| Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Re:Justine Greening votes with government 12 June 2018 | |
| Posted by: | Malcolm Grimston | |
| Date/Time: | 14/06/18 15:26:00 |
| In my view we elect politicians to take decisions in what they see as our best interests (and I believe the vast majority take decisions on exactly that basis). I go with the great speech by Edmund Burke (with apologies for the sexist language). "It ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion." (That last sentence is magnificent.) Referendum has never been a part of our way of doing politics because referendum takes as its starting point that we cannot trust the MPs who we elect to act in our interests. Even if occasionally we feel it may be the case, that where on earth do we go from there? In any case how could we boil down something as complex and many-faceted as our relationship with the countries to our direct north, east, south and west in areas such as trade, economics, movement of people, culture, science into a single yes-no question? To take an example from my field, what was the decision of the British people with respect to EURATOM? We elect and expect our representatives to dedicate themselves to understanding these fiendishly complicated matters and coming up with sensible and workable policies. I certainly understand only a fraction of the issues involved in the single market, customs union, European cooperation in areas like food regulation, crime, space research, environmental protection and so on and have no confidence at all that I could take a sensible decision in any of these fields, let alone all of them. So if Zac Goldsmith or Kate Hoey, say, believe we should leave the EU then they have a duty to support and argue that case in parliament even if their electors hold the opposite view. And if Justine supports the case put forward by the government she should support it even if her electors do not. Party loyalties do muddy this ideal (one of the reasons why I don't want anything to do with Party whips any more!) but I can't believe that we would get better and more coherent decision-making if every policy had to be decided on the grounds of public opinion at a particular moment in time. |