27th January 2004 - Must We Elect Another Liar

One of the biggest problems with democracy today is the resignation in the population that it doesn't much matter who is in power they just do the same thing. They lie. Oh, often, being the well trained lawyers they mostly are, they find formulations of words that are technically true but are going to be understood in the wrong way. "We have no intention to do X", meaning that it will definitely happen and other similar phrases are all too common. But the latest set of charges against Blair make it clear just how brazen this mental dissonance has become. The first case is of course the Iraq war. Iraq was not a threat to Britain or anyone else. There was no case for war. This was so well known that it was stated in explicit terms by many people including in 2001 Secretary of State Colin Powel and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. Now, even the head of the team of US investigators is coming out asking why anyone thought Iraq was a threat. What is the latest twist in this nonsense? I was disgusted to read in the leading front page of the Guardian newspaper recently the "explanation" of why no WMD have been found as the claim that Saddam had evidently been bluffing - i.e. pretending to possess such weapons! Sorry. What planet are you living on? He had been adamantly claiming he had none. What kind of bluff is that?

There was and is no way to persuade some people. Jack Straw was the other day waxing lyrical about how difficult finding weapons is. Referring to Northern Ireland's IRA and how well they had hidden their guns from British forces over 40 years. So what would you ever have accepted as sufficient evidence to lift the sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of innocents in Iraq? Nothing would ever have sufficed. It was a pure act of genocide.

There are those who say that this war was about WMD. This is a lie. There are those who said that this war is about oil. This is either a lie or pure idiocy. The oil won't flow for a good while yet in any amount to compensate for the costs involved. There are those who say this is for regime change and for democracy. Sorry, but if democracy means qualification for high office according to your ability to lie through your teeth then there is something rotten in your concepts. Why would we trust such a claim? No, this kind of lying and corrupted democracy is not the answer to Iraq's problems. So what was the reason for the war? Israel's desperate paranoia and ambition to keep all its neighbours "bombed back to the stone age". It is no secret that the neo-cons in the US administration that were pushing for war were all rabid Zionists the large majority of them Jews. This was nothing more than giving some Arabs a beating to keep them from getting any grand ambitions. A bit like the daily occurrences in occupied Palestine but just on a larger scale. The rest of it is just a bunch of lies told to keep everyone busy pursuing one another instead of the real culprits.

Which brings me back to pursuing Blair the prime liar. Not only did he lie on many occasions about the war. He is now in trouble for bringing in legislation to introduce student fees. This might not be such a problem but the manifesto on which he was elected specifically promised to oppose student fees. What is his barrister like excuse? Well, the legislation will not introduce the fees before the next election and so therefore he is somehow still holding to the letter of his promise. No Tony. You cannot spin this one.

It doesn't matter that Hutton has done a white wash of Tony and his cronies. When a government gets it as wrong as they did about Iraq's WMD being a threat there are only two possibilities: Conspiracy and cover up or gross incompetence. Whichever it is, they are not qualified to be decision makers anymore.

How do we get rid of these professional liars? Well, increasingly I am persuaded by the case to abandon voting all together in favour of drawing lots. Why have a parliament where people are corrupted to represent all the vested interests and money involved in party politics and in state sponsored activities. If you want a proper representation of the people to have power then just select a few hundred members of the public at random from the electoral register. It is guaranteed to be a fair selection of people and much more representative of the population. almost exactly 50% women, racial and religious minorities fairly represented, professions fairly represented - not just lawyers and party apparatchiks.

It could even work well in Iraq right now. It could be done tomorrow for hardly any cost! Why waste time on direct elections? Political parties will only be serving their sponsors and who will they be?