Saturday, May 23, 2009

Daily Telegraph calls for General Election

There is no reason for this parliament to go beyond the summer recess. So says the Daily Telegraph which has been revealing the disgusting and disgraceful situation that has prevailed in our Parliament, read the entire viewpoint from here. The article concludes:

One overwhelming message has come from this correspondence: the people want to be heard. They want a general election. On this week's BBC Question Time, which was brought forward by an hour and a half and expanded to accommodate the scale of this story, Ben Bradshaw, a minister, said the issue of allowances would be sorted out by the mechanisms put in place by Parliament in recent days: in other words, by the very people who have abused the existing system. Mr Bradshaw betrayed precisely the right amount of nonchalance guaranteed to rile an already angry group of people – one member of the audience attacked his "arrogant" answer, demanding that MPs stand before their electors in order that they be held to account. And that is precisely the point. MPs are supposed to be at Westminster as our representatives, and to constrain the executive. They should not be careerist politicians engaged in make-work activity.

Now into its fifth year, this parliament is failing to fulfil that primary function and has clearly run its course. The Government itself has lost authority and will be in an even weaker position after the European and local elections on June 4, in which Labour faces a defeat on a scale rarely inflicted upon a party in office.

Gordon Brown has dismissed calls for a general election because it would "cause chaos" in the midst of a severe economic crisis, though this did not stop America or India going to the polls. The truth is that chaos will only ensue if popular anger is not appeased. Time must be given for parties to select new candidates, where necessary, and for outstanding legislation to be enacted. But there is no reason for this parliament to go beyond the summer recess. A general election within a few months is now a necessity, not for party-political reasons but for the sake of good governance and to reassert the essential nature of our representative democracy: that MPs are our servants, and not the other way around.

Question Time Link.

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