Enclosed in an Irish loch

Enclosed in an Irish loch
Source: By Anabel Loyd: The Telegraph

The Group of 8 conference was hosted by the United Kingdom in a bankrupt hotel in a Northern Ireland struggling harder in recession than most other areas of the union. Northern Ireland has, of course, been severely disadvantaged by years of communal strife that were hardly likely to make the region the area of choice for business and investment.

In the uneasy peace that began, on paper at least, with the Good Friday agreement in 1998 and was seen to have come to fruition with the return of devolved powers to Northern Ireland in 2007, hopes were high. The UK and European economic crashes shortly thereafter stopped aspiration in its tracks and, while the location of the G8 may be a sign of international faith in the peace holding, any appearance of economic progress is likely to be window dressing.

With Syria at the top of the conference agenda — a civil war that makes Irish troubles look like a summer riot — and the world economy covering most of the rest, things would have been very gloomy indeed in Ireland. The Lough Erne Resort Hotel opened in 2007 to cash in on the tourists likely to flood towards Northern Irish beauty spots in the new peace and went bust shortly thereafter as recession hit.

From press ../images, it appears now to be surrounded by razor wire on the banks of a beautiful but grey watered lake on an equally grey wet day; it isn’t a place to lift the spirits or to encourage world leaders to rush home singing the praises of Northern Ireland. It is a shame actually, as the current Northern Irish tourist board television advertisements show, it really is a beautiful place and full of a much longer history than the troubles but few may see past the security wire and the jagged mountains to be inspired.

Meanwhile there is shock horror with new revelations, via the United States of America National Security Agency whistleblower, Edward Snowden, that international conferences have been spied on by the intelligence services of host countries.

Well, by the UK when it has been the host. The Americans, naturally, have been spying too, whether they were the hosts or not, and particularly their NSA operatives in London.

The issue is not so much that emails and BlackBerry networks have been tapped as that this does not break UK law which permits not only spying for reasons of national security but for ‘ economic wellbeing’. I can see that might make international business competitors uneasy but I must admit, naively possibly, to being staggered that anyone thinks any revelations of spying in this day and age surprising. It may be unusual to have it written into the law and rather typically British to dot the i- s and cross the t- s and make the underhand aboveboard, but I thought everyone who could spied on everyone else all the time and, anyway, a vast amount of information is already in the public domain for anyone ready to search two steps beyond Wikipedia. At a guess, most of the G8 leaders know pretty much who stands where in advance of any round- table discussions and so much the better for that and for the possibility of well- informed decisions being made without wasting any of the extremely short time available.

Back at Westminster there are ructions in the ranks. Sarah Wollaston, member of parliament, the first Conservative Party parliamentary candidate to be selected to stand by an open ballot in the constituency rather than by local party officials, has been complaining, entirely correctly, that this new selection scheme has not now been rolled out across the country. It did seem a positive step for democracy at the time.

She also takes issue with the sidelining of the opinions and demands of ordinary MPs who are, nothing new here, ignored by their party and the government and, although she does not say this, unable properly to represent their electors. Wollaston worked as a general practitioner in the National Health Service for many years and has an impressive record of public service.

She went to parliament like so many of our faceless MPs, to make a difference, in particular a difference to the lives of those who put her there. She has no particular ambition for high office but rather had hoped to do a good job for her constituents and gain that satisfaction for herself. She believed she was in parliament to speak up for her electors and, with so much experience in the NHS, to have useful opinions on the future of healthcare and medicine in this country that would be listened to and valued. Wrong.

She is, as it turns out, because she has a sensible and measured voice that should be listened to but unfortunately doesn’t always fit in with the party line, not only ignored but considered to be a rebel. The truth is that she is a real person who has had a real life and could use her experience usefully for her constituents and possibly for us all.

She is exactly what we would like our MPs as our representatives to be rather than young party apparatchiks who have been put into a smoothing- down machine straight out of university. They are now where they are to get to the highest possible political point by fitting in with the party zeitgeist regardless of any real opinion they might have left — actually they probably don’t have any opinions at all most of the time.

Our local MP in Wiltshire, Claire Perry, is one of the machined clones, albeit of middle age, and is horribly loud with her party prescribed opinions. She is plastered over the pages of our local paper every week, dishing out her views whether we want them or not and opening everything from a tin to the local community centre if someone asks her. She crops up on the late night radio programme, ” Today in Parliament” with nothing short of monotonous regularity. She spent years working as an advisor to George Osborne, cloaked herself in the sort of family minded, 2.3 children garb likely to appeal to the voters of the Devizes constituency and has recently parted from her husband who possibly got in the way of full on 24/ 7 ambition chasing. Unfortunately, Devizes is unlikely to part with her any time soon — nice, safe constituency more or less, whatever she does short of proven murder.

She is naturally the blessed one of her parliamentary party for following the party line with the determination of a bloodhound on a trail. She has occasionally shown her true colours when frustrated in her forward march with a turn of unparliamentary language that would have made the puritanical old Labour trades union MPs of the past blush even more the grandees of her own party.

I know who I would rather have as my MP. Unheard or not, Wollaston is, I suspect, a force for good and she is very right to feel aggrieved at her treatment and say so publicly, although Perry would certainly disagree. I know I have written about this before, a bit of a mantra I fear, but we need independent men and women who intend and, more to the point, are allowed, to represent us. We need people with properly rounded, thought- out opinions that may, indeed, sometimes oppose our own but are genuinely held and believed even when they are not absolutely in line with all their constituents — we don’t need to vote for them if we don’t like it.

As things are we are ruled by a sort of oligarchy by whom the voices of the masses and/ or their representatives are seldom any longer heard beyond matters of such mundanity that none of us cares anyway. We are not in fact properly represented at all and the oligarchs do what they please.

This is not a new phenomenon; the Tony Blair government was loudly accused and we have been here much longer than it has, but things are at least perceived to be getting worse in a sidelining not only of opinions but of parliament altogether and of us. We see a clique of rich party players at the top of our government, in a bubble outside the real world and damning dissenters to the frozen reaches, not to mention silencing their voices at the first sign of independent opinion.

Come to think of it, it’s a bit of a miracle they don’t spend all their time in a razor wired enclosure in the middle of an Irish loch but actually emerge for long enough to take the occasional unfriendly question in Westminster.

Courtesy: http://www.ksgindia.com/study-material/today-s-editorial/8139-02-july-2013.html