 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 4 - 10 May 2000 Issue No. 480 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 4 - 10 May 2000 Issue No. 480
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Special Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Plain Talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
Rummaging, as usual, through old copies of magazines I came across a copy of Encounter. Readers may remember that intellectual, high-browish magazine which at different times was edited by Stephen Spender, Malvyn Laski, Antony Thwaite and others and whose contributors included Forster, Auden and Desmond Stewart. One of the articles in the issue I thumbed through was by Lord Shawcross, a member of the first Labour cabinet which ousted Winston Churchill in 1945.
I remember meeting Mr Shawcross before he was a member of the House of Lords. The occasion was to present him with a copy of Egypt and the Labour Party, a small booklet that we published in London. The book detailed Egyptian requirements and demands for the evacuation of British troops from Egypt.
In 1946 Shawcross was the UK's chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, and served as attorney general from 1946 until 1951. In 1958 he left party politics mainly "because I found it utterly tedious to have to conform to the doctrine that it is the duty of the opposition to oppose." In his opinion, as expressed in the Encounter article, such a doctrine never had a respectable origin. "Its slavish and asinine pursuit today," he writes, "is fatal to any parliamentary democracy. The duty of the opposition is diligently to scrutinise every thing -- to oppose that which is wrong, and equally support that which is right and realistic."
Both the Labour and Conservative parties when in opposition have failed in that duty, he writes, and the general disillusion with politics by the public at large -- and also by many able sincere young people who otherwise might go in for a political career -- is one of the measures of that failure. And partly because of this abuse of democracy in parliament "power is steadily passing away from parliament."
Lord Shawcross deplores what he calls the strength of outside interests animated by cupidity and greed, and the way in which individual members of the House of Commons are "increasingly regarded as mere "delegates" -- puppets who are expected to manipulate themselves according to the requirements of some section of their constituency.
Lord Shawcross quotes a famous speech of Burke, the political philosopher, to the sheriffs of Bristol, which I would like to requote.
"Parliament is not a congress of Ambassadors from different and hostile interests, which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates, but parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole -- where not local purposes, not local prejudices, ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member, indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not member of Bristol, but is a member of parliament."
Such a wonderful remark which should be read, marked, learned and inwardly digested by every member of parliament in any country where parliamentary democracy is practiced. Though said over 200 years ago, it is as vital a truth now as then.
Shawcross goes on to say that the government cannot govern and parliament cannot rule if these "powerful outside interests are determined to defy them." There is, in Lord Shawcross's opinion, a powerful and general realisation by the mass of the people that parliament no longer represents the mass of the people.
"The statement constantly made by Ministers that they were elected to do this or have a mandate for their manifesto to do that is a plain lie."
Finally, Shawcross calls upon the prime minister to attempt to "unite the country by pursuing policies which will command if not a general consensus at least the support of the mass of the people. You cannot unite a country behind doctrinaire policies." People could be united, he continues "if they saw that the policies being pursued were not partisan but -- dare I say it -- patriotic in a true sense."
