by Dan Barker 5.12.14

Watching BBC1’s ‘Question Time’ last night, I thought Omid Djalili and a member of the audience between them hit the nail on the head. Omid said people had been turned of politics by MPs behaving like sheep, playing the game of ‘trying to stay in power’. A man in the audience said his adult children wouldn’t vote, and that all they heard from national politicians was ‘blah blah blah’.

So what is the cause of this sheep-like, game playing behaviour that puts people off voting? Westminster. The place is steeped in a tradition of sheep-like behaviour and the games of power. Newcomers are quietly inducted into the traditions by more long-standing MPs, and the behaviour is passed on from one generation to the next.

There’s only one way to stop this – take most decision making and MPs out of Westminster, out of that cauldron of tradition that says nothing to the real world, and move it and them closer to where people are, where new traditions of respect, truthfulness and public service had be formed for the next generation of politicians to aspire to.

But that requires radical change. That requires a lot more than creating a bunch of ‘super-local authorities’ that are more likely to take power away from local councillors than to permanently take power away from central government.

The only way to halt the decline in democratic participation is to create regional parliaments; to once and for all burst the Westminster bubble.