THE PEOPLE WANT THEIR POWER BACK
Many see no point in voting as they don't see what difference it will make
By Frederick Forsyth
IN all the Tory and media euphoria that surrounded the local and London elections last week, one small figure seems to have slipped under the radar. London apart, voter turnout was still only a miserable 35 per cent.
When one thinks of all the men and women who had to fight, suffer, bleed and die 65 years ago so that we could have free elections and not a swastika flying over our heads, any turnout figure less than 50 per cent is a disgrace. It is a snub to the war memorials scattered across our land.
It is also a figure far lower than would be tolerable in the US or any country in Europe.
So why? And why here? I am convinced that deep inside the British people is a dull, unspoken conviction that there is no point in voting.
So again I ask: why? Because we all suspect that nothing will really change, no matter who leads the council. They all make promises but none is kept.
We believe that politicians – local, regional and national – pose and posture, parade and pirouette as they ask for our votes but once elected feed us a torrent of excuses but no reforms. A third time I ask: why? And here is the nitty-gritty.
If I were asked, in all my lifetime, what has been the greatest transfer of power, I would not say “from London to Brussels”. That is the second greatest transfer. The biggest has been the transfer of power from the elected tribune of the people to the unelected bureaucrat.
Local councillors come and go but the embedded power of the bureaucrats resides on the fact that the full-time professional will always run rings round the evenings-only amateur.
It is no secret that many council leaders, not to mention sub-committee chairmen, are in awe of strong-willed civil servants, for they know if the latter withdraw their co-operation the entire machine can grind to a halt. Then the politicians will get the public blame until they capitulate to the bureaucrats.
In the days, and I remember them, when civil servants saw themselves as the servants of the “cives” (the citizenry), there was no harm done. They accepted the supremacy of the voter and sought to accomplish the decisions of council.
But that has changed. We now see them recruiting thousands of talentless hirelings to fill non-jobs and boost the ranks and therefore the bills and the power.
And we see constant examples of infuriating arrogance from minor jobsworths towards the public with never a rebuke from City Hall who simply do not have the nerve to fire an incompetent, no matter how
stupid or offensive he may be.
As for politicians taking a machete to the strangling red tape, forget it. I recall John Major on the conference platform urging Michael Heseltine to slash away the thickets of rules and regulations; and Hezza jumping up and down, pretending to be the Tarzan who would do the job.
Heseltine? There never was a more totally civil servant’s politician in our whole history. Red tape multiplied exponentially.
But there may be a change coming. Just maybe. In London Boris Johnson has sworn he is going to throw out armies of Livingstone’s politically correct non-jobs and within a week he seems to have started.
Tory council chiefs everywhere should watch closely. If he can do it, the counter-transfer revolution could even start this decade.
Power back to the people. Like it used to be when living in Britain was Great.
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