My last two posts were entitled If All Politicians Are Bad… and …We Must All Be Politicians… respectively. Now you have seen the title of the third, and concluding, post in this series. In most minds, government is something done by ‘them’, a largely faceless and nameless group, generally loyal to a party leader who we might recognize. We have forgotten it has not always been so. The corruption we see in our rulers, and our antipathy towards them, are born of an unhappy marriage. On one side we have a form of democracy where we elect representatives. On the other, we have political parties; these hierarchies organize, control and fund candidates before they are elected, and continue to organize and control them after they are elected. We are so used to this wedding of a popularity contest with power-hungry tribalism that we tend to treat it as synonymous with the word democracy. It is not. As I pointed out in my first post, the word democracy is the conjunction of the Greek words “dêmos”, meaning “people”, and “krátos”, meaning rule. Our democracies would be unrecognizable to the Athenians responsible for the first democracy. The greatest difference is that, for the Athenian citizens, democrat government was something they participated in. In contrast, most of our citizens are disaffected by government and their relationship with it. They view it as something done by ‘them’ to ‘us’. That feeling, that we do not participate in government, begs the question of whether we deserve to describe our constitution as democratic.

Our era is the most legalistic the human race has ever known. We have more rules today than have ever been before. Rules for what taxes to pay, rules for our benefits entitlements, rules for our health and safety, rules for how we got or lose a job, rules for what expenses we can claim, and many more rules besides. Rules supplant the need for reason. Rules supplant the need to judge what is right, and what is wrong. Instead of being responsible for the affect of our actions on others, we are only responsible for obeying, or breaking, the rules. When a terrible wrong is done, but no rule is broken, our rulers immediately set to work on changing the rules, in order to make the world a better place. I am not sure if that is the right approach. It seems guaranteed to generate evermore rules, but not better rules. During this most recent scandal, when so many Members of Parliament engaged in petty scams to enrich themselves, the near-universal excuse has been: “but we were following the rules!” Of course the MPs were following the rules. They followed the rules just like a taxpayer follows the rules but tries to lower a tax bill, or a benefits claimant follows the rules and tries to increase the value of the benefits received. Rules are like lines on a sports field. They define limits. So long as we stay within those limits, then we have abided by the rules. So long as we stay within the rules, then we are in the right…? So long as the referee does not blow his whistle, then we have done nothing wrong…? We make a slippery slope to climb, when we build a mountain out of rules.

There is such a thing as right and wrong, and it is not the same as a set of rules, no matter how long or perfect they may be. If we all stopped doing everything else, and sat, and constructed the most perfect rules we could ever imagine, and then went back to our lives, we would soon discover the folly in our actions. There would still be people who did wrong, but broke no rule. There would still be people who did right, but broke a rule. Our sense of right and wrong is infinitely sophisticated. It outstrips any set of rules we can devise.

In law, ignorance of the law is no defence. That is lucky for lawyers, because the law is no so extensive that no lawyer knows mores than a fraction of it. Knowing the law is like knowing familiar roads. I might know every road from my home to my work, but I have no idea about the roads between Rome and Milan, and still less between Ulaanbaatar and Beijing. If being good means never breaking the rules, you might as well expect me to drive from the Mongolian capital to the Chinese capital without ever taking a wrong turn or getting lost. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent of GPS for the law. Even the British law-makers, many of whom are lawyers by profession, do not know all the laws that govern them. As has also been pointed out recently, time and again they made mistakes in their expenses claims. Claiming for porno films was a mistake. Claiming for mortgage interest on the wrong house was a mistake. Many MPs have said they did not mean to enrich themselves by breaking the rules, the rule-breaking was an accident, and often because they did not know they were breaking a rule. So even the people who make a career of writing rules find it impossible to follow rules. Ignorance is no defence, but the MPs offer it as explanation. This should give us a clue as to whether we expect too much from endless writing and re-writing of rules, and should be looking for other ways to promote right over wrong.

The English language is full of mental gymnastics. One of my favourites is a phrase we have heard a lot recently: “the spirit of the rule”. The spirit of the rule is what you would get if you could write a rule to say what you actually want it to say, except you cannot write a rule that way. The funny thing about “the spirit of the rule” is that people can know what it is, even if they cannot put it into words. Such is the nature of right and wrong. We can know what is right, and what is wrong, even if we cannot put it into words. If we did not have this innate faculty for telling right from wrong there would be no point to having laws, and, by extrapolation, a legislature or government of any sort. There would be no sense to writing a law if we had no way of conceiving the right things we want, and the wrong thing we want to prevent, before they were put into words. What is more, many of us share this same ability. We can agree what is right and wrong, because we perceive right and wrong the same way. This is no coincidence. It is fundamental to our idea of what it is to be a human being, an animal with moral attributes as well as physical and intellectual attributes. Democracy depends upon this idea. We, the people, can judge right and wrong. We can do so independently of any rules previously written down. This ability guides us, making us strive for an ideal society where right prevails and wrong is curtailed. It is something we give to the world, not something handed down to us. It is not something that comes from books of law, written by people for people. It is already within people. The difficulty is not that we lack it and must compensate by getting someone else to give it to us. The difficulty is that any of us might chose not to follow it.

The crisis around the abuse of expenses by British MPs is slowly turning. If it continues the way it has, it looks likely that we will soon head down the same road that got us into this mess. For a while it will feel like we are making progress, but after a while we will soon notice that the landscape seems eerily familiar. A while later we will realize we have been here before, and gone precisely nowhere. Most voters want to vote in somebody new to rule. Like motorists going from Ulaanbaatar to Beijing who then got lost in the wilderness, we have decided the problem was with the directions we took, so we need a new driver at the wheel. Throw out the one-eyed Scots idiot, and replace him with the telegenic old Etonian or the one who used to amuse us with funny vegetables. We can go to sleep on the back seat, and when we wake up, we will have arrived at our destination. When you say it like that, the problem is pretty obvious. Whoever is at the wheel will drive the car in the direction they want to go.

The usual suspects, hoping to get power, only rarely have to listen to the ballot box. As I noted in my earlier posts, in most constituencies in this nation, the voters pick the same party every election, no matter how good the individual candidates are. The real influence is not held by the voter, but by the parties that select which candidates will stand for them. Political parties are fundamentally undemocratic. They represent the wishes of groups within our society, not the wishes of the whole people. They also represent the wishes of the people most motivated to get power, whether their reasons or good or bad. It should be no surprise that bad people are likely to be drawn to party politics, because it offers them opportunities to get power without merit. The party machines work like any other selective network, giving favours for favours received, and serving rewards for time served. Loyalty to the party, and to the party’s quest for power, is more important that caring about what is right. Bad behaviour, so long as it is not disloyal, is often hushed up or ignored by political parties. It gets rationalized away. Why admit to doing bad, when it is easier to point fingers at the bad things done by the other side. Dedicated political activists are little better than naughty children. Try getting a Labour party activist to admit invading Iraq was all about supporting George Bush’s hunt for oil, or getting a Tory grandee to admit tax cuts are not only good for the economy, they are also great for the rich. Political parties can never be anything more than groups of people with a mutual interest in getting power. Everything else is window-dressing. Power is a magnet to those made of corrupted mettle. When political parties are such an obviously warping influence, the real surprise is not that our rulers fiddle their expenses, but that their corruption seems to be so modest.

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle classified the rule of the many as being the worst of the good constitutions, and the best of the bad constitutions. If it strives to do the best for society, it will be less effective than either the rule of the one or the rule of few. However, if it is corrupted, and serves the interests of one group rather than society as a whole, the limitations on its power mean it will do less harm than an oligarchy or a tyrant. The British constitution is a democracy, and per Aristotle’s categorization it delivers a perverted rule by the many. We have a system where the many play a part in deciding the government, but their decision is mediated by a party machine that ensures the interests of a subset must inevitably and regularly be placed above the interests of the whole. That much is essential in order to maintain party loyalty and to keep the parties functioning. If parties handed out no favours, there would be no reason for anybody to support one party over another. Forget the dewey-eyed sentimentalism about ideology and all that guff. If it was just a case of picking our rulers based on what they thought, we could simply ask them and vote accordingly. Parties are not necessary in order to find rulers we agree with, but they are a good way for our rulers to exert more control than they otherwise would.

One way to reduce corruption, and to strengthen democracy, might be to do away with parties. Of the 646 MPs that are currently sitting in the British House of Commons, there was only one who was both elected as an independent and who has never used a party machine to build a popular base. He is Dr. Richard Taylor, MP for Wyre Forest. In 2005, he successfully held the seat he won in 2001, being the first incumbent independent to win since 1949. The few other independent MPs were either elected whilst standing for a party and have since resigned the party whip, or were elected as independents but have benefited from former party allegiances. Only 12 independent candidates have been elected to Parliament since 1950, and of those only two, Taylor and former news correspondent Martin Bell, could say their political careers owed no debt to any campaign by any political party. However, political parties have not always been as important as they are in Britain today. In Britain’s history, parties used to be a lot looser affiliations of like-minded people, with less obvious leadership and not such stringent control over how its members voted in Parliament. As more people gained the vote, and more money was needed for campaigning, parties have become more influential, and now they have a stranglehold on the Parliamentary system.

In the US, political parties are not as powerful as they are in the UK. The US President is a foremost an individual, and not the leader of a party. Compared to the UK, US political parties are more concerned with fundraising than with ideology. Given the vast sums of money involved, political parties are naturally keen to select popular candidates. This is the inverse of the British system, where it there is an assumption that voters vote for the party, and supporters give money to the party, but people care little about the actual candidate. Perhaps of most importance is how US parties pick their candidates. Many people get to participate, unlike the British parties who tend to give more control to a smaller group of party activists. In some cases US candidates are selected through an open primary, where people can vote even if they are not affiliated to the party. Tory Leader David Cameron recently floated the idea of open primaries, though he stopped short of fully endorsing it.

Proportional Representation (PR) might be a way to decrease the power of parties, if it helped a wider spread of people to get into Parliament. Unfortunately, PR tends to increase the power of parties, by emphasizing that people most vote for a party, and not just for an individual representative. It also tends to give increased power to the hierarchy within parties, who get to decide things like the ranking order in which its candidates get elected. There is an argument that PR makes parties more powerful because it leads to lots of back-room deals between party high-ups. There may be some truth in that, but I suspect that argument is really about the distribution of power between big parties and small parties, and not about the power of parties per se. One big party with a big majority will still conduct plenty of back-room deal-making and deal-breaking amongst the leaders of its internal factions. These deals, completely internal to party politics, have nothing to do with democracy or the will of the people. Tony Blair did a back-room deal with Gordon Brown about when he would hand over leadership and the role of Prime Minister. Gordon Brown then moaned and groaned about him breaking it, as is now well-documented in various autobiographies of others who bore witness. I see no great reason to prefer back-room deals between parties over those within parties. The only difference is that the former are much more obvious, and arguably that is an advantage to the voter.

Another approach might be to make parties less powerful by making it easier for independent candidates to raise funds and raise their profiles. If there were more independent MPs, the power of political parties would be reduced because there would be an increased need to build consensus within Parliament rather than just relying on gaining a majority and using party discipline. This is the reasoning behind a new party-but-not-a-party that will promoting a slate of candidates in the June 4th European elections. They are called the Jury Team and their main sponsor is Sir Paul Judge, a former Director General of the Conservative Party and Ministerial Adviser. Aside for the clever play on words with the name of its prominent member, the name Jury Team is very apt. Their core argument is that many ordinary people, without party political affiliations, but with an interest in public service, have the necessary skills and experience to be good Members of Parliament. It is essentially the same argument about what should qualify people to do jury service. Unlike career politicians, Independent MPs are not hamstrung by the corrosive influence of political parties, and are free to put the concerns of the whole of society above the interests of any particular group. It is not necessary for an MP to be vetted by one or other ideological-cum-fundraising camp in order to be a good MP, just as the qualities of a good juror are not determined by preselecting the kinds of jurors more likely to find the accused innocent rather than guilty, or vice versa. Independent MPs are more likely to judge each decision based on the evidence and the arguments and their relative merits, like a jury does when judging a court case. This is unlike party politicians who frequently subordinate individual judgement to the collective will of their party.

I will be voting for the Jury Team at this coming election, though I can of plenty of reasons not to. For a start, the way politics currently works, they are unlikely to prosper, though I also recognize that a defeatist attitude tends to benefit the status quo to the detriment of much-needed change. Then, the Jury Team, despite all its assurances that elected representatives will be free to vote according to their conscience, still has a minimalist manifesto focused around constitutional change. That makes the Jury Team something of a diet version of a political party. It still runs campaigns about voting for a collective group, rather than voting for individuals, and it still pursues funding and membership like any other party would. One merit it that it has chosen its candidates based on completely open primaries. The Jury Team was dubbed the ‘X-Factor Party’ because candidates were selected based on the SMS votes of the general public. Even so, there is a problem with the idea of a group that is not a group, a body of people who work together for mutual interest, but have no mutual interest. Right now there is no leadership or hierarchy in the traditional party political sense, and no common manifesto. However, power corrupts. If the Jury Team is successful, it will doubtless attract the involvement of all sorts of people who are rather keener on getting power than on upholding the very high-minded principles that currently define the Jury Team’s minimalist shared agenda. They will want to recreate hierarchies, and authority, and all the other mechanisms necessary to help them exercise power and compromise less. My political antennae started twitching the moment that has-been showbiz personality Esther Rantzen started turning up to Jury Team press conferences. Does she represent a happy coincidence of a person who loves the limelight and has deep-held beliefs about reforming party politics? Or is the happy coincidence that she would like to be back in the limelight and a furore about corrupt politicians might help her do that? Now David Van Day, formerly one half of pop act Dollar, says he wants to stand for Parliament to help clean up the system. I fear for any political system that is going to be ‘fixed’ by people whose most prominent recent qualification is that they appeared on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here.

Instead of electing faded celebrities and party apparatchiks into positions of power, going to sleep, and occasionally waking up when we realize what a mess they have made and how corrupt they are, we could all do with a democracy that lets us, the people, make decisions. There is a way, and we still use it today. The Jury Team allude to it in their name. We pick representatives to make important decisions all the time. Those people are representatives not because they have some special skill or because they won an election. They are representatives because we have built our society on the guiding principle that most people can tell good from bad, and will choose good over bad. Jurors are people like you and me, as ordinary or extraordinary as any one of us. They get to make important decisions, that determine the future of the individuals on trial, and the safety of the general public. We trust jurors to decide that murderers are put in prison, so they cannot murder again. We trust jurors to acquit the falsely accused. They are twelve people, picked by a lottery. We trust their judgement. Their judgement is assured not by some special qualification, not by some vetting of an organization of like-minded people, and not by any absurd claim to fame. Their judgement is assured by the same moral compass, as reliable or unreliable, as found within all of us. We trust them to make the most important legal decisions not because they know the law, but because they know the difference between right and wrong.

In ancient Athens, in the first democracy, they had not evolved all the rules and mechanics and procedures that determine how we live today and how our government works. They did not have laws and lawyers like we do. No small and ancient society could have borne the tremendous cost of the enormous bureaucracies we have around us today. Athens had neither the manpower, the technology, nor the motive to install vast and expensive institutions to govern a populous supposedly too busy to govern themselves. That did not stop them having right and wrong, and finding ways to agree, as a collective group, on how to get more of what is right, and less of what is wrong. In terms of participation, they were far more democratic than we are today. They had direct democracy, quite unlike the representative democracy we have today. Every citizen could participate in government and vote on specific laws and executive orders. They were far more participatory in how they made every judgement. For example, juries might consist of 500 citizens picked by lottery, unlike the 12 we use in Britain today.

In ancient Athens, the population was probably around 300,000 in total, and 10% of these would be citizens eligible to participate in all aspects of democratic government. The current population of the United Kingdom is just under 61m. Nobody could imagine a direct democracy involving 61m people, or rather of the 45m citizens who would be eligible after you applied an age threshold, barred prisoners and the mentally incompetent. But we also would struggle to imagine the scale of the democractic assemblies that the Athenians held, where it might be necessary to attain a quorum of 6,000 to make a decision, and where the decision was made according to the vote of everybody who attended (with no postal votes or votes by proxy). Athens was powerful, wealthy and successful. They were prosperous. They made good decisions not by electing good representatives, but by trusting the whole citizenry to make good decisions. If they could do it, why not we?

Of course, I am not suggesting 45m people all walk down to London and have a big debate. That would be foolish. I am also not suggesting that everything be decided by referendum. Most of the real politicking, when it comes to referenda, revolves around the question to be asked. Any pollster can tell you that you influence the answer by how you ask the question. Referenda give bad decisions because they encourage people to think of one question at a time, and not to resolve any inconsistencies. You would no more want government policy decided by referendum than you would want the outcome of a murder trial to be decided by a public vote of people who may or may not have paid attention to the trial. The science of the referendum is the science of the leading question. Should we spend more on healthcare? Yes! Should we spend more on education? Yes! Should we allow the Gurkhas to settle here, do a better job of protecting children at risk and clean up the litter from our streets? Yes, Yes and Yes! Should we pay more in taxes? … erm… (coughs and looks around sheepishly)… erm… maybe other people should pay more in taxes but… erm… (hushed voice) not me.

You cannot get good decisions from a lot of barely interested people. We trust the public, which is why our juries are composed of the public, but we also know they are weak, and busy, and easily distracted, and have a lot on right now, what with the children playing up and auntie being unwell and the problem with the damp spot in the guest bedroom. With juries, we take the public away from their normal lives and ask them to perform a public service for a limited time, concentrate on the job, do it well, then go back to their normal lives. In other words, we expect a jury to be quite unlike a careerist politician, for whom public service (or their version of it) is normal life. The model works well for some of the most serious public decisions that need to be made. We could apply it more widely. We should include the public in the making of decisions by our legislature, and our executive, as well as our courts. I hesitate as I type those words, because for a hundred people who read them, ninety-nine will believe we need an elite to do those jobs for us. Ninety-nine out of every hundred believes themselves too busy to participate in government, or unwilling to trust others, or is convinced that some people have a special talent to rule and that those special people are the ones who rule. Saying an ordinary person might make good decisions is almost a taboo, we have become so used to the idea of experts and specialists and careerists running every aspect of the world around us. I challenge that notion. There are no people with special qualifications that make them much better to be legislators, or Foreign Secretary, or Minister for Housing, or Speaker of the House of Commons, or Prime Minister, or Chancellor of the Exchequer, Shadow Education Secretary, or to sit on the Public Accounts Committee, or to do any of the hundreds of very different jobs we now seem to believe should only be done by career politicians. Harriet Harman may care deeply about social justice, and David Davis may feel strongly about preserving our liberties, but I fail to see why that would make either of them automatically superior at deciding how to test schoolchildren, which sources of energy the nation should invest in, or the punishments that should be handed out for fox hunting or kerb crawling. We are all equally competent to decide those things, or if not equally competent to make a decision, we are all equally incompetent at deciding who should decide except to prefer the people who would decide the same way we would and not the people who would decide the opposite.

We could do away with having people to make decisions, especially as we currently pick the people who make the decisions on the basis that they make the decisions we would have made if we were in their position. We could just make the decisions ourselves. We are too busy to do that, of course, but not too busy all the time. Jurors are busy people too, but some sacrifice is necessary for the public good. Jurors give up their time for the well being of us all. By picking jurors at random, juries are perfectly representative, without all the silliness, fuss, cost and bother of an election. In fact, picking people by lottery is a lot better way of getting representatives who actually represent who we are. In elections, we chose people who look good on telly, or who have the right-sounding names, or because they sound like they know what they are talking about, and for a hundred other reasons that makes them good at winning elections but not necessarily any good for making decisions. Geoffrey Archer, Jonathan Aitken, Peter Mandelson, David Blunkett, Norman Tebbett, Edwina Currie… if these self-serving, self-important, pompous, odious, objectionable and despicable people have special qualifications to be our rulers, then we should pick rulers who have no qualifications.

Picking people for high office based on lottery is not new either. Once again, the ancient Athenians got there first. Apart from a few special roles which required particular expertise, like being a general in the army, most officials were picked by lottery. It was not compulsory, but large numbers were willing to do their public service. Forcing somebody to take on an important job against their will would be foolish, but otherwise it was assumed that every person had the innate talents to fulfill their duties. There was trust in the honesty and integrity of the common person. Furthermore, the Athenians selected officials by lottery because it was the most democratic way to do it. As they appreciated, voting favours people who are rich, or eloquent, or famous. Picking lots prevents corruption, at least in the selection process. The Athenian democracy did need measures to impeach and punish corrupt officials, just as we do today. If anything, they needed these procedures less often, though it would have been easier to instigate the removal of a corrupt official in Athens; the participatory nature of the democratic assembly meant any citizen could propose and vote on the removal and punishment of someone corrupt. Contrast that to the corruption inherent to and hidden by the party machines, notoriously unwilling to eject the corrupt from their ranks and punish them for their sins. Under Athenian rules, it would be hard to imagine Peter Mandelson enjoying the lengthy political career he has enjoyed under the patronage of the British Labour Party.

In ancient Athens, there were limits on how often people would be picked for an office. Most offices were one term only, some permitted the same person to be picked twice. Compare that to these tedious career politicians, more motivated by the fear of losing their jobs and expenses than caring about doing their jobs well. There has been a riot of activity to clean up Westminster since the news of MP’s fiddles became public. Contrast that with the total inactivity for so many years before, followed by a period where the only activity involved stratagems to keep the truth from the public. Jurors make the right decisions because they have no reason not to. Politicians have plenty of reasons to make the wrong decisions, motivated as they are by keeping their party happy and their bills paid. Inevitably, the longer a person does a job, the less keen they will be to find themselves forced to find an alternative line of work. This is the well-spring for corruption: when decisions are made not because of what is right and wrong, but because of the needs of the person making them.

It would not take that radical an experiment to bring ordinary people, picked by lottery, into the democratic decision-making process. We have a two-chamber Parliament in Britain, but one chamber is now utterly dysfunctional due to a mix of historical inheritance, creeping decrepitude and Labour’s half-assed reforms. The House of Lords is now an anachronism in every possible sense. Rather than being an effective buttress to the House of Commons, and a way to bring other skills into government, it is at best irrelevant, at worst, another tool to aid corruption. The Lords are full of people who were ennobled (even that word now bears the taint of repeated corruption) in exchange for a lifetime of service to party machines, masquerading as a lifetime of service to the public. Peter Mandelson is now Baron Mandelson, and sits in the Lords. Need I say more? Given the need to reform this abomination, we could simply do away with this gratuitous hall of toadies and replace them with people who genuinely represent the nation.

Imagine a chamber of ordinary people, not motivated by greed and with no long-term career plan, debating and considering what is in the best interests of the nation. Pick, by lottery, a thousand willing candidates from the public, and give them the power to block legislation they disagree with. Let them sit in their own debating chamber, and vote separately, acting as a balance to the party-dominated House of Commons. Give them the right to propose new legislation, and make the careerists in the Commons debate ideas that come from outside the narrow circle of party activists, lobbies, trade unions and business interests that currently determine the legislative agenda. Allow these citizen volunteers to sit on Parliamentary committees, and hence to dilute the importance of parties in all aspects of Parliamentary scrutiny and review. Ask them to serve once, for the term of a year. Pay them a fair reward for their time, and allow them to talk to the political parties if they like, but punish any attempts to influence them through promises of rewards or positions in exchange for how they vote. I believe there will be plenty enough willing volunteers to give a very good spread of the beliefs and principles of British people. Because they would have time to focus on detail, they will be informed and make good judgements, like a jury would. They would be independent, and as free from the taint of corruption as is possible to imagine. Would they do a good job? Perhaps not. On the whole, they will be average. Being thoroughly average, they would provide the best guarantee that our government is the least worst of all options. Aristotle thought rule by the many was the least best when good, the least worst when bad. He was not thinking of a democracy like ours, which is more like an elective oligarchy than the democracy through participation that was found in ancient Athens. The need for support from the many puts a limit on power. It limits the power to do both good and bad. Party politics also imposes limits, but there is plenty of reason to suspect their influence is bad overall, turning our rulers into members of self-serving clubs that represent factional interests first and foremost. We can limit the parties by increasing the participation of people, the dêmos, in the job of making important decisions. And if you do not think it is a good idea to let ordinary folks make important decisions, I have only one question for you. If you do not trust your fellow citizens to act like good rulers, how can you expect them to select good rulers? We either believe in democracy, or we do not. If we do, then let us have more, and that involves taking power from self-serving groups and giving it back to people. The only way to do that is to bypass the need to form those self-serving groups, by involving people directly.

In my last post, I felt driven to comment on the current scandal surrounding British Members of Parliament and how they have been able to abuse their expenses. In that regard, I have been like most people in Britain, who have been talking to each other with outrage about the actions of some of our greedier MPs. Now I want to stop talking about what MPs did and how they got away with it for so long. Now I want to talk about what we should do about it.

The first observation to make is that MPs deserve some credit for outing themselves. In 2000, Parliament passed the Freedom of Information Act. The purpose of the act can be succinctly explained as follows:

The Freedom of Information Act gives you the right to obtain information held by public authorities unless there are good reasons to keep it confidential.

From the website of the Information Commissioner’s Office

Then along came a journalist. She did something that only a tiny proportion of journalists do, but something all the other journalists find useful to write about. She did some original research. Heather Brooke asked about the expense claims made by MPs. Five years later, and after winning her case in the High Court, those expenses have still not been officially published. What has been published is a leak of the information collated to satisfy Heather Brooke’s original question. If Heather Brooke had not asked her question, and won her case, then nobody would have compiled the information that has now been leaked.

Then along came John Wick. He is an ex-SAS officer who now works in risk management. It seems the government, so keen on collecting data about honest law-abiding citizens, and so careless with protecting it, should take his advice on managing risks. With help from an anonymous accomplice, Wick obtained what he called “an unregistered copy” of the expenses database “as a result of lax and unprofessional security procedures used in the House of Commons”. He also says that “the protective classification given to this project was described to me… as offering the same protection as a wet paper bag”. Looking through the data, Wick was unhappy with the way the original and complete list of expenses was being tarted up for publication - by censoring the uncomfortable truths it contained. Wick then leaked the database to the Telegraph, so they could print the full details, without any omissions. You can hear Wick talk about his reasons in this interview:

Thank you, Heather Brooke. She used the law for a good purpose and asked a question that needed to be answered. She fought for the answer in the law courts, and she prevailed. Thank you, John Wick. He took a personal risk in order to do a public good. That decision has been vindicated. The Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service have reportedly stated that Wick will not face any charges because the information he leaked is in the public interest and is not a threat to public safety. Final thanks should also go to our MPs, or rather to the MPs who voted for the Freedom of Information Act in 2000. Their reasons for passing the Freedom of Information Act were good. It is just that some of them did not anticipate the good consequences that would follow - good consequences in general, bad consequences for those particular MPs that submitted expense claims in order to fiddle the taxpayer. It is also a shame that some, like the reprehensible former Speaker, Michael Martin, then wasted even more taxpayer money on trying to block the consequences of this law to promote transparency. He was more concerned with hiding dirty laundry than upholding the laws his Parliament had written. This has also been a victory for Parliamentary incompetence over Parliamentary corruption. MPs will pay dearly for spending so much taxpayer’s money on legal obstructions to keep expenses secret, whilst spending so little on the security of that information.

Since the scandal broke, there has been an overwhelming tidal wave of resentment towards MPs. Passions are high. Unfortunately, when blood runs hot, brains often freeze up. The scandal has provoked a spectrum of proposed solutions. These range from demands that the expenses system should be independently policed, to voters saying they will switch allegiance to the BNP. You could also say the proposals range from the stupid to the very stupid.

Let us examine the idea of “independent” scrutiny. It is a fantastic idea - there is a job that needs doing, so let us give it someone else to do. Make it SEP - Somebody Else’s Problem. It is exactly the kind of thinking we hear after every public mess. Going back in history, it is exactly the kind of thinking that got us into this mess. Our MPs are already independent. They are independent of the King, or Queen. That is why we have a Parliament, to curtail the arbitrary rule of the monarch and to govern the nation based on the consent of the people. The British Parliament is the most independent body in Britain. Everything else depends upon it. The Queen has the power to dissolve Parliament and have an election, but in practice she never does this without being told to do it by the Prime Minister. All other sovereign power comes from Westminster (let us skip arguments about the European Union for now). Parliament and Parliamentarians may sometimes break the laws, but Parliament always gets to make the laws. The courts can only curtail Parliament when Parliament breaks its own laws, and even if the courts did intervene, Parliament could just decide to change the law to suit itself. If MPs decide to suspend elections indefinitely, they can pass a law and do it. If MPs decide to pay themselves a one-off bonus of £2 million pounds each, they can pass a law and do it. If they decide they want to punish someone for doing something they think wrong, they can pass a law and then direct the expenditure of millions of pounds on hunting that person and having them punished. They can do that if the person committed the crime before the law they broke existed. They can do that if the person broke a British law whilst in another country where their actions are not considered illegal. If that seems a bit arbitrary, it is, but the public loves it all the same. The public has no problem with arbitrary laws to punish ex-Nazis who never expected they might be subject to British laws, or to punish paedophiles who visit Asia to get their kicks. In short, Parliament already has any and every power needed for absolute rule. The reason they do not tyrannize the nation and plunder its wealth is not because somebody created an “independent” body to stop them. The reason is because we - the collective British public - would stop them.

King John of England was a tyrant of the worst order. His murderous, avaricious and lustful excesses were so infamous that England never had another king named John. Yet he agreed to the Magna Carta. In 1215, the Magna Carta proclaimed that everybody - Kings included - was subject to law. Its principles have had an inestimable impact on the history of the world, influencing the development of constitutional law all over the planet. It enshrines freedoms for all, whilst making all subject to due process in the execution of the law. For example, clause 29 states:

NO Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the Land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right.

Wonderful though Magna Carta is, King John did not agree to it because he was a generous fellow who wanted what was right for his people. He was forced to agree to it. King John was forced by a rebel alliance amongst the most powerful barons in Britain. They were tired of John’s taxes and his pursuit of their wives and daughters. To force John to compromise, the barons occupied London. Magna Carta was a peace deal, designed to impose balance. It demonstrated that power could be taken away from a ruler, if other men acted collectively. Magna Carta embodied the idea that if a ruler is unjust, then it is just for his subjects to band together and usurp the ruler’s authority. That principle has been carried down to today, and still underpins democracy. Although Magna Carta is a written document, the principle does not exist in words alone. For there to be balance, just people must be prepared to band together and act when their rulers fail them.

To borrow from US President Harry Truman, the British Parliament is where the buck stops. The people with the ultimate power to create an “independent” body to oversee the expenses of people in Parliament is… Parliament. The people with the ultimate power to decide who works for that body, what they get paid, whether the body is scrapped or reformed is… Parliament. Yes, Parliament can pass laws to get in the way of itself, just like it passed a law which the unintended consequence that we all got to see MPs expenses. It could also have repealed that law. Asking for an extra quango, paid for from taxpayer money, to supervise the actions of MPs is an irrelevance. What we need is for the British public to be public-spirited, and to act like Heather Brooke and John Wick. The British public needs to supervise the actions of MPs, not some unelected body that must ultimately be appointed by the Parliament it is meant to supervise. We must recognize that our rulers answer to nobody, unless they first answer to all of us.

MPs are already subject to plenty of independent scrutiny. The MP for the Isle of Wight, Andrew Turner (Conservative) has the most independent scrutineers. These scrutineers may also be described as eligible voters. There were 108,253 in his constituency at the last general election. The MP for Na h-Eileanan an Iar, Angus MacNeil (Scottish National) gets by with the least, with only 21,884 constituents in 2005. The great thing about these independent scrutineers is that they are cheap, because they are us. Except, we did not do a very good job. We voted red or blue on a moronic party-driven basis, and forgot to ask questions of the individuals that were being elected. We may not have known about the expenses, but how many of us thought to ask? Any one of us could and should have asked our own MPs to voluntarily publish details of their own expense claims. Public pressure would have made them do it, just like public pressure is now making a lot of them write big cheques for refunds. Some would have gladly done it. Douglas Carswell, the Conservative MP who was a leader of the revolt against the Speaker, was one MP who voluntarily published all his expenses before there was any scandal. It voters cannot expect Parliament to supervise itself, it should not expect an “independent” body to do so either. Voters need to be the ones who keep an eye on their representatives. Like they say, if you want a job done well, do it yourself.

At present, MPs’ bigger fiddles seem to be worth somewhere between £10,000 and £20,000. There are 646 MPs in total. If MPs ripped off the state by £10,000 on average each year (and we should remember that not all of them are corrupt) then the annual cost to taxpayers is about £6.5 million. That makes this the expenses scandal an argument about principles and good goverance, not an argument about money. This year it looks like the government will borrow a total of £175 billion to pay for all the things deemed vital for a happy prosperous Britain but which the government cannot actually afford. They borrowed £8.5 billion in April alone, a record for that month. We should all be able to agree that Britain has some more serious financial issues to deal with than the pilfering of £6.5m by MPs. Compare the amount that was cheated from the public purse to the amount that will be spent, from now until the crack of doom, if Parliament creates an independent quango to monitor MP’s expenses. To begin with, the quango will need to have a leader who is highly-qualified, very respected, utterly impartial, and well enough paid to be incorruptible. That should mean a salary of at least a £100,000 per year, plus pension pot and other benefits giving a £150,000 per year total package. His or her office will need a staff. Assume five people to deal with the claims themselves, which would equate to about 20 mandays per year being spent reviewing and checking each MP’s expenses. Anything less and you might as well not bother; it would be too easy to cheat. Then you can add another five people in the office to handle all the other nonsense of running a small organization as imposed by laws, rules and regulations (Health and Safety etc) plus the huge amount of time that will be spent communicating with and answering questions from both the media and from private individuals. The total payroll is now looking like it would be half a million pounds at least. Then they need to work in an office somewhere - probably somewhere expensive in central London so they are close to the MPs, and they will need computers, phones, desks and all the rest. We can comfortably reach the point where this independent body needs an annual budget of £2m. What starts out looking like an exercise in saving taxpayer’s money soon ends up an exercise in wasting taxpayer’s money, except in a different way.

We should use another comparison to create some perspective. The Telegraph, the newspaper that leaked the contents of the expenses database in order to boost its circulation and profits, sells between 800,000 and 1,000,000 copies every day. The cover price of the Telegraph is 90p. If Telegraph readers gave up the newspaper for a fortnight, and paid over the money they saved to the taxman, they would more than cover the MPs’ abuses. The cost of this scandal is about 10p per every British citizen per every year it has been going on. That puts it near the bottom of the list of shocking wastes of taxpayer’s money. On the other hand, many more millions are spent every year by private citizens who just want to be aware of the news. That money is well spent, if it means the populous is informed and willing to act to curb the excesses of its rulers.

If we want to clean up Britain, we need to do it. It is not possible to delegate the job of cleaning up public life. Standards in public life are a reflection of standards in all aspects of British life. Our rulers are likely to be as corrupt, lazy or self-serving as we all are. We voted in the corrupt MPs, we were the ones who dropped our guard and failed to ask pertinent questions of our rulers. It was private citizens like Heather Brooke and John Wick, not career politicians or salaried public servants, that acted decisively and unveiled the corruption. We live in a democracy, and the people need to play their own part in ensuring we have good government. As Aristotle noted, government by the many can be either good or bad. He called the bad version “democracy”. The good version he called “polity”, implying we should all be politicians if we are to enjoy the healthy version of a democracy. The furore about MPs’ expenses has prompted many suggestions about how to replace our rulers. Too many of the suggestions would only replace a bunch of career power-seekers who have been proven to be corrupt with a bunch of career power-seekers who are likely to be corrupt. There is an alternative that can guarantee the participation of the people in government. Aristotle would have been familiar with it. I will tell you more in my next post.

Democracy. It is a Greek word. The word is the conjunction of “dêmos”, meaning “people”, and “krátos”, meaning rule. The word has been around for a long time, as has the problems associated with running a democracy. A quick look back at history shows that Britain’s little crisis of confidence about the corruption of its rulers is nothing new.

Hundreds of years before Christ was born, the ancient Greeks were experimenting with lots of different ways to govern their multitudinous city-states. In order to study them, the philosopher Aristotle decided to sort these varied governments within a consistent schema. To do so, he devised a categorization that still puts democracy into context. Aristotle divided constitutions based on whether the state was ruled by one person, was ruled by a few people, or was ruled by many people. He also divided them between their pure forms, where the goal is the common good, and their perverted forms, where the goal is to benefit some at the cost of others. Most elected politicians (especially from the US) love to harp on about the joys and benefits of democracy. I suppose they would - they did get elected after all. Aristotle, however, was far from a cheerleader for democracy. He ranked the constitutions, from best to worst, as follows:

1. Pure government of one person (”monarchy”)
2. Pure government of a few (”aristocracy”)
3. Pure government of many people (”polity”)
4. Perverted government of many people (”democracy”)
5. Perverted government of a few (”oligarchy”)
6. Perverted government of one person (”tyranny”)

Aristotle was no misty-eyed sentimentalist. Whilst one good person, if given free reign to rule, might do the best job of all, Aristotle also recognized the danger that an autocrat could end up becoming the most diabolical despot. By the same token, whilst a good government by the many would be less free to act, and do less good than other forms of government, it would also be less bad when it went wrong. The restrictions placed on a government of the people by its need to maintain popular support does as much to inhibit its freedom to do good as it inhibits its freedom to do ill. I believe Winston Churchill was alluding to Aristotle’s idea of democracy being the “least worst” when he famously said:

Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. 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.

Winston Churchill, Speech in the House of Commons, The Official Report, House of Commons (5th Series), 11 November 1947, vol. 444, cc. 206–07.

British democracy is in a malaise. It is not hard to tell when British politics is in trouble, because normal people start talking about it. The point was rammed home amidst the early evening chat of the BBC’s The One Show. The affable Adrian Chiles was joined by Henry Winkler. Or perhaps I should say Chiles was joined by Henry Fonz-Winkler. Winkler should consider changing his name to ‘The Fonz’ given how often they called him that, though he stopped playing the character of The Fonz when the TV run of Happy Days was canceled twenty-five years ago. For those that cannot understand the difference, I included this photograph of Winkler as The Fonz to confuse you further. Everybody else can keep reading. Presumably Winkler has done other things in the last quarter of a century, though I dread to think how many involved saying “hey!” whilst giving a thumbs up. Co-star Ron Howard (’Richie Cunningham’) directs proper films and even Anson ‘Potsie’ Williams directs TV, so Winkler really should move on. He got his chance to do just that when Chiles asked him what he thought of the current political crisis in Britain. Yep, Chiles asked the The Fonz to comment on greedy British politicians fiddling their expenses. That goes beyond taking politics into the mainstream. It takes politics through the mainstream and carts it out the other side again. If Brits are asking American TV stars from the 1970’s what to do about MP’s expenses, the British democracy must have really come off the rails.

Like so many others, I share the current feeling that there is something rotten in the state of British democracy. The last time I felt this way about politics was during the 1997 election campaign. Lest we forget, that was the campaign that swept out a seemingly corrupt bunch of Tories who had been in power for well over a decade. In came shiny new Labour. A decade later, and it feels to me like so little has changed.

During the 1997 campaign, I was, like so many people, angry at the perceived corruption of Britain’s rulers. On one evening, I got so irate at the scaremongering tactics of one Conservative election poster that I literally ripped it down with my bare hands. It was the ‘Tony and Bill’ poster for those who remember such things - a picture of Tony Blair alongside a bill for £20bn in increased taxes. Those were the days when £20bn seemed like a lot of money. Now the government borrows that amount every week. But I digress. It offended me to see propaganda, seemingly from a gang too busy raping the country to think of a single positive reason to vote for them instead of against their opponents. The hoarding was on a very public street in Battersea, near the inaccurately named Clapham Junction train station. At about 3am in the morning, and still only partway through a disastrous journey home, I allowed my frustrations with the underinvestment in public infrastructure to pour out. When I write that I destroyed it, bear in mind that this was no small poster like you might find in a teenager’s bedroom. The hoarding was a full eight metres by three metres, the kind you can see a mile away. The location must have cost the Conservative party several thousand pounds to rent. Had I been caught, I would undoubtedly have suffered a severe penalty for my unilateral and rather negative contribution to political debate.

I am doubtful about whether I should share the story of my electioneering sabotage now, a full twelve years later. There must still be a small possibility that I will suffer as a result, hounded like a politician who once stuck a spliff in his mouth but insists he never inhaled. Anyhow, I confess. I did it. Better still, I did what today’s fiddling MP’s failed to do. I got away with it. In hindsight, I should never have been able to get away it. If the red mist had not descended, I would certainly have considered my chances of escape from punishment to be slight, at best. Apart from the very late hour, there is every reason why I should have been caught. To begin with, we are talking about a public street in London, the kind of place where it makes sense to have huge billboards aimed at people driving past or walking to the train station. Then, it took a full hour to tear the blasted thing down. Imagine peeling the label from a jar. You pull one tiny shred for a few centimetres, it tears, you do the same thing again. Repeat and scale up for a space which is eight metres wide and three metres high. On top of that, I did not have a ladder with me. For obvious reasons I started at the bottom, but after a while I was unable to reach the higher parts of the poster. That did not stop me. Fortunately, directly beneath the billboard there was one of those peculiar electrical junction boxes you find on some London streets and which I assume are put there for easy access to the circuits for the local neighbourhood. I climbed up on the box, precariously balancing on it and, near the end, sometimes jumping up to get the final few remnants of the tattered billboard. Had anyone called the police, I would have been easy enough to identify. I was dressed in a business suit, which I was still wearing after a long day’s work. As well as committing a crime, I could easily have been the victim of a crime, with my work laptop left sitting in its bag at the base of the junction box whilst I did my handiwork. Doubtless these days I would be recorded on a CCTV camera, but on that night, it would be up to somebody in the public to report the crime to the Police. Nobody did, or if they did, the Police did nothing about it. None of the seven or eight people who walked by on the street remonstrated with me, though I got some approving nods. Nobody on the buses that drove past shouted that I should stop, but I did sometimes get a cheer. I guess all those witnesses to my crime were either indifferent, or supportive, of my peculiar solo attack on the British political system. Given the current mood of the British public, I imagine that performing a similar act of vandalism today might just garner even more encouragement. Or maybe it is just that people awake at that hour are more inclined to hate the government.

Despicable as many British MPs are, I am loathe to do what I did that night and ascribe corruption to one side over another. The problem is not that one party is especially corrupt, although obviously some excesses are worse than others and it is simple-minded to brand all as equally contemptible. The problem is not even that politicians are especially corrupt compared to any other group in our society. The problem is that, by and large, across all walks of life and all jobs, everybody is corrupt. Public outrage with MPs is fueled not by the belief that MPs are going to be better than anybody else. The public is already far too cynical for that. An MP is as likely as the rest of us to say nothing when handed too much change at the corner shop, and we all know it. Public outrage is fueled by the recognition that whilst the rest of us must answer to our rulers, our rulers seemingly answer to no-one but themselves. There should be no surprise in that. The British constitution has always been like that. The elite that makes the rules are the elite that makes the rules. You cannot then ask for yet another elite to sit above them and impose rules upon the elite. The only power that sits above the elite is the dêmos - all of the people, acting collectively. If our rulers are corrupt, it is in part the fault of the people who picked them. As Joseph Marie de Maistre wrote:

“Toute nation a le gouvernement qu’elle merite.”
(“Every country has the government it deserves”)

Lettres et Opuscules Inedits, (1851) vol. I, letter 53, 15 August 1811

We picked them. There is no point blaming our representatives for being corrupt, if we do not also point the finger of blame at the people who selected them. Asking for somebody ‘independent’ to regulate, scrutinize, or stop politicians from being corrupt is the answer of a simpleton. That is like asking for a King to control the politicians, and then who gets to pick the King? What stops someone ‘independent’ from being corrupt too? Everybody’s position in society depends on something or someone else to some extent. However bad the current crop of British politicians are, their freedom to act corruptly is limited to the extent that the public act effectively to limit it. As a consequence, we have seen all sorts of truly depressing displays in recent weeks, as politicians fall over themselves to ‘win back the trust’ they lost by being caught out as filthy cheats. The ignobility of the British politician reached its nadir with Hazel Blears, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, going on TV and brandishing a cheque for £13,332 that she intended to pay back to the public purse. What next? When I am next in Tesco’s, will I be expected to applaud the shoplifter who voluntarily returns the tin of tuna he stole? Are we all expected to start thanking the tax evaders who give up more easily than others?

Let us make an example of Hazel Blears, in more than one sense. To begin with, who picks her and who says she should be in Parliament? In theory, that would be the constituency of Salford, in Greater Manchester, which she has represented since that landslide Labour victory in 1997. That is twelve years being paid to do the same thing - not bad job security in this day and age. At the last election she won 13,007 votes out of a total of 22,600 that were cast. That equals 57.6% of the vote. Her victory margin was down from the previous election, which was itself down on her 1997 result. Even so, the second place candidate from the Lib Dems would have needed to more than double his 5,062 votes in order to better Blears. At the last general election, 35% of the people who could have voted in Salford made the effort to do so. In other words, about 13,000 people decided to put Hazel Blears into a position of public trust which she used to swindle herself £13,000, until she was eventually caught out. That works out at one pound she attempted to pocket for every vote she got. Another 40,000 voters in Salford could have intervened and picked somebody more honest - but they had better things to do that day.

Hazel Blears has good job security, but she has a way to go before she enjoys the longevity of the predecessor in her constituency. Stanley Orme was a Labour MP from 1964 to 1997. He always represented seats in Salford, moving between them as boundaries were redrawn. Like other party political careerists, including Hazel Blears, he started out by fighting a constituency he did not win. Having proven his worth and commitment he was then given a constituency he would win, and kept being given constituencies he would win. But who gave him these constituencies? It was not the voter. The voter’s only involvement in Stanley Orme’s career, just as with Hazel Blear’s career, is to keep voting for the same party election after election. By picking the same party over and over, they hand over responsibility to the real unelected elite that controls, or fails to control, corruption in our rulers: the local constituency parties in safe seats. If all the voter does is to pick the same political colour - red or blue - without fail, at every election, they abrogate their control over the quality of our rulers. No wonder we then find our rulers are corrupt. Most of them have never answered to voters. They answer to the people in the political party who select them and control their career. The voters have long since abdicated any responsibility by playing the most moronic part of all in this democratic pantomime - by cheering the hero (whoever is dressed in the right colour) and booing the baddie (whoever comes dressed in other colours). Hazel Blears, like every other corrupt product of party politics, paid her dues to the Labour party and got her reward accordingly.

This corruption is nothing new, and it is inherent in the system, not a specific party. What goes around, comes around, and has been doing so for a long time. The first parliamentary election fought by Hazel Blears - the mandatory allocation of an unwinnable seat to first prove her commitment to the Labour Party - was the safe Conservative constituency of Tatton. In that election, in 1987, she came third, with a modest 21.3% of the vote. The winner, backed by 54.6% of the voters in that constituency, was Neil Hamilton, the man who came to epitomize Tory corruption in the 1990’s.

Political parties are corrupt, and necessarily so. They hand out power based on favours and the advantage of its members and representatives, not the good of the people. Borrowing from Aristotle’s schema, they must necessarily be impure, as the can only exist if they give advantage to their group over other groups in society. If they did not do that, they would be unsustainable. Voters know that, and for the most part, they go along with it. Instead of backing the candidate that might do best for the common good, voters consistently select the party they perceive would favour their interests over the interests of others in society. It is a stable system and it is a corrupt system, so we should hardly be surprised if it tends to encourage other forms of corruption like the abuse of expense claims.

On the bright side, corruption in Britain is not so bad. That British MPs have cheated thousands of pounds of expenses is hardly on a scale with Vladimir Putin controlling the media in Russia, Robert Mugabe beating and killing his opponents in Zimbabwe, Wen Jiabao terrorizing those families that blame corruption for the schools that collapsed in the Sichuan earthquake, or even the never-ending circus of scandal that surrounds Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi. Perhaps Brits should pat themselves on the back. Maybe it is their high standards and low tolerance for corruption that has kept our British politicians in check. Even in the safe Tory seat of Tatton, Neil Hamilton was eventually booted out thanks to the collective disgust of the voter and the candidacy of news journalist Martin Bell. Perhaps the voters of Salford will teach Hazel Blears a lesson too, despite her desperate attempt to win back favour. But we could have it better still, if only we were better at selecting who runs the nation. But how might we do that? I have some suggestions. One of them comes from the Ancient Greeks. I will share more in the next post.

A long time ago, there was a saga that borrowed from another saga. Imagine a parallel universe where the characters in Star Wars can travel faster than light and shoot laser beams, but otherwise behave much more like you and I. Imagine that parallel universe sitting halfway between the fictional universe of the movies and the real one we live in. From the creator of Star Wars: Parallel Universe, More Star Wars: Parallel Universe, Even More Star Wars: Parallel Universe and The Empire Strikes Back: Parallel Universe - in other words, me - comes another installment of the imaginatively-entitled riffs on the greatest movie trilogy known to man. We left the story with the rebels fleeing their base on the ice world of Hoff…

[Han and Leia are running to get to Leia's transport ship. They are almost caught by the collapse of the roof in one of the ice corridors.]

Han: (Pulls out his mobile phone and starts talking to the Transport’s captain) Transport? This is Solo. Better take off, I can’t get to you. I’ll take her out on the Falcon.

[Han turns and pulls Leia up from the floor whilst talking on his mobile. They hurriedly backtrack down the corridor.]

Transport Captain: (Talking to Han over the phone) Why didn’t you just offer to take her in your ship to begin with? We’ve been waiting for the Princess to board. We made the final call for departures half an hour ago.

Han: The living quarters on the Falcon don’t have en suite. The Princess doesn’t like to share the head with the rest of us. If you’d ever gone after Chewie, you’d understand why.

Transport Captain: It’s not the toilet she should be worried about. I’m amazed you finally got that hunk of junk flying again. It looked like you were working on it to the last minute. Why didn’t you buy a new ship with all that reward money you got?

Han: Don’t call my ship a hunk of junk. She may not look much, but she’s got it where it counts. For a start, she’s got great headroom. They make the ceilings on those new ships too low, and Chewie’s always banging his head when he’s in them. Plus I’ve made a lot of special modifications myself. We converted the Falcon to run on bio-mass instead of that horrible nuclear power stuff. I’m really hoping to get a lot more work from the green smuggling lobby as a result. There’s a lot of money to be made sneaking off-world organic vegetables past custom controls. The only problem is when Chewie starts eating into the payload - he really stinks it up. No wonder the Princess doesn’t like to use the loo after him.

Leia: (Grabs the phone from him) Come on! The stormtroopers are going to be here any minute!

Han: I was just waiting for ‘3PO. He can’t run as fast as the rest of us.

[They get to the Falcon's hanger and they climb aboard.]

Chewie: (Angry) Bark!! Growl!! (translates as “Where have you been!?!? We gotta get out of here.”)

Han: Did you get everything working?

Chewie: Bark-bark howl (translates as “Not exactly. But I did unblock the head. Good job I did - I didn’t realize you were bringing your moany girlfriend with you.”)

[Darth Vader and a phalanx of stormtroopers approach the Falcon. Inside, Han and Chewie are still desperately trying to get it working.]

Leia: Would it help if I got out and pushed?

[Han stops and tries to think of a witty comeback. He is stumped and just stands there open-jawed, trying to think.]

Leia: Just get on with fixing the ship.

[Leia follows Han around the ship as he frantically tries to get it running. She bites her lip but cannot resist taunting him further.]

Leia: This bucket of bolts is never going to get us past that blockade.

[Han stops and tries to think of another witty comeback. He is stumped once more.]

Leia: (Waving a wrench in Han’s face) Come on, fix it!

[Han is playing with the controls, trying to get the ship to start. They seem frozen, and will not respond. In desperation, he presses alt-control-delete and tries to reboot. This time, the Falcon's engines buzz into life.]

Han: (Relieved) See!

Leia: Some day you’re gonna be wrong, and I just hope I’m there to see it.

Han: (Repeats back slowly) “Some day you’re gonna be wrong, and I just hope I’m there to see it.” You want to be there the day I don’t get the ship started and we all get captured and slowly and painfully executed by the Empire? Geez, woman. You’re hard to please. You know that time we rescued you from the Death Star, and you said it was too easy and they were letting you escape? I’m starting to understand why they’d do that.

[The Falcon takes off. Darth Vader calmly watches as it does.]

Stormtrooper: Sir, why didn’t you use your dark Jedi powers to bring the roof down on top of them, or to screw up their ship’s systems, so it couldn’t take off? Or you could have just killed them all with that strangling thing you do. I’ve seen you do that kind of thing before, and it’s very impressive. Why did you let them escape?

Darth Vader: We’ll catch up with them, don’t worry. And imagine what they will be like after a few days spent in the confined space of that ship. Between Leia’s incessant nagging, Chewbacca’s toilet habits, and 3PO’s ‘the probability of navigating an asteroid field is eighty-eight billion-to-one’, Solo’s going to endure a far worse torture than any I could muster.

…

[Luke is walking back to the rendezvous point outside the rebel base, having crashed his snowspeeder and destroyed an AT-AT in single combat. He stops to watch the Falcon taking off. R2-D2 is waiting in Luke's X-Wing.]

Luke: R2! (Luke waves)

R2-D2: Beep-whistle. (translates as: “Where the F@*K have you been? And will you hurry up? You’re sauntering along like you’re taking a Sunday stroll. We got to get the F@*K outta here!!”)

Luke: (Laughs) I love you R2. I can’t understand a word you’re saying, but the sound of your cheery whistle always makes me feel better, even at the worst of times.

R2-D2: Beep. Toot. (translates as: “Stupid prick.”)

Luke: Get her ready for take-off.

R2-D2: Whistle. Bleep. (translates as: “Well, duh. Do you think? It’s been ready to take-off for the last hour, you moron.”)

[They take off and fly into space.]

R2-D2: Bleep. Beep. Tweet. (translates as: “Hey! What the buggery’s going on here? You’ve changed course…”)

Luke: (Reading a polite version of what R2 says from the cockpit screen in front of him) We’re going to the Degobah system.

R2-D2: Whistle. (translates as: “Now he tells me. Let’s recuperate from the ice planet by going to a world which is one giant swamp.”) Bleep. Tweet. (translates as: “You must be exhausted from your long walk. Why don’t you have a nap and I’ll fly the ship for a while?”) (R2-D2 also shows this last message on the screen in Luke’s cockpit.) Tweet-beep. (translates as: “And once you’re asleep I can fly this ship back to the rest of the fleet and find myself a new owner. One who’s not quite so barmy. Methinks that moisture farming must have left this one with moisture on the brain.”)

Luke: That’s alright. I’d like to keep it on manual control for a while.

R2-D2: Bleep. Hum. Beep. (translates as: “Maybe he’s not so stupid after all…”)

…

[The Falcon is flying in space above Hoth, closely pursued by a Star Destroyer and several TIE fighters.]

Han: (To Chewie) I saw ‘em, I saw ‘em.

Leia: Saw what?

Han: Star Destroyers. Two of them coming right at us. (He points at them in the window). I can still outmanoeuvre them.

[The Falcon darts downwards as the two oncoming Star Destroyers almost reach the Star Destroyer that was chasing from behind. The Star Destroyers struggle to change direction to avert a head-on collision. Their crews are thrown to the floor as their ships swing around.]

[In the engine room of one of the Star Destroyers...]

Chief Engineer: (Sat on his chair) You see? That’s why they made me chief. ‘Cos I got the big engineering brains.

Trainee Engineer: (Picking himself up off the floor) What’s that you’re talking about?

Chief Engineer: My invention, of course. Check it out - it’s gonna revolutionize space travel.

[The Chief Engineer points to a strap across his chest and around his waist which is holding him securely in his chair.]

Trainee Engineer: What is it?

Chief Engineer: It’s a bit of strong fabric that holds me in my chair, so even if the ship swings to port, starboard, up or down, I’ll never fall over and hurt myself. It’s got tension, see (he demonstrates by pulling the strap out slowly, then letting go and allowing it to pull taut against his chest again) but if there is any really violent jerks (he demonstrates by pulling rapidly) it jams and holds you firmly in place.

Trainee Engineer: Like an elasticated belt to hold your trousers up.

Chief Engineer: (Unimpressed by the analogy) Yeah - somefink like that. Now I just need to come up with a name for it. I was toyin’ with “space strap”.

Trainee Engineer: Well, it’s like a belt, except for your chair. How about “chairbelt”? Or better still, “seatbelt”?

Chief Engineer: Nah. They’ll never go for fitting something called a “seatbelt” on a space ship. It doesn’t sound scientific enough. It’s got to have a sexy spacey technological name, like “space harness” or “star restraint”.

Trainee Engineer: Sir, what I don’t understand is the physics of falling over in spaceships anyway. Can you explain it to me?

Chief Engineer: Whaddaya mean?

Trainee Engineer: Well sir, it’s like this. We’re travelling at hundreds of thousands of kilometres a second, and we can alter course and go through phenomenal acceleration and deceleration and rapid changes of direction. But if the pilot stuffs up, like he did in that near head-on collision we just had, we only get mildly jostled. By rights, the acceleration should be so great we should be thrown so forcefully across the inside of the ship that we’d be literally flattened against the interior walls. But instead, people fall over like they were standing inside a caravan that went over a speedbump at thirty miles per hour. Why is that?

Chief Engineer: It’s called inertial dampening, which is just a fancy name for the ship’s suspension. In early ships, you were right that the ride was very firm, and people did tend to get flattened into a pancake every time there was a small deviation in course. But with these modern ships, the suspension’s so good you could fly through a black hole and the worse thing that could happen is you might bang your head on these low ceilings.

Trainee Engineer: So why don’t they turn up the suspension a little more? Then people wouldn’t even need a star restraint, and would never need to worry about falling over or banging their noggin’ or whatever.

Chief Engineer: True, but that’d take all the fun out of the ride, wouldn’t it?

[Meanwhile, on the Falcon.]

Han: Prepare to make the jump to light speed.

C-3PO: But Sir! If I may say so sir, I noticed earlier the hyperdrive motivator has been damaged. It’s impossible to go to lightspeed!

Han: No problem. Leia - you go back there and motivate that hyperdrive.

Leia: But I don’t even know what the hyperdrive looks like.

Han: 3PO, you take her back and show her. We need to stay here and keep evading those fighters.

Leia: But how do I motivate a hyperdrive?

Han: You’ll think of something.

[C-3PO leads Leia to the Falcon's hyperdrive.]

Leia: You’re the sorriest hyperdrive I think I’ve ever seen. Call yourself a hyperdrive? You don’t deserve the name. You’re not even a superdrive. Any decent hyperdrive would have taken us half way across the galaxy by now. But there you sit, doing nothing at all, like the lazy worthless piece of scrap you are. The only thing you’re driving is me - driving me up the wall! Why don’t you pull yourself together and get us out of here?

[In the Falcon's cockpit.]

Han: It won’t work, but at least it’ll get her off my back for a while.

[The Falcon shudders.]

Han: That wasn’t a laser blast - somethin’ hit us.

[Leia returns to the cockpit.]

Leia: Asteroids!

Han: We don’t have any astrodroids. If we did, I get them to repair the hyperdrive. Why did we have to end up with the protocol droid when Luke gets to take the robot that could’ve gone outside and fixed up this ship in a couple of shakes?

Leia: Not astrodroids! Asteroids! (She pauses as she realizes where they are heading.) What are you doing? You’re not actually going into an asteroid field?

Han: They’d be crazy to follow us, wouldn’t they?

C-3PO: Sir! The probability of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1.

Han: What do you mean, approximate? How approximate can it be, if you calculated the odds with the level of precision needed to state it to a factor of one in several thousands? If it was approximate, say you stated the probability to three significant figures, then you’d say the chances are nil.

C-3PO: Alright sir, have it your way. The probability of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately nil.

Han: (Aside to Chewie) I showed him, huh? Now who’s the smart one?

…

[Luke crash lands his X-Wing in the swamps of Degobah.]

R2-D2: Beep-tweet. Whistle-hum-whistle. (translates as “Well, that’s just great. We’re really screwed now!! Somehow I can’t see the space vehicle breakdown service coming to pick us up from here anytime soon.”)

[Luke opens up his cockpit hatch and throws off his gloves in anger.]

Luke: I said I wanted to get away from the dry, dusty desert, but this isn’t what I meant. (He pulls out his mobile phone.) Would you believe that? The battery on my mobile phone is dead. Now we’ll have to find a payphone to call for a recovery van. (Takes a long look at the swamp around him.) It could be a long walk to find a payphone round here.

R2-D2: Beep. (translates as “I’d better go look for one.”)

[The ship subsides and R2-D2 falls into the swamp. After a second, he raises his periscope above the water's surface. He swims around.]

R2-D2: Tweet. Whistle. (translates as “Actually, this is rather nice. Kind of like being in a hot spa. But I hope the salts in this water don’t cause my data ports to rust.”)

[A large submerged lizard creature sneaks up behind R2-D2 and swallows him whole. A few seconds later, he spits him out.]

R2-D2: Beep-bleep. (translates as “Eat me, will you? Heh heh, I’d give you rotten indigestion. Good job you spat me out, as it would have been much worse for you if you’d waited until I came out the other end.”)

[Luke and R2-D2 unload their supplies from the X-Wing.]

Luke: Now all I gotta do is find this Yoda, if he even exists. If we find him, maybe we can call the recovery van from his place.

R2-D2: Bleep-tweet. Whistle. (translates as: “So this is your plan? Land at a random spot on a planet you have never been to, and just hope the man you’re looking for lives nearby? What a cretin. The chances of finding somebody like that must be approximately… nil. And you’re not even sure he exists! How long were you planning to spend looking for this character?”)

[Yoda walks up from behind and startles Luke. Luke pulls his blaster from his holster.]

Yoda: Away put your weapon, I mean you no harm. I am wondering, why are you here?

Luke: I’m looking for someone.

Yoda: Looking? Found someone you have I would say, hmm? (Laughs) Help you I can, yes, ummm.

Luke: I’m looking for a great warrior. A Jedi master.

Yoda: Which one? Jedi master Tanah Lot not far from here, he lives. Jedi master Bora Bodur his home he makes in the next big swamp over. Jedi master Chechen Itcha lives a few miles East. Jedi master Sha-na-ram-a-lang-a-ding-dong into the neighbourhood has just moved…

Luke: That’s a lot of Jedi masters. I thought all the Jedi were hunted down and killed. And why are they all living in this swamp?

Yoda: Hmmm. Of course not all Jedi were killed. Exaggeration, that is. I’m Jedi, and I’m not dead, am I? As for why we live here, imagine Darth Vader wading through all this gloop, can you? Mess up his shiny uniform he would. His cloak would get all sodden and havoc with his breathing gear, the swamp gas would play. This is the safest place for us Jedis, now we’ve all turned into cowardly custards and from the Empire have run and hidden. Plus it was cheaper if we went in together and bought a big plot of land between us. Unfortunately, Jedi wages don’t pay so well, and none of us, in belongings, we ever believed, so savings we had few. This most swampy bit of swamp land on this swamp planet, all we could afford, it was.

Luke: Jedi master too are you? - Now you’ve got me talking backwards too - I’m looking for Jedi master Yoda.

Yoda: Me that is.

Luke: Great! What a stroke of luck! Obi-Wan Kenobi sent me. He said I should train with you. I nearly didn’t make it - I was dying from hypothermia when he told me.

Yoda: Sure you hallucinating were not?

Luke: Pretty sure.

Yoda: Spoken to him since, have you?

Luke: No. But I’ve been pretty busy. And he hasn’t been in touch since.

Yoda: Hmmm. Mentioned you, he has not. Not heard from him for ten years. Now he sends you to me. Why? (Yoda has a sudden revelation.) Wait - are you the boy Skywalker? The one Kenobi was keeping an eye on?

Luke: Yes, that’s me!

Yoda: Okay. Train you, I will. Kenobi, did he mention a rate?

Luke: Excuse me?

Yoda: Kenobi, did he explain my fees when to come here, he told you?

Luke: No, he didn’t. I haven’t got any money.

Yoda: (Suddenly angry) No money?! Do you think a charity this is?

Luke: But I thought you said you don’t believe in possessions.

Yoda: That was then. Now, look at me. I wear rags and in the smallest hovel in the worst swamp I live, all because savings I had none. Now listen, Luke. When nine hundred years old you reach, be as poor as me, I hope you will not. Pension, no. Investments, no. Astute financial planning, no. And Degobah social security benefits payments? Generous, they are not. (A tear rolls down his eye). Rats, lizards, newts, eels - this is what I eat. Ashamed, I am. Pay, you must. (Yoda wipes away the tear and straightens himself up.) Rich you look, your clothes are fine and fancy spaceship and droid own, you do.

Luke: The spaceship’s not mine. It’s borrowed. And we only got R2 cheap because he was stolen property. There’s been a terrible misunderstanding. I didn’t realize you expected payment. I’m only a poor moisture farmer, and I’ve been too busy with this rebellion to make money.

Yoda: Too busy, you were, to make money? And your rebel friends, are they also too busy to make money?

Luke: Well, now you come to mention it, I suppose not. Han got a massive payday for making the exact same rescue as me, but all I got was some medal. It wasn’t even made of proper metal - more like the stuff they wrap chocolate coins in. And there’s this girl, Leia, and she’s a Princess and she’s rich…

Yoda: Error of your ways, see you? Rich, your friends are. You, poor, and now, penniless, in this swamp, with me you are stuck.

Luke: Tell you what - if you teach me how to be a Jedi, I’ll get my friends to pay you 10,000 credits when this is over.

Yoda: When over, this is? How long do you expect this to take, hmmm?

Luke: I was hoping to get a crash course. Maybe a couple of weeks, maybe a month?

Yoda: (Laughs and points at the X-Wing.) How to crash, I think you know already. But years and years of training, to be a Jedi, it takes. Start when you are only a very small child, and completed the training would be only by the age you are now. That was with the state of the art training facility we used to have. Now the only training equipment we have will be the sticks and stones in this swamp, and maybe you can climb up some trees, or down into some holes. Not the fanciest equipment. At least twenty years it will take, to train you to be a Jedi.

Luke: Yikes! I wasn’t counting on it taking that long. Is there any way we can speed things up?

Yoda: Hmmm. Not really, no.

Luke: I’ve only got 25 days leave each year. I’ll need to go back after that, especially if you want your money.

Yoda: Teach you a few tricks, in five weeks, I can. Jumping high in the air, doing backflips, making a stone fly in the air, this I might be able to show you in a few weeks. But no refund if you leave empty handed, hmmm?

Luke: And will you show me how to use mind powers to influence the simple-minded, especially chicks?

Yoda: Yes, with that we will start. In that department, as much help as you can get, I can already sense you need.

…

[Aboard Darth Vader's super star destroyer.]

Admiral Piett: (Walks briskly towards Darth Vader) Lord Vader! The Emperor commands you to make contact with him.

[In Darth Vader's private chambers. Darth Vader kneels and looks at the ground as the holographic projection chamber is activated so he can speak to the Emperor.]

Darth Vader: What is thy bidding, my master? (He looks up) Master? Is that you?

[There is a large holographic projection of the Emperor's head and shoulders, tinted blue.]

Emperor Palpatine: Of course it’s me. Who did you think was calling you? Your mother?

Darth Vader: It’s just that… you look strangely different. I was expecting you to look, well, a little more greenish. Are you wearing make up? And your eyes look different.

Emperor Palpatine: It’s a new foundation I’m experimenting with. I’m trying to cover up some of these scars. Don’t think it will help you with yours, though. And how do you like these new disposable contacts? They’re tinted. I think yellow really suits me, don’t you?

Darth Vader: Yes, I suppose so.

Emperor Palpatine: Come on, Vader. If you can’t tell me what you honestly think, who can?

Darth Vader: It’s been a long time since I worried about such things. And the picture is not very good - interference from the asteroid field, I suppose. But yes, yes, you look good. It suits you. But if you’re worried about the scars, maybe you should think about cosmetic surgery?

Emperor Palpatine: I’ve never been keen on the idea of unnecessary surgery, but I suppose you’re right. Why not? I’m not getting younger. And even with my mind powers it’s not easy to influence chicks to go out on dates with me these days.

Darth Vader: You should be thinking about settling down, my master. Perhaps some children…

Emperor Palpatine: That didn’t work out too well for you, did it?

Darth Vader: No, no it didn’t.

Emperor Palpatine: That’s what I was calling about, actually. The son of Skywalker - probably you should kill him now.

Darth Vader: Kill him? If you say so, but we never bothered before. Why now?

Emperor Palpatine: I can’t afford to have him blowing up expensive Death Stars all the time, can I? They’re not cheap. If he keeps doing things like that, he could destroy us, or worse still, we’ll end up in the poorhouse like that wretched Yoda. Yoda lives in a swamp, you know? No pension, no assets. He lives off the welfare state. Bloody scrounger. Eats worms and heck knows what. I was going to have him killed, but when I realized how far he’d fallen I thought I’d better just let him be. Killing him would be a mercy. But anyway, the Force is strong with the son of Skywalker. He must not become a Jedi.

Darth Vader: That’s rather an odd way of referring to him. He’s called Luke. He’s been living with my stepbrother Owen. At least, he was until I had Owen and his family killed.

Emperor Palpatine: (Surprised) You’ve known about your son all along?

Darth Vader: I didn’t realize it was meant to be a secret. I mean, he lived with my step-brother and his family. I can’t believe they sent him there in order to hide him - that would be ridiculous. Owen and I weren’t close. I hardly knew him, so we didn’t keep in touch or anything like that. I always assumed that my mother’s new family wouldn’t want anything to do with me, what with me hunting down and killing the Jedi. Can’t say I thought about it much.

Emperor Palpatine: But he’s your son! Weren’t you just a bit curious?

Darth Vader: Perhaps, but what was I going to do, go visit them for Christmas? Just drop by and say something cheesy about being in the neighbourhood? No, it was better that I didn’t have anything to do with the lad. Then at least he could grow up in peace and have the kind of normal childhood that I never had. Playing with friends, not being a slave, that kind of thing. I was hoping he was going to end up a harmless moisture farmer like my stepbrother Owen, but when I heard he was the one who blew up the Death Star, I thought that’s that ruined. It’s my own stupid fault - I should never have had the family killed, just so we could find those blasted droids that were carrying the Death Star battleplans. Ironic, huh? I unwittingly spurred my own son to do the very thing I was trying to stop from happening.

Emperor Palpatine: Yes, that is ironic. Almost as ironic as killing him now, after all this time.

Darth Vader: If he could be turned, he would become a powerful ally.

Emperor Palpatine: Yes, he would be a great asset. Can it be done?

Darth Vader: You should know more about that than me. You turned me to the dark side. It should be much easier to turn this untrained boy. If he takes after me, he’ll be turned in no time. And if he takes after his mother (shrugs his shoulders) then I’ll have to kill him too.

Emperor Palpatine: Lord Vader, you’re professionalism and dedication never ceases to impress me. I asked you to kill your own son, and you’ve reacted by being very philosophical about it. Actually, I was just testing you. I wanted you to turn young Luke to the dark side all along, but I was keen to see how you’d react to being told to kill him.

Darth Vader: You know me, my master. I live for my work. It’s the only thing that keeps me going.

Emperor Palpatine: Well, maybe with your boy turned to the dark side, that’ll give you some refreshed enthusiasm for life. Think of it: ‘Vader & Son: the dark side double act’. He’s got the youth and energy, you’ve got the experience.

Darth Vader: Yes, that does have a certain ring to it. I’ll be sure to suggest it when I see him. But I’ve no idea where he is these days.

Emperor Palpatine: He’s with Yoda on Degobah.

Darth Vader: I’m not going to chase him there. That swamp gas plays havoc with my breathing apparatus.

Emperor Palpatine: Don’t worry, he’ll soon get bored of Yoda’s training program. Do you remember it?

Darth Vader: How could I forget? ‘Over there run, over that jump, that rock lift up, on your back carry me you shall’. ‘Do or not do, there is no try’. How’s anyone supposed to learn anything like that? I don’t think Yoda’s got a proper teaching qualification. I give Luke five weeks at the most. After a month spent eating toads and listening to Yoda’s annoying prattle, he’ll be begging to come to the dark side.

To be continued…

This is a poem I wrote recently to celebrate the birthday of Mrs. Tracy Buys. Saying that, I think it is true enough for all, whether looking back on bring 30 or still looking forward to it…

It’s time to say goodbye to your twenties.
There’s no need to shed a tear.
Although it was such a happy decade,
A happier one is here.

You’re still young enough to boogie all night,
And enjoy a drink or two.
But you’re old enough to know when to stop,
Though that won’t be stopping you.

There are very many good years ahead.
Just take a look at the stats,
You’ve 64% of life to go,
And possibly more than that.

They sometimes say “life begins at 40”.
By that proverb’s reckoning,
You’ve another ten years to please yourself,
Before life really begins.

Medical texts say women at 30,
Often become randier.
That’s good news for ladies, but for the men,
The plus points are handier.

If you want to exercise discretion;
Deny the passing of time,
Then simply pretend that you’re 25,
Until you reach 39!

Be happy that you’ve reached the big 3-oh,
You won’t fall into ruin.
When you still run amok, once in a while,
You’ll know just what you’re doing…