Consent

Today and I am writing this on Friday, is I think a day for sober reflection. Not only is it the when we all woke up to the true horror of what had taken place on Le Promenade des Anglais in Nice on Thursday evening but it is also the day of Jo Cox's funeral.

In my mind the two events are very much connected.  

As yet we have no idea of the motivation of the man who drove that lorry at so many people last night, killing scores of them and injuring many more, some of them very seriously.  We can guess that because he has been identified as being of Tunisian origin that it may have something to do with Daesh and Islamic extremism.  Likewise we cannot know what drove Thomas Mair to kill Jo Cox, who by all accounts was a lovely person who could have contributed so much more to the world than she got a chance to do.

Superficially they have little in common, except perhaps that they were both totally unprovoked attacks on people going about their business carried out by lone men.

The connection runs much deeper than that though.  It really has to do with the way we live and the way we behave, and you can see examples of similar behaviour all around us all the time, albeit not with such fatal consequences.

It goes back to the way in which we are governed.  In a world as populous as ours and in societies where we live in close proximity one with the other, there needs to be governance. Without governance we have chaos. I avoid the term Anarchy because when used with a capital 'a', Anarchy or Anarchism is itself a political philosophy which replaces top down control with co-operation.  Now is not the time to go into the pros and cons of such a system, although I will say that it seems unlikely to work on a large scale and has not been a spectacular success when it has been tried in the past. Instead I use the word chaos, quite advisedly.  Nothing would ever happen, people would starve, disease would be rife. Even early man must have had leaders, those whose job it was to organise families or tribes in the hunt or harvest.  Otherwise we would not be here now.

I believe that if we are to all live together in relative harmony then we must adopt some form of strong governance.  The important thing is that the form of governance, what ever it is must be established by consent. It must not be imposed on those who are being governed against their will or without even consulting them.

In the West we have adopted various forms of parliamentary democracy in the mistaken belief that this is the only way to do things.  In far flung parts of the World where that is not the system we in the West have attempted to impose it, usually by military means, with varying degrees of success.

By government by consent I don't mean that we all have to agree on everything.  That would be the same as having no government at all.  There will always be dissenters.  There will always be that person at a meeting who disagrees with what Geoff says, because Geoff said it and for no other rational reason.  All that we need is to agree on the form of government which we are prepared to accept.  This is not immutable, as with parliamentary democracy, it changes over time, with any luck becoming better with each change.

What has this to do with the carnage in Nice and the murder of Jo Cox?  Well I believe that both acts were carried out by people who wished to impose their way of doing things by violent means on the rest of us.  Thomas Mair was influenced, by all accounts by far right fascist theories. Whether or not he is mentally ill is something for the courts to decide. What is pretty self evident is that he thought that violence was his way of getting what he wanted. Similarly Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel presumably thought that what he was doing would in some way further whatever cause it was that he espoused.  Neither of these two accepted government by consent preferring instead violent intervention.

If we now turn our attentions to what is going on inside the Labour Party at the moment we can see echoes of this.  The knives may be metaphorical but they are still there.  There have been moves to democratise the party in the past few years, and the voting rules introduced under Ed Miliband were designed to do just that.  There has been a huge upsurge in membership since last September and I think many of these new members, of which I am one, would be horrified if they knew how the party actually works.

For a start although it operates under the banner of the Labour Party it is in reality a coalition of several groups, notably the trades unions, the membership and affiliated organisations. Overseeing all this is the NEC made up of representatives of the above and   also MPs and councillors. There are only six members from constituency parties, representing the rank and file ordinary member.  This NEC decides how the party operates and that is why I have just received an email from them informing me about the voting timetable for the upcoming leadership election.   

Many new members are up in arms about the way the right to vote has been manipulated but I suspect many members of longer standing will recognise it as just the way things are done in the Party. Increasing the influence of the individual member has started but there is still a long way to go before the Labour Party is a truly democratic institution. Yes we have a vote but what we are allowed to vote on is still decided by the NEC.  I note that on the website it no longer claims that by joining you will get the chance to elect the leader and vote on other matters.  I wonder if that is a permanent change.

I believe profoundly in the policies which the left of the Party espouse.  I believe in nuclear disarmament (unilateral if it's the only way but multilateral for preference).  I would love to see the railways and other services brought back into public control.  I would like real support for the NHS and our schools and a much more humane approach to benefits with a recognition that most claimants are not scroungers, despite what your mate George told you about a bloke who knows a bloke whose wife has never done a hand's turn and been claiming benefit all her life.  The Welfare State was once something to be proud of and now it is regarded as a damaging drain on the economy.  What have we become? I believe that Jeremy Corbyn shares my core beliefs and that is why I support him.  He has been in the party a very long time and is well aware of the way in which different power blocs jostle for power and influence.  Maybe this is why he seems so unruffled by it all.  For the new membership it is a real eye-opener.  It is clear, to me at least, that the party needs a radical rethink about how it runs itself.  There is a definite whiff of the 1950's about the way it does things at present with factional in-fighting of the type satirised in Monty Python's Life of Brian. Modernisation does not necessarily mean the espousal of unfettered free-market economics. We already have plenty of that, what we need is an genuine alternative.

I will stop there but I will probably return to this at a later date.

Love Tim xx

Just heard more details of events in Turkey. A military coup to bring back democracy? Sounds slightly oxymoronic to me.  Situation unclear.  Will comment when the smoke clears a bit more.