Saturday 5th September

Is that it isn’t by the people and certainly is not for most of the people, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, who by the way never really was a politician at all, but a wise man nevertheless.  For a start far less than 50% of M.P.s and Cabinet and other Ministers are women.  The ethnic mix of the House of Commons does not reflect the countries varied minorities.  The proportion of Public School and University educated M.P.s is far higher than the general public and most of them have never had a real job, far too many are ex-businessmen or lawyers and far far too many are rich.  And how have we come to this pass, how is it that even the Labour party has far too few ordinary people as M.P.s?  The reason is that Politics has become a public relations exercise above all, and candidates are chosen not for what they might bring to the House of Commons if elected, not for how clever or committed they are, but for how they might appeal to the voters.  Or more importantly for the image that the party wants to project to the electorate, smart good-looking managers who will toe the party line and not scare the children, let alone the opposition.  This has been happening for some time now but reached it’s peak during the New Labour period and even the Tories have copied Labour.  Only UKIP allows odd-balls through the net.  So no wonder these professional politicians fail to understand what life is like for most of us.

And because the M.P.s are not ‘by the people’ they have successively failed to govern ‘for the people’.  Or only for some of the people, for Big Business, for the Bankers, for the so-called ‘Wealth Generators’ when in reality the ordinary workers are the ones generating the wealth for the few at the top.  Maybe, just maybe the extraordinary popularity of Jeremy Corbyn may begin to change things.  Only a few days now to discover if real democracy has for once succeeded against the Political Machine governing us all.