No, I am not saying bring back Guy Fawkes, all is forgiven.

And I do not write this an anarchist in the Spanish Civil War. I am not saying abolish democracy. I am saying, make it work. Give a little power back to the people and to their elected representatives. I don’t often agree with Tony Benn, but this is what he has been saying too.

In Death of a Nightingale I sometimes found it quite useful to use my characters to put into the public domain thoughts and ideas buzzing around in my own brain. Here I will not use intermediaries. This is directly from me to you.

There is an old adage. “If it ain’t broke, don’t mend it.” But what if it is broke? What if it is badly broke? You don’t believe me? Watch BBC Parliament on TV.

The scandal of MPs expenses is just the tip of the iceberg.

It is the symptom of a much deeper malaise. MPs on their own admission, if you watch as I have done their own debates on their own future, are no more than lobby fodder without the power to challenge the Executive on behalf of their constituents.

See all too often the acres of green and red leather largely uninhabited by any living being. A better analogy, see the oceans of green and red leather with the odd piece of driftwood floating on the surface. Then suddenly two big whales appear, blowing their blowholes for half an hour every Wednesday, and the sea suddenly heaves with little minnows.

Prime Minister’s Question time. What a waste of time!

Just what does it ever achieve? Proving that Democracy is alive and well? Or, that it is half dead and sick?

Then there are the Select Committees.

Potentially they are the best part of our democracy when they sit in Westminster Hall. But currently they are constructed to be part of the System, not a counterbalance to it. Their composition is controlled by the party machines. Their members are then so deferential that they wouldn’t say boo to a goose. And there are plenty of geese around these days. They never press home the really difficult questions. Congressional committees are much more abrasive in the States.

Take the “Credit crunch” for instance.

They all lament the fact that the banks and the regulatory authorities allowed the excessive growth of debt in the economy, but they never ask why they allowed the excessive growth of bad debt, toxic debt, billions and billions of it. Did the printers serving their super computers have to print it out in red to draw this to someone’s attention? That is where the real problem lay. My late mother who ran the offices in a multi-million pound furnishing company thought that bad debt was bad business. That’s why I do too.

The right question to put to leading on both sides of the Atlantic is not whether there was “due diligence” but whether there was any diligence.

Remember there are three simple truths when it comes to economics:

1. Every conman needs at least one mug.

2. People will be greedy if politicians let them.

3. Politicians will let them if there is something in it for them.

Once you understand that you understand everything! In particular you will understand why the “Dot-com” Bubble was succeeded by the collapse of Enron, and the collapse of Enron succeeded by the Credit Crunch – and all within a decade. Think about that when you are told that the Credit Crunch was just a global crisis no-one could anticipate.

Iraq.

They ask why Tony Blair took the country to war in March 2003. Much more important, they never ask on what conditions the Cabinet allowed the army to be moved to the Middle East in the first place. In October 2002 the US Congress passed a Joint Resolution to authorise the use of United States Armed Forces against Iraq. That is when there should have been a clear decision as to when and if the army could be used in war. It was all too late to ask this question just before the battle started. What alternative did the Attorney General have then but to say that it was legal? Could he possibly say a war was illegal at the moment America was about to start it and the British army stood alongside them? Get real.

And now we have a phoney war.

Should cuts to our £170bn budget deficit start now with the Tories or later with Labour. And will front lines services be threatened? But the cuts have started already, and front line services are already being affected.

Only yesterday I watched on BBC Parliament a live debate in the House of Lords on Higher and Further Education.

£1bn cuts have already been imposed. What happened to “Education, Education, Education”? It was quite a commentary on our Parliamentary system that while Higher and Further Education come within Lord Mandelson’s province, he was notable by his absence. He was not present to listen to and answer the debate relating to his own Department. The cuts will deny over 200,000 young people access to Universities, and probably the ones least able to afford it will be hurt the most. It will affect further education on Teesside where those who have lost their jobs after the mothballing of the Corus Steel plant will most need it. Meanwhile Estelle Morris, a former Labour Minister of Education, now Baroness Morris of Yardley, advocates that Universities deal with these cuts by, amongst other things, introducing two year degree courses. All comment is superfluous.

Cuts already threaten front line services in the NHS too.

In today’s Newcastle Journal I read that the Government has just issued a new national operating plan for the NHS. This, according to the Journal, already threatens the closure of 100 beds in highly rated Q.E Hospital in Gateshead and other sites. Will they never learn? The last Conservative Government, to save money, encouraged hospital trusts to aim at 100 per cent bed usage, closing wards and hospitals in the process. This did not provide for winter epidemics, but it did provide a breeding ground for MRSA and Clostridium Difficile superbugs as beds were overused without pause and without any provision for isolation wards as in the Netherlands. What was designed to save money ended up costing it.

In the same paper I read that a £7.5bn plan for the overhaul of the East Coast Main Line to replace the ageing Intercity 125 fleet which date back to the 1970′s has been postponed.

Capital expenditure promised to pick up the slack in employment is clearly a mirage.

Death of a Nightingale, if you read it, tells the same tale of financial ineptitude in relation to Special Educational Needs.

Back in the 1980′s and 1990′s the Conservative Government turned to accountants, Coopers & Lybrand, and asked them to advise how to save money on special education. They saw that three per cent of children with special needs were costing the Exchequer eight per cent of the total spend on education. Cut the number of statements. Close special schools. Hey presto, there will be savings. No calculation was made as to the capital and revenue cost of doing this. No-one anticipated that it would be necessary to recruit over 100,000 non-teaching care assistants at say £15k a time to help mainstream schools cope with the influx of children deprived of the choice of mainstream or special school.

Read the book and my website and weep! And please don’t excuse the shortcomings of the policy because of lack of money. That won’t wash now. It certainly won’t wash in the years ahead.

The truth is that neither the Conservative Party nor the Labour Party have a particularly good track record when it comes to making cuts. For the Conservatives, at times their hearts are in the wrong place. For the Labour Party, sometimes their brains are.

I quote in my book a memory going back to 1961 at the Liberal Party conference in Edinburgh. The then Leader of the Party, Jo Grimond, said of Harold Macmillan and his government at the time “They couldn’t run a sweetie shop in the Lothian Road.”

The fact is that the same thing, at one time or another could have been said of every succeeding administration, Labour or Conservative.

The problem is not basically with the political parties; it is with the system of government itself.

It is confrontational when issues should be debated on their merits not on the basis political in-fighting and short term political gain that ends up as long term national loss.

There could not be a better time than this to institute major change in Westminster.

After Maastricht more and more laws are now made in Brussels by the European Commission. Meanwhile power has moved the other way too. Decision making has been devolved to the Scottish Parliament and to a lesser extent to government in Cardiff and Belfast.

Meanwhile there is increasing disenchantment with Westminster with 35 per cent of voters (22 per cent of the electorate) electing 55 per cent of the MPs who gain what they euphemistically say is a mandate to govern.

There is a renewed call for a change to the voting system to try to make individual votes count, not just in marginal constituencies; to give voters MPs that they can personally identify with and support, and actually worth giving a good living wage to.

Sure, the political parties don’t like “hung parliaments”. They like to get things all their own way if they can. But should they? Good for them? Maybe. Good for us? Maybe not. When one is bad, the other is worse. Maybe they shouldn’t get it all their own way. Maybe they should have to argue their policies out in a broadly based forum more truly representative of opinion in the country. Might we not then get better government? It happens in most other European countries that work multi-party democracies.

The UK is the odd man out.

And if this forum held the executive properly to account and if, right through the system, those who cocked things up were not moved sideways in the jobs, but fired, maybe the public would be better served.

My solution is very simple. Make the Houses of Parliament a museum.

It would make a truly great museum. We are very good at making museums. Commission Madame Tussauds to recreate the Narvik Debate in its debating chamber. That is recognised as a high point in British Parliamentary history. In May 1940 backbench MPs, some dressed in military uniform, rebelled against Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and paved the way for Churchill to take his place. Let the world see one man/one woman one vote at its best. It would be a gift to posterity, and of much more lasting benefit than the First Emperor of China’s Terracotta Army.

Something “British” would be really be the best in the world – the best tourist attraction in the world. The benefit would be much more long lasting than Olympics in 2012.

And wouldn’t it be a better way to sell democracy to the world than the bible and the bullet?

Meanwhile, a different forum should be constructed right for 21st Century, as many are in Europe today, a half circle; opposing forces shouldn’t just glower and yell at each other; it is a bit out of date to make the distance between the government and opposition benches 3.96 metres, said to be equivalent to two swords’ length. They should talk to each other not at each other. Design it so that the elected representatives of the people and the best brains around vet new legislation and hold overweening civil servants to account, people like James Harrington the mandarin in Death of a Nightingale.

The essence of good governance is to trust professionals to get on with their jobs at every level of society, but pull the mat out from underneath them when they fail. That is not the way of it in Britain today. It should be the basis of a new compact with the civil service Unions.

You know something. The Party that offered this at the next General Election I confidently predict would win by a landslide.

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