LETTER: Political system is broken in UK

How unsurprising that councillor Dawe cynically and blatantly plays the blame game for the country’s troubles.

He then effortlessly extends this from his own local field to national level, with an undisguised leap that quotes a single isolated case of failure to engage with the lawmakers by a former abject failure as Home Secretary in a socialist government – David Blunkett.

Notwithstanding the unconnected leap into support for a socialist from the Conservative Mr Dawe, it’s all the fault of unelected officials applying the ‘rules’ set down for them, he says.

Is this true, or just another ploy to persuade you to continue supporting an out-of-date, totally disreputable and undemocratic system?

Let’s examine who appoints those unelected officials and lays down the laws and rules they operate by.

Certainly not us electors.

We get the laws politicians decide are right for us, or for them one might argue.

For example, in an open vote the British people would unequivocally agree that a death penalty for certain crimes was appropriate.

Your politicians don’t like that, because they know better than you, so you don’t get a say – ever.

Once we have voted for our chosen candidate, selected and sponsored by another set of unelected and largely secret bodies that Mr Dawe is part of, operating behind closed doors and to secret political agendas, we are stuck with them and their political view of the future.

OK I will concede that at a local level, politicians just like the rest of us (one would hope) are bound by the law and by rules put in place by government but aren’t all these politicians members of the same party machinery that set the agenda from which those laws and rules were derived?

And don’t we already know how those same politicians think they are above those laws? It would seem to me that Mr Dawe is doing nothing more than confirming what we already know.

That is, the political system in the UK is broken.

Judges don’t make law, they apply laws. Planners don’t decide planning rules, they implement them. Immigration panels don’t make visa rules, they apply them.

The list goes on to infinity and beyond.

It appears to me too many politicians are legally ‘qualified’ and law is written today mostly by them, on a knee-jerk reaction basis, not by civil servant specialists taking long term views and considering all inputs as well as the transient, media-hyped, sound-bite pressure that drives so much of our lives today.

This and enabling acts, in which politicians change the law without recourse to parliament, is why it is so often proven in the courts that ‘modern law’ is badly written and unworkable.

Politicians wrote the Civil Rights Act so it’s pretty rich for politicians to criticise it.

The same politicians write immigration acts, company law, tax law, the local government act, planning law and all the other things they keep tell us are going wrong and don’t forget, they run these failing organisations as well.

In the same way, the ‘rules’ Mr Dawe so easily denigrates are created by politicians against an agenda designed largely to change your behaviour to a norm suggested as required by unelected political advisers to meet those agendas.

They seek to change behaviour by the likes of fines for ‘wrong’ behaviour that have changed absolutely nothing and are actually used as tax collection by another name these days and have made criminals out of all us.

Until we fix the party political system to one where political candidates are chosen by a balloted committee system and an unchallengeable recall system is in place, we will continue being ruled by Mr Dawe and his like with their ‘don’t blame me, it’s the system’, excuses.

On other matters, over and over again in your pages we are told by local government officers and our elected representatives that the provision of services is all about priorities.

Where I live in North Horsham ‘they’ are installing new street lights.

New street lights!

The old ones appear to me to work perfectly well but could of course be switched off at night to save electricity.

Are they actually considering the priorities or just following a budgeted plan that is already in surplus?

Not fit for purpose?

ANDREW CAMPBELL

Butlers Road, Horsham