Democracy in Action within Parliamentary Government

DEMOCRACY either means that the will of the people shall be implemented, or it means nothing. Yet to suggest a system which can, in fact, do what the people want done is often denounced as a denial of democracy, since effective action is regarded as a danger to liberty. In the name of freedom people are condemned to live in slums for fear that a government powerful enough to rebuild the slums might turn life into some kind of prison. Consequently we live in a State of universal negation within a system of individual inhibition. The individual has liberty to drink or drug himself into oblivion of his inhibitions, but not the liberty to live in a good home easily obtained at a fair rent, or to enjoy a secure livelihood in work which interests him because his ideas are used, while in the evening his enthusiasm is encouraged in an active community life. These things are possible in the age of modern science, but they require organisation on a great scale which means action by government. The failure of government to act results in disillusionment and eventually in the disintegration of society. It is possible to reconcile action with liberty? Can we give government power to act and yet make quite certain it will not abuse that power, and will preserve the absolute assurance of individual liberty? I believe we can. Government freely and regularly elected by universal franchise would ask the parliamentary majority to grant it freedom to act in all the main problems facing the nation. It would then be able to do what the people want done, subject to the right of Parliament at any time to dismiss it by vote of censure. Give a man, or in this case a government, a job to do, and sack him if he fails, is a principle most people would support. Common sense principles of everyday life, which everyone can understand, are required to cut through the Gordian knot of present confusion and frustration in government. Members of Parliament should not only have power to dismiss government by a majority vote of censure, but also to question Ministers far more frequently than time now permits. Members of all parties should be attached to each department to make suggestions to Ministers and interrogate them publicly if they proved recalcitrant. Members of Parliament should also be more closely informed of what is happening in the country by spending more time among their constituents. They would then be competent to question Ministers, since they would be well informed by their contacts both with the departments and with the people. What would be gained and what might be lost by such a reform of government? The gain would be complete freedom to act. For instance, just conceive solving the housing problem by the present rigmarole of interacting procedure between government, Parliament and local authority. The scandal of the slums in Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow and London itself was one of the main

factors which took me into the Labour Party in 1924, after betrayal of the government's pledge in 1918 to rehouse the people with particular reference to the returned ex-servicemen. Yet it was reported in The Times of October 22 1969 that 4,500,000 houses still require demolition. For my part I have proposed ever since return from the war of 1918 that we should solve the housing problem as an operation of war. Government should mobilise individual firms by mass production methods to build houses as they built ships, planes, shells and mulberry harbours in wartime. When the housing shortage is at length overcome and the slums are rebuilt industry could revert to private enterprise just as normality returns at the successful conclusion of a war. It would be a national effort to solve a problem which menaces the life, health and happiness of our people. Why should government only have the power to act in time of war; always to destroy, never to build? The gain in terms of what could be done for our people by this long overdue action of government would be immense. What would be the loss? We should lose whatever advantage is derived from detailed parliamentary debate, an overrated benefit. As an ex-Minister responsible for conducting difficult and complex Bills through Parliament I will not deny there is some benefit. The old adage that several heads are better than one always applies in regarding these measures from all angles in Parliament because every kind of human and professional experience is to be found there. Yet the real, detailed grilling of the problem by the experts of the departments has already occurred. The Minister has already accepted valuable advice and made his own contribution if he is any good, and his job in Parliament is more by debating skill and agreeable manners to get the Bill through prolonged and successive readings as quickly as possible. Members of Parliament lacking the mass of detailed information which is only available in the departments are tempted instead to obstruct with party politics. We never learn all the fact until we become Ministers; that is why all party programmes are more or less bogus. The task of the Minister is to grasp the facts available in the department, and to decide his action; it should, of course, coincide with and not contradict the party statement of intent at the previous election. If he knows his own mind and comes to clear decisions he will be supported by the complete loyalty of the Civil Service. The elaborate paraphernalia of detailed Parliamentary discussion dates from a previous epoch, and today wastes time without really touching more than the fringe of the subject. My old gag about government and opposition fancy running a factory but paying one man to do a job and another man to stop him was demagogic, but an element of truth. Admittedly Ministers would lose some time in dealing with all-party committees to co-operate with the department, but nothing like the time they now waste in hanging about the lobbies day and night in idle discussion. Also there would be a corresponding gain learning continually what was happening in the country from M.P.s who were in close and constant touch with their constituents. My wish that Government should always know what the people are thinking, and the people should always know what the government is doing, would then be implemented. The Prime Minister would find it worthwhile to see these committees at regular intervals and to learn the facts of daily life. He would also do well to inform and be informed by often submitting himself to interrogation before television by skilled journalists armed with all the facts of their organisations. That would be the beginning of participation. For the rest, effective participation surely entails the consultations of every man in his daily work, above all the careful

study of any idea he presents for enter in an organised form into all questions affecting his daily community life at home. This is an interest which has occupied me from the co-partnership and profit-sharing schemes of the twenties to the European Socialism - briefly, syndicalism in industries now nationalised which I was suggesting in the fifties. It was inherent, too, in my proposals for an occupational franchise in the thirties. I do not, at present, advocate this reform, because such great changes will be necessary before long to overcome economic crisis that we should undertake nothing which is not strictly necessary; we should say with Jeremy Bentham: minimise pain. What matters is that full outlet to every man's mind and spirit in work and daily life shall be secured in this mechanical age. Can we then agree that democracy consists firstly in government with the duty and the power to do what the people have elected it to do, subject not only to their will at frequent multi-party elections but also to instant dismissal at any time be their elected representatives, and secondly in the organised consultations of the whole people in their work and daily life in a manner so thorough and systematic that it can only be initiated and conducted under the auspices of the government they have elected for this purpose? If we can agree that some such measures can give the people effective control over their internal affairs and lives, we are still faced with the problem how they can change the present control of their country by external factors. It is not much good taking all this trouble to manage our own affairs, if they can be completely upset any day by some outsider. What Mr. Attlee used to call external factors have continuously wrecked the best laid plans of social democratic governments both in Britain and Europe. We depend at present not only on the vagaries of world markets but on control by foreign bankers who dictate to British government the necessary measures to maintain our balance of payments. In this sphere one or other of the weak, divided European countries is always in trouble, because it is self-evident that all countries cannot simultaneously sell more than the buy. The resultant movements from surplus into deficit and back into surplus are ordained by foreign bankers: we live under a system of external financial control. What nonsense in these circumstances to talk of the sovereignty of the nations or its people, or even to maintain that democracy exists. We are governed not by the vote of the people but by dictates from abroad, and in a Euro world by inflation party imported from abroad. It is necessary to unite with the rest of Europe in order to establish any true basis of democracy. We need not only a common market but also a common government; I have always contended that to put common market before common government was to put the cart before the horse. We must become a single self-contained country, with no more payments problems within its borders than exists today between Lancashire and Yorkshire. A firm in Manchester may by successful competition put out of business a firm in Lyons or Hamburg or vice versa but there will be no national balance of payments problem between Britain, France and Germany. We will never solve these problems or win true independence for the people to rule their own lives by their votes until we have common government and common market: in short, Europe a Nation for which I declared in 1948. It has long been admitted that to win access to the large and assured market which renders possible modern mass production we must enter a wider economic community. Now it becomes clear to all who seriously study the industrial and technical problem that advanced industries can

only be developed with the related resources of an entire continent. I was not far out in the 1940s in saying (1946 and 1947): The union of Europe becomes not merely a dream or a desire but a necessity and Politics must bring in the new world of science to redress the balance of the old world of Europe. European politics, industries and science are becoming completely interwoven, and I maintain again that it was right then to say: modern statesman should live and work with artists. They must also live as Europeans and not as mutually suspicious villagers. What becomes of our national culture and institutions? - the usual misunderstanding arises at this point. Are they really so proud of the roast beef of old England being cooked for ever in Wall Street? Cannot they see that the only way to save our national culture and institutions from the control of foreign bankers, from Americanisation or Soviet domination, is to get together with other Europeans not only to save our whole homeland and make it greater Europe but to preserve our individual cultures within our mutual strength? The combined might of Great Britain never obliged any Englishman to eat haggis or play the bag-pipes, but it did preserve both English and Scottish culture from outside domination for several centuries. Directly we consider a realistic structure for Europe it is clear that individuals national cultures would be preserved and the control of the people over their own lives would , at length, be established. The government of Europe a Nation should deal only with such questions as foreign policy, defence and the general economic leadership of the whole continent; it would depend on the vote of all the people of Europe for a European Parliament. National Parliament would also exist as they do today, to deal with all the social and cultural questions of the individual states within Europe. Further devolution to the regions would also be necessary in local parliaments dealing directly with the daily lives of the people. There would be more, not less opportunity than now for the development of local culture. Government can be built in three tiers, the region, the old nation and the new nation. The new nation Europe a Nation would comprise both the regions and the old nations, but would not supersede them. Europe in union alone can give all our peoples the strength and the means to control their own lives and to direct their own destinies. Democracy will then cease to be a sham and become a reality. Our people will enter a wider life of limitless opportunity, in which their political genius may develop to the benefit of all mankind. Oswald Mosley