One Has Granted You Permission

Deputy PM Nick Clegg (still looks funny writing it) has announced a radical revamp of Blighty democracy. He is going to introduce the permission slip.

Obviously he isn't but somehow that is all it appears to amount to. Ordinary Dave, Oxford graduate and distant aristocrat, had a good old chin-wag with Ordinary Nick, Cambridge graduate and distant aristocrat, and they decided to give some rights back to the plebs. They decided, because they are in charge, to drop a whole load of the Orwellian New Labour shit.

Now I am not opposed to scrapping all the Orwellian New Labour shit but what irked me was the following:

"I'm talking about the most significant programme of empowerment by a British government since the great enfranchisement of the 19th century. The biggest shakeup of our democracy since 1832, when the Great Reform Act redrew the boundaries of British democracy, for the first time extending the franchise beyond the landed classes," he said.

Do you see? The people who we pay for and who allegedly work for us are "empowering us". They are giving "power" to us. How fickle democracy is that the people elected were pretty much always going to be in charge anyway. Hence Nick's confident spouting off. There speaks a man who knows he is never going to have to worry because of his class.

In 1832, much to the Tories disapproval, the system was made a little less corrupt. Now, 180 years later, maybe Nick is trying to make it a tiny bit more less corrupt and passing it off as the Big Society.

The BBC's House of Commons graphs had a couple of interesting entries:



Graph number 1 illustrates that 33% of current MP's attended a private school as opposed to 7% of the school population in England.

While graph 2 shows that where 90% of MPs have attended university, as opposed to 31% in the general population, a staggering 33% of those attended either Oxford or Cambridge.

Ordinary Dave and Ordinary Nick. Born to it and anything but ordinary.