the coast of mainland Europe. The days when the building you’re currently in ruled a quarter of all the world’s population are gone. Hallelujah!”

That’s not to say that Galloway is unconcerned with the future of Afghanistan. “I have interests in that country as a British citizen and they are this: that it must not be a base for those who wish to harm me, us, our country and our legitimate interests.” However, he believes that it is important to separate the pan-Islamist al Qaeda from “Johnny Afghan who just wants foreigners out of his country.” These, he argues, were never the same thing. “Insofar as there’s an al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan, it was we who sent it there, paid for it, armed it, glorified it, paraded it at the Tory conference and at Ronald Reagan’s Republican national convention, called them Mujahedeen and all that you know. To punish the Afghans for al Qaeda when we sent it there, is double jeopardy.” Instead Galloway wants to see a negotiated outcome with the Afghan forces to ensure that the country is not used as a base to harm Britain and its legitimate interests. “I can’t guarantee that Afghanistan will be a lovely place if the foreign armies withdraw, but I can guarantee it will never be a lovely place if they don’t.”

There are many far-from-lovely places in the world that Galloway is concerned about, but perhaps none more so than Palestine. He recently returned from a convoy to break the Israeli siege of Gaza, the occupied territory which would form part of any future Palestinian state. But, I ask him, is a two-state solution really the best way to achieve justice for the Palestinian people? “I’m pleased that Hamas and Fatah have signed a unity agreement,” he says. “I hope it works. The division within the Palestinian ranks has been catastrophic for them and for those of us who support them from the outside, as I have been doing now for almost 35 years of my life. As to what the final outcome is, this is really a matter for them.” Galloway says that if the Palestinians decide on a two-state solution then he, as a supporter of their cause, must accept that. “My own personal view, however, is that Palestine is too small, the issue of the refugees too great, the topographic and demographic cleansing that has occurred has been too extensive. The building of the wall, the ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem, the building of the settlements, which are really cities, have all been too extensive to make the separation of this small piece of land into two viable states realistic.”

Galloway is keen to point out that he does not support sectarian countries. “When Mandela was asked by the Boers at the end of Apartheid if they could have the Orange Free State as a white state, he said that he didn’t believe in white states or black states, only democratic states. One man, one woman, one vote, one government and everyone equal under the law. And if I believe that in South Africa, why should I change it for Palestine?” Instead he would like to see a democratic state, where everyone is equal, where all the existing inhabitants have the right to live, and all the people who were driven from the land have the right to return. “One state between the river and the sea is by far the best solution.”

In the meantime, Galloway believes that the convoys he is leading to Gaza to bring aid to the Palestinian people are crucial acts of defiance and solidarity. “I’m leading another one on the 6th of December to arrive on the 27th, which is the anniversary of the war. I think that these attempts to break the blockade are the most urgent priority for solidarity organisations around the world. We can march here, and protest here, and hold public meetings, but they make little difference.”

Somehow I didn’t expect George Galloway – the firebrand activist and unremitting radical who has always spoken his mind even when his opponents don’t like what’s on it – to say any different. His has always been one of the loudest voices for change and he has never lacked the courage of his convictions. I thank him for his time and make my way back through the courtyard and the green trees and sun-dappled water features under the enormous sparkling glass dome: the seat of power of an almost bankrupt set of islands off the coast of mainland Europe. On my way home, I pass Brian Haw, whose protest, like Galloway’s, will continue unabated till the people in power take notice.

http://www.georgegalloway.com/

Earlier this evening The Guardian was served with a gagging order forbidding it from reporting parliamentary business. To quote the article in the paper itself:

Today’s published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.

The right to report on what’s said and done in Parliament is traditionally seen as pretty important in a democracy, so in an attempt to aid transparency, the Third Estate can exclusively report that the question is (probably) this one:

61 N: Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.

Trafigura, of course, is the company that was recently revealed to be not only dumping toxic waste into the sea near Ivory Coast, but also trying very hard to make sure no one found out. Why they and Carter Ruck would be so keen for this question not to be revealed I’m not sure, (especially as it’s clearly publicly available), but they have a history of this kind of behaviour.

All the questions due to be asked in Parliament from tomorrow (Tuesday) onwards can be found here, so feel free to have a browse through the rest of them – it’s possible I guessed wrong, though I think it’s unlikely. And please, please re-post this – the more places publish it, the harder it is to justify a gagging order and the worse Carter Ruck and Trafigura will look.

Edit: This guy found it too (and a bit sooner than me I think).

Edit edit: You can download a copy of the Minton Report, which Trafigura is so keen you don’t read, from Wikileaks here. (H/t Chicken Yoghurt)

Guest post by Guy Aitchison

It is time for those who want a new politics to work together for change

With the party conferences over and MPs returning to Westminster today following their 82-day break, now seems like a good moment to reflect on the crisis that engulfed the political class during the early summer months and how they have responded.

At the height of the Great Expenses Scandal party leaders made a great show of telling us how they knew exactly what was wrong with our political system and how to fix it, competing to outdo each other with ever-more radical constitutional solutions to voters’ loss of trust in the system.

Gordon Brown promised far-reaching democratic reform, informing us that he was a long-time fan of constitutional campaign group Charter 88 and making noises about a “a written constitution”. David Cameron called for giving “power to the powerless” and talked of fixed term parliaments and new powers for constituents to recall MPs. Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, pointed out that he had long distinguished himself with calls for reform of a “rotten” Westminster system and demanded that an urgent list of constitutional changes be made in “100 days”.

At the time, some in the commentariat were asking what on earth constitutional reform has to do with abuse of expenses. But the impulse to respond to public anger with proposals to re-distribute power was the correct one. It involved the recognition that anger over expenses was about more than simply duck houses, moats, dry rot, and other abuses, however petty or extravagant: it was symptomatic of a much deeper disconnect between the public and politicians that has been building for years.

For a long time, people in the UK have been switching off from formal politics. Voter turnout at the last two general elections in 2001 and 2005 was at a historic low of around 60%. This disengagement doesn’t arise from apathy or satisfaction with the status quo, as the Power Inquiry, which carried out the largest ever investigation into people’s attitudes to British democracy several years ago, concluded. It arises from feelings of powerlessness and a sense that parties and politicians are all the same.

Public outrage reflects a much deeper sense that our political system is dysfunctional and in crisis and that our insular and self-serving political class just don’t give a damn. How else to explain disastrous decisions like the Iraq war executed with total contempt for popular opinion, the vicious attacks on our civil liberties, the pathetic surrender to the banking system, and the total failure to face up to the challenge of catastrophic climate change? The disjuncture between what needs to happen on the big challenges we face and what our closed political system will permit is massive.

What is to be done?

Several months on from this crisis, as we enter a new parliamentary term with a general election in sight, any small hope there briefly was that the managers of our stale two-party system would bring about change has been disappointed. The political class are once again hoping that voters’ anger and disgust will give way to disillusionment and resignation allowing them to keep the whole sorry show on the road a while longer.

I was at the Labour and Tory party conferences, in the main hall and at the party fringes, and you could almost hear the sound of brush strokes sweeping the crisis and the earlier promises of change under the carpet.

Brown’s speech to the Labour conference offered a cowardly mixture of fudges and half-measures that will please no one. The Prime Minister promised a referendum on electoral reform – but not until after the next election and even then only on the Alternative Vote system which wouldn’t move Parliament any closer to being proportional. He talked of a new right for constituents to recall errant MPs – but only when voters are given permission from their political masters on high. And one hundred years after Parliament decided to reform the Lords, Brown committed to “remove the hereditary principle” from the second chamber, re-stating Labour’s position in their manifesto of twelve years ago.

David Cameron’s speech to the Tory party conference was a master class of rhetoric promising a lot but offering little of substance. He clearly wants people to think that he “gets it” when he says that the expenses crisis “reflected something deeper…the sense that people have been left powerless by big government”. Spot on! But apart from some vague references to “decentralisation”, “transparency”, and “accountability” there was nothing on how he plans to reform a political system which, by his own admission, is “broken”.

These paltry offers to the electorate confirm that we simply can’t trust politicians to deliver the reform that’s needed. With less than a year until the next election, all of us who want a new politics should focus our efforts on ensuring that the next Parliament is a reforming one.

This will not be easy. It’s almost a law of nature that once politicians take power they are reluctant to give it away.

We need an intelligent and demanding citizens’ movement organising outside the parties and the formal structures of political power, calling for change and holding politicians to their promises.

It is with this goal in mind that the Rowntree Trusts have launched Power2010, a unique campaign that will give everyone a chance to have a say in how this country should be run.

In the first phase of the campaign, Power2010 is asking the public for their ideas for how we change politics. Everyone is encouraged to get involved and contribute their own ideas by going to the website at www.power2010.org.uk.

All the ideas submitted will then be considered by a panel of randomly selected citizens drawn from across the UK who will decide a list of options to be put to the public vote.

The five ideas that receive the most votes will become the Power2010 Pledge, which candidates of all parties will be asked to commit to at the next election – in public meetings, on the door step, by email and letter; as often as possible by as many people as possible.

It is time for those who want a new politics, one that is open, honest, and responsive to the needs and interests of the public, to work together for change. If we join forces and act now we could get a reforming parliament and a new politics out of the next election.

Guy Aitchison works for the Power2010 campaign. Before that he was deputy director of the Convention on Modern Liberty. He blogs at openDemocracy’s UK blog, OurKingdom.

When I want something to laugh at, I often find myself reading the blog tory MP Nadine Dorries. With her repeated evocations of ‘common sense’ she comes across as a thick version of William Hague (late 1990s version). Particularly entertaining, however, has been her response to the questions put to her over her expenses.

A few days ago, the Telegraph put a series of questions/allegations to her. In her wisdom she decided to do the opposite of contrite. She posted the letter she had been sent on her blog, along with a super confident, super angry, im-not-conceding-anything reponse. Her post was peppered with irritated sentences written in capital letters (think 14 year old on an online gaming forum), although looking at the blog right now it would appear that someone has given her a bit of good advice and she has switched the caps to lower case.

Yet when comes to her claims, the picture is not as pretty as Nadine’s assertive self-righteousness would suggest. Dorries currently claims a second homes allowance for a property in Bedfordshire – where she a constituency MP. The people at the telegraph, however, wisehed to determine where exactly she considered here ‘main’ home to be.

Her response was as follows:

“I have no intention of exposing every detail of my private existence, what little I have, on this blog. However, needs must. I rent a house/office/ surgery in my constituency… On the weekends I have free, and during the recess, I go somewhere else. I am not publishing the address.”

This, of course was in spite of assurances in the Telegraph’s letter that they would NOT publish her address. She couldn’t say where her second home was because this was a matter of privacy.

By Saturday, she continued to claim that she had been reluctant to discuss the location of her second home for reasons of ‘privacy’, but nonetheless felt compelled to now disclose that it was in the Cotswolds. This particularly detail was submerged in alot of irrelevant schmultzy tripe about what she does/did there:

‘The rest of the time during weekends I finished work and spent my time in the Cotswolds preparing the week’s meals for my daughter, washing and ironing school uniforms, changing sheets, checking homework, and leaving to drive back to Bedfordshire’

Nonetheless, the issue here is clear. I would have thought the reason for MPs to have to homes is fairly obvious. They need to work and vote in westminster and they also need to have a base in their constituency. Of course the Cotswolds is in neither Loolndon or Bedfordshire. The justification for two homes, as far as I can tell – is that she likes to live in one place, but needs to work in another. So would many of us.

Her failure to locate her her homes in her place of work is not without expense (to the taxpayer). As David Reeves notes over at Liberal Conspiracy she has claimed thousands and thousands for commuting from Bedfordshire to London – and some of this travel would surely be unnecessary if, like most MPs, the location of her MAIN home bore some relation to where she was expected to work. It would seem obvious to any reasonable person why Dorries was coy about locations of her homes. But she continues to insist that it was about protecting her own privacy and that of her lovely daughters.

I would not, however, simply suggest this is a question of greed. Having read quite a number of her posts, and those specifically concerning expenses, I honestly wonder if she is not perhaps too thick to get what the issue is.

One of the questions The Telegraph put to her was as follows:

‘When you moved out of your flat in Westminster, the fees office demanded repeatedly that you repay the £2,190 deposit but you did not and eventually they docked your rent claims in order to recoup the money. Please explain why you did not repay the deposit when asked.”

She responded by explaining that the Landlord was ‘dodgy’ and didn’t give back the deposit even though the flat was in pristine condition. She goes on to say that she gave up on trying to get the deposit back and that the the fees office ‘should have chased the landlord for it.’

This is all well and good, but what on earth does she think hundreds of thousands of other people do when they are faced with dodgy landlords who wont return deposits. The idea that, if she cant (be bothered to) win back her deposit, its up to the taxpayer to make up the shortfall, and the civil servants in the fees office to chase up whoever her landlord was, is obscene. Yet it is something she confidently and self-righteously proclaims.