Getting published 2
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Getting published
The British Invasion
Salvador
The quality of sanity is not strained
Going round in circles
Where do you hide your money?
For film buffs
SteamboatsMP’s reply says mind your own business
You’d be aware that the Albion Alliance has been urging people to write to their own MPs and potential MPs in their constituencies to get them to commit to a referendum on Europe. One such writer received a reply:
“There is a strict Parliamentary protocol which prevents an MP from intervening in matters raised by the constituents of other MPs. I would be grateful if you could let me know your full postal address to confirm you live in the Gloucester Parliamentary Constituency boundaries in order for Parmjit to look into your concerns.”
If you analyse this, you’ll see a few key things in the reply:
1. If you write to an MP on his/her view on a referendum, he can just turn around and say that as you’re not in his constituency, he/she needn’t reply.
2. If I do live in his/her constituency though, then he/she is bound to address the matter. But if I ask about a national matter such as a referendum, I’m told that this is a party matter and to write to the party.
Thus, either way, the MP or potential MP [PPC], avoids having to comment on his/her stance on a referendum. End of story, tail between legs, go home and take your pills.
This is the idea, this is how the system has been progressively set up by a succession of laws, none of which are designed to give you a say and in fact, are designed to remove you from the policy making process.
Ordinarily, under previous administrations, it has not been a major issue because our sovereignty has not been the N1 issue in people’s eyes. However, a headline in a national daily on the news stands the other day loudly proclaimed that the EU had “stitched us up”, that we’d had a snow job done on us. Perhaps the EU is moving up the priority list.
Whatever can be done to reverse this situation?
It’s very, very difficult.
1. For a start, there’s little homogeny in our own stance – it’s like a rowing eight, with each oarsman pulling in his/her own way.
2. There is also the frustration factor which they’re banking on – that people in Britain will simply take this rebuff and go back to grumbling in the corner, so they think. They’re banking on it not being an issue of sufficient importance in enough people’s minds for them to have to worry about it.
As Kevin Barron, Labour MP for Rother Valley, said:
We are the state’s representative in our constituencies and we should not be frightened of taking decisions on behalf of our constituents, because that is to the general good.
3. They are banking on the fact that it is the British way to grumble a lot, write letters to the editor and leave it at that. Revolution and riots is not the Anglo-Saxon British way until something has gone on for so long that the national mood suddenly turns savage.
Then we angrily throw out one party and put in the other, somehow believing that that is effecting change. Sadly, it’s not.
4. They’re also banking on the established principle that people will happily email a complaint but when one has to supply full address and phone number, this is a big stick which often shuts us up – we’d prefer not to bother and we subside.
The crux
The crux is whether these tactics will work on us this time round. Will we, in fact, go back in our shells and let the day to day concerns once more take over our week or will we take the plunge and write a letter, if necessary, with our address?
Albion Alliance
This post is not on behalf of AA. It is my personal statement, my personal reaction. I can understand people’s reticence to do anything proactive, especially in the early stages.
Obviously, if we all wrote to our MPs and PPCs, if we continued to write, if we pointed out that it was not good enough to say that the MP could not comment on this matter, if Albion Alliance really was publishing replies and commenting on them, as it is, we would eventually make a difference.
So I’m asking my readers to at least do this – to take the plunge and to write.
We have no other mechanism left to us, save direct action in the street and they surely know it might come to that and they have the means now to suppress it. You’ve all seen the attempts at protest thus far. You’ve seen the lines of police and all the other paraphernalia of mass confrontation.
I’m asking my readers to take the milder course – to write, a long British tradition – and to not let up doing this. I’m asking you to urge your own friends and contacts to whip off a letter and get a reply.
Meanwhile, other channels within our country will also be pushing hard for this referendum. We simply can no longer afford to sit back and do very little at a personal level.
Thanks to all who have acted thus far.
Filed under: This blog
I think I should help you with your publicity statements, to get more people interested in the cause! There are one or two things you could leave out of this statement which might mean a few more people sit up and notice what you are talking about!
Sorry James I am not having a dig at you, publicising things like this is something I am good at xx
James
You might find this quote applicable;
Big government depends, in large part, on going around the country stirring up apathy — creating the sense that problems are so big, so complex, so intractable that even attempting to think about them for yourself gives you such a splitting headache it’s easier to shrug and accept as given the proposition that only government can deal with them.
– Mark Steyn
As requested, I have written (via email, supplying address) to my MP (no reply yet, but he’s got a safe Labour seat); I have signed up to UKIP’s amateurishly-worded petition for a referendum on British membership of the EU; I have written to Daniel Hannan and received a breezily affirmative reply, though I have yet to see in the papers that he’s shouting for a referendum “right now”, or lobbying hard with the people who matter. Maybe I haven’t read the right stuff, or maybe he secretly thinks it’s all a waste of time, too, but there’s a living to be made as a contrarian commentator.
The fact is that when our leading politicians on all sides have decided to collude, there is nothing we can do legally, and a combination of apathy and well-grounded fear will ensure that nothing much will happen illegally, until the system breaks down into an economic and social chaos caused by those above, and then the poor will smite the poor (and those who try to help them).
It’s teachers, nurses, social workers, local government officers, police plugging the holes in the dyke for now, but we are running out of fingers and some of us don’t want to do it any more. Even liberals like Ben Elton are fleeing Western Europe, citing family reasons (a good cover) but also letting it be known that he is “fed up with the British Government” (http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/story/0,28383,26332750-5013561,00.html).
The Tommies in the trenches in WWI could see what was happening, but they couldn’t change it and believed in doing their duty nevertheless. Today the difference is the lack of belief (and thanks to the spoiled liberals for that), which makes the situation so much more perilous.
It’ll take some years yet, but unless an influential element in the leadership decides to get patriotic and take some genuinely tough decisions, we are on the slippery slope. I’ve tried to do my bit, but in your campaigning you must remember that what seems like apathy is really a matter of people being too busy trying to survive in their own little foxholes.
Cherie – thanks for that. I’ll write.
Angus – I’ll use that quote next missal. We know what should be – that there are mechanisms we should have in place and we’ve all been so otherwise concerned that it hasn’t mattered until now.
Sackers, you just wrote:
The fact is that when our leading politicians on all sides have decided to collude, there is nothing we can do legally, and a combination of apathy and well-grounded fear will ensure that nothing much will happen illegally, until the system breaks down into an economic and social chaos caused by those above, and then the poor will smite the poor (and those who try to help them).
I counsel NOT to be despondent or to accept we are powerless. This is the big con, the thing they are banking on. Just as in Roosevelt’s only fear is fear, the feeling that one can do nothing is straight our of hell – what was the sign over the gate?
This is is in every country, not just our own. Now we need that voice and the notion of “giving” it to Ireland in the hopes of a yes vote, giving it again to get that yes vote, shows that western governments are operating outside their legitimacy.
People can do what the disempowered usually do and just grumble but a certain proportion wish to act. There are ways to achieve change and Ghandi had much to write on it. His frustration was just as palpable as ours.
We are a society where the rules are the rules. It’s ingrained in us. To act against our MPs is just bordering on treasonable, so we’ve had inculcated in us. And yet we must act on this matter, in the same way that Britain had to finally act in 1939.
Otherwise we are no democracy. The Kevin Barron statement shows how far it has gone, that to get to Westminster makes you a lord of the land over us. This was never as most people saw it.
The danger with seeing the illegitimacy of the Westminster, two and a half party, adversarial system is the question – what are we going to replace it with?
We have the technology to have in each person’s home, just as so many homes have internet, a quick vote system on the major issues of the day. Obviously we should leave the day to day matters with a limited parliament acting as representatives – part of our taxes would pay for that.
But issues such as conceding sovereignty are another matter. Anyway, that’s the future.
Right now, in practical terms, what mechanisms do you see for us? The immediate threat is on our doorstep and writing before the next election and continuing to write seems the only course which doesn’t get them to use the state against us, their own people.
That Steyn quote is very good.
I’d add that there is the tendency to either apathy or despondency. As sovereignty is an abstract, just as power is an idea in the mind, enshrined in legislation, we have no casue to be despondent. In us lies the power, the legitimate power and if an administration chooses to ignore this, though we have no legal means to make them honour our will, we do have mass letter writing as a first volley.
Why don’t we just publish all the replies people get? Name and shame the cowards!
Sue, that’s exactly what Albion Alliance is currently doing – look at the site. Hope you’re well.
As you know, James, I’m pretty exhausted right now, so maybe I do need a moral kick up the rump like you’re giving me.
Maybe it’s time for dusting off an idea I put to the Libertarians a while back – hold our own referendum. Nearly everybody now has an email address book, a computer and a printer. Get a lawyer or pollster who’s worth his/her salt to devise a clear, unbiased wording on the issue, get a marketing expert / copywriter to put together a covering message, and send it round the Web like a chain-letter. Everybody to print off their copy and get their friends, neighbours and workmates to sign; organise a central address (or arrange with the Daily Mail and Daily Express?) or series of collection points.
You are not the one, Sackers. You’re proactive and we’re adopting your viral letter idea. It’s a way forward but in the end, it needs people to actually to act. You yourself said it: Everybody to print off their copy.
We will gain ground in this battle, I’m sure.
Hi James – I mean actually a referendum initiated by us, not a round-robin petition to MPs who’ll see us as nuisances/busybodies/nutters, if they see us at all (how many will have theor letters and emails screened out by interns?). 10 million signatures might do the trick, especially if you got the meeja on board.
Well the British peoplemay just grumble and then give up like the wimps we are but we seem to be importing a lot of people who believe in protesting in a different way. Now if only they were not to thick to work out who to target the problem may solve itself.
I’ve written to my PPC so far and the current incumbent, no reply so far though from either.
If avoiding national issues is the aim, then what is the point of electing MPs to serve in Parliament?
I don’t see the point in not supplying your address/postcode, unless you think your MP will use your personal info in a way that is not in your best interests.
If the MP still shirks his responsibilities to his constituents, he can be reminded that you and thousands of others needn’t vote for him. In the current climate of mistrust, even ’safe’ seats are not necessarily safe. We need to use their insecurity to control them in the same way that they use ours to control us.
All good points but Faustie – yes, they do need to be reminded of that, particularly in a second letter.
In a second letter stating that you would not be voting for them despite voting for their party in the previous elections as they no longer represent you but someone else who publicly supported these causes.
The principle of preventing one MP interfering in the constituency business of another MP is correct, however, there is nothing to prevent an MP commenting on policy issues from someone who is not one of their constituents. For example, tonight I have written to Austin Mitchell regarding the Common Fisheries Policy. This is one of his areas of expertise and he may have some figures and statistics that may help me. He is entitled to reply to me.
I did contact my MP, Diana Johnson, last year regarding a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. The reply came with an EU myth busters guide. Needless to say, I found her reply rather unhelpful.
Yes, we’re getting ready made negative responses but the ones whom we’d think would be positive are not replying as yet. More in the next few days.