<div>Hi James & Everyone</div>
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<div>Maybe we should draft a small flier for the big 23rd May United Campaign Aagainst Police Violence demo, to introduce the campaign. Hopefully we should have a venue for (bi-weekly?) meetings by then, but even if not we can surely drum up some interest. As most of you will know, the UCAPV initiative came straight out of the G20 debacle, although it has roots going a long way back with police abuses of power. </div>
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<div>Could we make a strong, short statement making clear our position on the police's role in a democratic society and calling on campaigners and police alike to join us in our struggle for a very different society where power is dispersed so people can act honourably and responsibly - and powerfully together?</div>
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<div>Unrest is linked to injustices, perceived and real and the police are being forced to defend a clapped out system - not an easy position to be in. People and polcie should be able to steward their own neighbourhoods together so that truth, justice and a keeping of peace are served and preserved. Likewise - by extension - the whole of our society. Apparently the mood out there anti-politics, and/or for a different kind of politics. Surely we can make some democratic hay with that on 23rd May?</div>
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<div>Mark </div>
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<div>PS Dawn and Panda, any news on the venue? I'll be in central London this afternoon if you need to direct me to the place you suggested on Friday, please do! PPS looking forward to Rachel's this Friday! All welcome.. xx </div>
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<div class="gmail_quote">2009/5/11 A World to Win <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:info@aworldtowin.net">info@aworldtowin.net</a>></span><br>
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<div><font size="2" face="Arial">Hi Mark - thought the 2012 listers might want to read today's blog from A World to Win.</font></div>
<div><font size="2" face="Arial">Cheers, Corinna</font></div>
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<div><font size="2" face="Verdana"><strong>Parliament versus the people</strong> </font></div>
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<p><font size="2" face="Verdana">The shoddy and demeaning spectacle of MPs milking their expenses’ system at the taxpayers' expense for all it is worth knows no bounds. They have been claiming for just about everything: £60,000 (Employment minister Tony McNulty) for second home allowances, and £25,000 for security patrols (Barbara Follett) down to 69p for a packet of biscuits, £2.50 for eyeliner and even for Kit Kats and an Ikea carrier bag.</font></p>
<p><font size="2" face="Verdana">MPs have blatantly engaged in property speculation, using allowances to do up homes before selling them on. “Never in my 20 years in politics have I seen the public as angry as they are today and, frankly, who can blame them? It doesn't help that the revelations have come at a time of recession.” Thus the Liberal Democrat Norman Baker, MP for Lewes, East Sussex, once home of revolutionary democrat Tom Paine. Baker’s remarks are part of a growing chorus warning about the yawning credibility gap between the electorate and those who purport to represent them in parliament. </font></p>
<p><font size="2" face="Verdana">And are the Honourable Members, who include 13 members of Gordon Brown’s Cabinet, expressing any shame or remorse for their venal attitude to office? No, sublimely oblivious to criticism, they are complaining that their abuses were exposed to public scrutiny. The House of Commons authorities are even asking the police to track down the source of the leak that showed how deeply MPs’ snouts are in the trough.</font></p>
<p><font size="2" face="Verdana">As the <em>Observer</em> commented yesterday, the distance between MPs and ordinary people is now so big that they consider a £24,000 second home allowance as an “incidental” perk. For most, that is a lump sum they would never dream of seeing in their bank account. And so, warnings of the breakdown of trust upon which bourgeois parliamentary democracy relies are flying thick and fast:</font></p>
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<li><font size="2" face="Verdana">Baker concludes that auditing, transparency and limits on expenses must be imposed – warning that “If we do not, then the trust between the people and Parliament will have been irrevocably damaged, with all the dangers that holds.”</font></li>
<li><font size="2" face="Verdana">The <em>Daily Telegraph</em>, which first blew the whistle on MPs expenses, concludes that: "There is no doubt that the current system is rotten and cannot survive.”</font></li>
<li><font size="2" face="Verdana">The <em>Daily Mail</em> says it means a “terminal wipe-out” for New Labour and that Blairism’s claim to moral virtue has been “blown to shreds”. The question now, it asks, is what will be the consequences of all this. “For with such an unprecedented breakdown of Parliamentary integrity and loss of public trust, we are surely in uncharted territory.”</font></li>
<li><font size="2" face="Verdana">And last, but not least, a <em>Guardian</em> blogger points out that the corruption shows “how alienated the political classes are from those they serve”, demanding that Oliver Cromwell come back with a peoples’ army to shut the whole thing down.</font></li>
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<p><font size="2" face="Verdana">The haughty obliviousness of New Labour after 12 years in power is indeed mind-boggling. Of course the Conservatives, and indeed Sinn Fein, have also been playing the system for all that it’s worth, but New Labour’s arrogance is far greater than that of the rest combined. It comes at a time when income inequality in Britain is at its widest point in 40 years after 12 years of Labour government, a result of low wages and benefits held below inflation.<br>
<br>MPs have justified their greed by pointing to the difference between their pay and the vast salaries paid to executives in the private sector. In doing so they show that they have nothing in common with the people that they are supposed to represent. Instead they draw their “morality” from the capitalist economic system which parliamentary democracy oversees and keeps in place. <br>
<br>The populist right like the <em>Daily Mail</em> is aware that the limits of parliamentary democracy have been reached and that they will be breached. By its actions, New Labour is opening the doors to dictatorial rule. It’s time to sound the alarm bells loud and clear.<br>
<br>The current scandal shows the urgent need to campaign for a People’s </font><a href="http://www.aworldtowin.net/about/Rights21C.html" target="_blank"><font size="2" face="Verdana">Charter for Democracy</font></a><font size="2" face="Verdana">. The aim is not to “re-build trust” in a corrupt and undemocratic parliament but to end the rule of political elites, and create new forms of direct local and national democracy through peoples’ assemblies.<br>
<br>Corinna Lotz<br><font color="#888888">A World to Win secretary, 11 May 2009</font></font></p></div>
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