..and the answer to the Parliamentary Crisis is....More Regulation!

Below is a post I made onto John Redwood's blog and a Telegraph blog (I cannot remember which one!).

"I heard Gordon Brown on the radio banging on about the need for ‘independent regulation’ of MP’s expenses and remuneration.

I flatly do not want this. ‘Regulation’, and the excess of it, is what has got us into this mess in the first place. This universal misplaced faith in ‘experts’ is symptomatic of all that is wrong with New Labour’s ghastly idea of how to organise society. Organise it along the lines of some settled idea created by ‘experts’. It is clause 4.4 by regulation.

What I want is men, and women, of independent mind and capable of making professional judgements about what is correct and what is not correct. I want Parliament to be and remain sovereign in the country. I do not want MP’s to be continually engaged in a box ticking compliance culture that has so bedevilled my area of business and directly led to the failure of banks and the collapse in savings.

Experts only know what is the current consensus. The rest of us operating in a free market are always ahead of them, testing and challenging the status quo and developing a new paradigm. Experts, as used by New Labour, are all about limiting our freedoms and making us fit an idealised, and completely unworkable idea of what about 300 labour MPs think is the way we will operate.

The whole New Labour project was all about forcing this agenda and designing a society that made election success for them guaranteed. It had nothing to do with running the country properly or making sure that public money was spent wisely or that troops were properly equipped for actions that New Labour got them involved in, but all about ensuring a continuing New Labour success at election time. And the main weapon they used to implement this agenda was the unelected unaccountable quango ‘regulator’.

Stop them doing more of this in Parliament. Stop them now."

This slavish idea that more regulation and hence more bureaucratic rules will make anything better or here less likely to be corrupt is simply risible. All that will happen is that MP will have endless negotiations about what is 'allowed' and have to employ staff to do lots and lots of lovely box ticking.

In the real world it is patently obvious that an excess of 'regulation' is precisely what has causes all the current problems. Regulation has taken over from common sense. Brains have been disconnected. Thinking for oneself has stopped. Well, of course thinking for oneself is a complete anathema to a bureaucrat. It is completely outside their control. It means that they have to fit in with us. Oh dear. What a shame. It's what you're for, you bloody fools.

So imposing an 'independent regulator' on MP's is probably the stupidest idea I have yet heard.