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.

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.

We will gain ground in this battle, I’m sure.

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.

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.

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.

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