It is written into Article One of the US Constitution (section three, clause one, if anyone is interested) that “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each state”, the idea being that this was the easiest way to ensure that none of the states felt left out.  However, when these binding building blocks were laid down, the ratio (in terms of population) of the largest state to the smallest was 12:1; yet today California is home to 70 times the population of Wyoming.  A senate majority can be commanded by just 15 per cent of the American people, which presumably leaves a few more people out than the founding fathers intended.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t only sound a bit wrong; it’s also at the root of many an American woe.

For an ‘upper chamber’, the US Senate is strangely powerful.  Unlike its counterparts in, for example, Germany, Australia and, to an increasing degree, the UK, where the lower house can generally overrule its loftier brethren, the US Senate has an in effect equal role in the legislature to the House of Representatives, and in some crucial areas it is actually more important.

The bias in favour of the small states can, therefore, have a distinct impact on public policy across America.  This is especially evident when one considers that the larger states—California, Texas, Florida—are home to the biggest populations of ethnic minorities, while the smaller states—Wyoming, the two Dakotas, Montana, Vermont etc—are among the least ethnically diverse places in the US.  Balanced senatorial judgments on more contentious issues thus pop up about as often as black people get elected to the upper house (five in its history, stat fans).

Population projections suggest that the problem is going to continue to get worse, as more American citizens make the move to the big cities.  Some studies have shown that by 2050, members of the senate who represent just 5 per cent of the population might be able to wield majority power.

Despite the obvious problems that this malapportionment poses, the issue is barely being debated, let alone acted upon.

This is not surprising.  Anyone perceptive of the problem is also aware that solving it is almost impossible.  Because equal seats per state is etched so evidently into the Constitution, changing it requires the support of two-thirds of the Senate and three-quarters of State legislatures, meaning that the small states can (and would) easily veto any plans to curb their influence.

It is not just a question of little against large, either.  Because the bias works in favour of the GOP, such that they hold 55 of the 100 Senate seats despite an amalgamated deficit in terms of the popular vote, party politics is firmly in play too. In this case, that means gerrymandering.  And in the US, gerrymandering is positively gladiatorial, with legal legionnaires at loggerheads and blood-soaked ticker tape covering the battlefield.  It is also worth remembering that the US Senate was the one chosen as a model by Robert Mugabe when creating his own skewed state.

E pluribus unum?

Another problem is that of the (somewhat tacitly) touted solutions, such as electing both senators from each state at the same time, none can claim to be likely to usher in anything much more than a mess.

New systems possess unknown devils and awaken dormant disputes, which populaces throughout history have tended to meet with disapproval.  The status quo may be bad, but at least it’s relatively calm.  Or, as Cicero put it, “An unjust peace is better than a just war.”

After the November elections, the disproportionality of the Senate may be clearer still, but that doesn’t mean the solution will be too.

One enterprising fellow had the audacity to take on the premier barge-pole topic of capital punishment, and presented an idea worthy of the show’s name.

Re-instating capital punishment, the plucky contestant suggested, should be put to a referendum. All those voting in favour should then have their names stored on a file somewhere. When the first incidence of proven post-execution innocence occurs, as it undoubtedly would, so our man claimed, all the names of the supporters of state-sponsored killing should be put in a hat, with one lucky person being plucked out and put to death as a way of saying sorry.

Whoever was chosen wouldn’t mind, of course, as they cast their vote for the reinstatement of capital punishment in the knowledge that eventually something would go tragically awry. They’d merely be a happy martyr for their particular political belief.

Which is all rather super, I think you’ll agree.

There are many ways to pigeonhole these people, indeed, most of them spend a good part of their time cataloguing, categorising and cross-referencing everyone they ever meet, read an article by, or hear something about in passing.

Trying to understand all the options is, of course, a pointless task, and doing so risks being dragged into a cruel and pathetic game, where petty squabbling over the rules seems to take up most of the time.

With this in mind, we’ll stick to the two most common labels, the easiest and most efficient way to work out who it is you’re supposed to unswervingly hate and instantly disagree with at all costs and in all situations—left and right.

By sheer weight of numbers, these are the two fiercest gangs out there. But right here and now, massed ranks aren’t as important as simple, snarling, gruesome mass.

After prowling around this nasty game for long enough to be only a couple of weeks away from requiring full-time therapy, it has struck me that there’s a crude and simple way to distinguish, should you care to, your right from your left. Waistlines.

Other than those on some sort of hunger strike to show solidarity with their Somalian brethren, lefties are lardasses. At the first ugly glance, I thought this was some crazy quirk, but the more one thinks about it the more obvious it gets. Ponder about it further still, and it’s a wonder that the Labour Party conference hall doesn’t have to reinforce the flooring.

Politically speaking, lefties don’t believe in personal responsibility. It’s always someone else’s fault that they’re not paid egregious amounts of cash to run the country their way. This makes them more likely to get fat. Fatties are always making excuses for their state that never seem to include their propensity to sit around eating too much.

By contrast, righties (a word not used nearly as much; probably something to do with right-wingers not being so big on the idea of collectivisation) tend to have proper jobs, where personal appearance is important and gym membership is subsidised.

And despite the extra time being unemployed, (or being employed to clock-watch) provides members of the meaty mob, they don’t tend to spend it playing sport. They’re too busy reading Chomsky. Or just getting bored and eating to pass the time before Countdown is on.

Not having a job is also strongly linked to not having money. And as we all know, poor people think it’s cool to eat crap food. It is, of course, no cheaper to eat unhealthily, but it is often quicker. This is food that comes with a ready-made (no pun intended) easy excuse—it’s not just food, it’s fast food. Perfect for today’s discerning disgusting layabout.

But these are cheap shots. Accurate, but cheap. The real clinchers come when we lever apart the fat flaps and bellyflop into a lefty’s head.

The rotund ranks of the Red Army have a number of amusing psychological problems, the assorted perils of being professionally angry and housing a Himalayan blood pressure.

All these ‘issues’ stem from their lives being governed by an impressive array of indignations, be they moral, personal, or there just because nurturing them seemed like a good idea at the time.

The pain of living in such an unfair world makes people angry, anxious and depressed. Emotional turmoil such as this can inspire eating as a form of escapism. That, and ice-cream comforts the mood swings. As any good doctor will tell you: “emotional problems can both contribute to obesity and result from it.” It’s a vicious circle. A plump, round, vicious circle.

Minds plagued by such foul and bilious ghosts are more prone to vicious bouts of overeating or sitting around shouting at the television. They’re also more prone to thinking that Marx had a point.

Detractors from these undeniable facts, if they haven’t wobbled off to the fridge already, will probably feel like fighting back about now. Obviously physical fighting is out of the question, but a replying rant is no doubt frothing away. This spittley spindrift will almost certainly centre around one word: Americans. Lefties love to hate Americans almost as much as they love to eat American food.

“Americans are the fattest people on the planet! (outside Glasgow)”, they’ll cry, “And they’re also the most right-wing!”. Well maybe so. But that is to forget that theirs is a different culture, or rather a lack of one. American society is too base to judge each other on anything other than relative bank balances; being fat in America is just another way of showing that you can afford to be. We have eloquence for that.

Wanting to a) talk about something more interesting, and b) provoke dear old Henry, I treated the topic with a healthy mixture of mockery and flippancy, remarking how at least it was nice that the US military was getting to test out some of its weapons given that they’ve spent so much money developing some pretty cool stuff, and other quips along similar lines.

Henry bore this for a while with a forced knowing smile and a growing sense of indignation. His welling worthiness was never going to stay quiet for long however, and when I expressed shame that Saddam’s beautiful palaces had been turned into the much less attractive ‘rubble with optional civilian body parts and weeping women’, he lost it, and proceeded to make himself look very silly.

Optional blood-soaked Independent-front-page accessories aside, he said, the razing of the palaces was one of the few good things to come out of the war, the symbols of oppression felled, the totems of tyranny terminated. The city could now be rebuilt, he continued, to represent a fairer, democratic, way of life.

Which is all complete crap, of course. Anyone who claims to be unquestioningly opposed to all forms and occurrences of flagrantly oppressive hierarchical structures is a fraud and a liar.

“Henry, you hypocritical swine,” I muttered, “where did you go on your last holiday?”

“Why, Egypt; you know that; but what relevance does it have here? And how am I a hypocrite?”

“Do you remember, upon your return, describing the pyramids as the most amazing thing you’d ever seen (and thus replacing the previous title holder, Moscow)?”

“Yes, and…”

“Were those edifices which so stirred your soul the result of an anarcho-syndacalist commune with a rather nifty aptitude for lumping bricks on top of each other? Or were they rather the result of the taking of some liberties that would make Blair blush? Khufu the Pharoah wasn’t big on workers’ rights, I hear.”

“Don’t be daft. That’s different.”

“Go on…” says I

“They’re not so closely associated with the evils that built them.”

“Give it time. Anyway, by going all goo-goo over the glories of Giza, you’re saying quite clearly that the methods that built them are justified, because it makes you happy to look at them and marvel. If you ask yourself whether you would rather they existed or that both they and the evils employed in their construction didn’t exist, you’re going for the former. That’s okay. They are rather cool, and a bunch—hell, millions—of dead Egyptian slaves mean tit-all to me.

“If you deny such a thing, you bracket yourself with the queer moralisers that think that so long as dead Iraqi babies aren’t on the front pages, then they aren’t so important. And that’s not a pretty place to be. There’s nothing wrong with admitting that oppression has its upsides. We’re all heartless goons; at least some of us are honest.”

At which point Henry finished his drink, uttered a soft, but deliberately audible “idiot”, and got up to leave.

“Same time next week?” I said.

“Of course” replied the deluded, dishonest fool.

“For one should not declare one’s intentions, but should seek to get what one desires anyhow. There is, for instance, no need in asking someone for a weapon to say ‘I propose to kill you with it’, since you can satisfy your appetite once you have the weapon in your hands.” —Niccolò Machiavelli, The Discourses, 1.44

The incomparably humourless Gordon Brown stands, statuesque and secretive, in the centre of the chaos enveloping his party. The man whose seductive shadow he has been skulking around in for the past decade has all but moved aside.

Tony Blair has declared that he is going sometime soonish, but in effect he has already gone; his authority undermined, his aura abolished and his enigma emasculated.

Yet still Gordon Brown does nothing. In fact, he does more than nothing. He actively does nothing. He seeks out opportunities to do nothing in the most public way, before walking away, his face strangely contorted, trapped somewhere between a smile and a death throe, in the mistaken belief that those around him are more confused by the whole situation than he is.

There is, however, method in the chancellor’s maladventure. Firstly, Schadenfreude doesn’t come much sweeter than the self-destruction of smugness, particularly when that smugness has spent ten years treating you like an especially supercilious CEO treats his distressingly eager arse-kissing minions – with contempt and cheeky cul-de-sac courting.

Secondly, although by no means more importantly, Brown doesn’t need to do anything. Being a Brutus carries few benefits. As does letting letting people know what you’re thinking. Elaborations give one enemies. El Gordo has enough enemies as it is, and his chalice has already been poisoned in a number of strange and scary ways. Taking a big gulp now is simply asking for trouble. Furthermore—and I admit I may be wronger than Swampy’s haircut on this one—Gordon doesn’t look like a man who deals well with trouble. This isn’t the economy, where one can get away with simply redefining stuff (such that the badness—theoretically at least—doesn’t exist anymore) on account of no bugger understanding the numbers. This is politics, and the best way to deal with problems in politics is with a convincing smile.

Sadly for the chancellor, however, he has one of the least convincing smiles on the planet. I’ll bet there are poor souls being tortured in Uzbek dungeons who could curl up the corners of their mouths with more meaning.

Just as surely as Mr Blair will swap boisterous backbenchers for bronzed Bermudans for good within the year, Mr Brown will take over as Labour leader, and, for a while at least, PM. Throwing his hat into the ring now will just make it dirty: it will be the focus of a dirty campaign run by very dirty people—the sort of miscreants whom a decent man would have to think very hard about socialising with even if a mountainous myrmidon with a machete was making moves to slice off his head if he didn’t.

If Mr Brown wants to give himself the best chance of stomping all over his other smooth-talking and slightly barmy foe, he needs to keep schtum for now, concentrate on not cocking too much up and not stealing too much of his potential voters’ money for practices that range from the disreputable to the deranged. He can—and should—save the statements of any substance for the tougher battles later on, when, as a sour-faced Scottish pisser-away of public funds who possesses about as much charm and charisma as a comatose IT consultant, he’ll need every weapon he’s got, not least the element of surprise.

History is a pretty place. Sure enough, the fields were soaked with blood, inequality was worse than it is in modern-day Brazil, life expectancy was about 25 and the streets were plagued by, well, plague, but it was populated almost entirely with heroes.

Bands of valiant men rode majestically across vast expanses of wilderness bordered by evergreens and castles that stood as stone testaments to the charming mix of nobility and fear that characterised the heart of every character deemed worthy of chronicling.

The odd spot of butchering went on, of course, but it was done with the type of courtesy, politeness and sense of order markedly lacking from today’s society.

They were punctual too, these knights. Those pre-battle scenes so beloved of film-makers, where the two sides stand facing each other before the fun begins didn’t happen because they were being held up by late-comers – it was because they had all assembled five minutes early and were patiently waiting for kick-off.

Even after all but the most inbred were done with the bothersome business of killing each other via the medium of organised slaughter, and had swapped their grass-fringed domiciles for life in the cities, chivalric courtesy obstinately refused to die out. Instead it evolved, into wearing dapper top hats and helping ladies into and out of carriages. Even the thieves were courteous; pickpockets may have run off with your wallet, but they still called you sir while doing so. 

Yet fast-forward to the here and now and decorous language is the last thing on the mind of the hoodie commandeering your mobile phone and spitting on your shoes. Open any paper, talk to any man, woman or Radio 4 listener, and the evidence is clear: chivalry is dead. It perished in a cultural war that also claimed the scalps of valiancy, courteousness, honour, politeness, punctuality, common decency, nobility and gentlemanly conduct. 

It’s a war that’s left society in one hell of a mess. When they’re not shooting either smack or each other, feral youths terrorise shopping centres with their cult-like clothing and chains hanging menacingly from their ill-fitting excuses for trousers. The back row of every double-decker bus in the country is now the property of an unruly gang communicating in a strange, pseudo-human language and armed with a poisonous arsenal of discordant ringtones. It’s got so bad that the adult generations would probably be moved to do something about it, were they not all constantly pissed and fighting outside nightclubs. The disease of binge-drinking (which I believe is now classed as anything more than half a shandy every fortnight) is now extravagantly epidemic. 

As a member of the House of Lords put it: “In every part of this great metropolis whoever shall pass along the streets will find wretchedness stretched upon the pavement, insensible and motionless… These liquors not only infatuate the mind but poison the body; they not only fill our streets with madness and our prisons with criminals, but our hospitals with cripples.” 

Except, of course, that was Lord Lonsdale… speaking in 1743. One with greater research patience than me could no doubt collect similar ‘gone to the dogs’ stories all the way back to the discovery of fermentation. After all, ‘gone to the dogs’ is itself a product of medieval baronial banquets. 

The truth is that bar a few exceptional sectors we’re as bastardly, as belligerent and as bibulous as we’ve ever been. 

General decorum has only ever existed in an elite, save where it furthers personal aims elsewhere. Looking at the eras where literacy resided only in certain select quarters, everything appears that bit prettier: if heroes write the history, then the history tends to be heroic. Nowadays, however, anyone can get published, even if they’re called Jade, or Wayne, or have more in common with plankton than princeliness. 

As governments have become oh-so-irritatingly aware of the politics of fear, and as the communication revolution has burrowed into our brains with a gusto the meanness of which will probably never be fully understood, the underlying absence of good form has shone through with a murky hue. It’s probably no more dangerous than it was 50 years ago to leave your doors open or to let your kids grow up in a manner less geared towards imbuing them with future psychological weaknesses, but what’s the point of having kids at all if you can’t lose all sense of perspective over their welfare following isolated incidents framed by the front page of the Daily Mail? If you really loved your kids, you too would protect their eyes from conkers and demand that every paedophile in the vicinity be named, shamed and beaten half to death with a bag full of door knobs. 

The average human being’s ability to assess risk in a manner befitting a multi-cellular organism will never be anything more than risible, so a complete ignorance of the risks that require assessing would arguably be something of a societal boon. 

However, denying people the choice to be rubbish is ignoble in itself. It’s the doctrine of delusional cruelness so beloved of New Labour, and like all the best New Labour doctrines it is nothing more than a mask. Banning Nuts and Zoo, swearing on the television and 50 Cent won’t make anyone less swinish. And where would such a thing end? The world today is in undoubtedly finer shape now that the works of Henry Miller are as liberated as their content. That he may corrupt the odd fellow isn’t the fault of the writer, but of the reader. 

And regardless of how entertaining such a spectacle would be, the heads of Wade, Dacre, Wallace and their supposedly high-brow brethren don’t really deserve to be put on the block for giving people what they’ve been driven to desire. 

Similarly, there are many things to be said in favour of corporal punishment. It kept the kids in line and taught them how to spell separate and use apostrophes appropriately. And in politics, it’s better to be feared than loved, whatever huggy Cameron thinks. 

However, what discipline teaches in terms of respect for authority, it stymies elsewhere, especially with regard to creativity. 

‘Society’ used to come with quotation marks and a touch of Evelyn Waugh; now it comes with a police vigilance warning and a battered copy of The Da Vinci Code. But why, we may ask, is this so? Is it merely a question of advertising? Is it simply because media moguls are more intimate with the baser side of society, or is there something more? 

Nietzsche once wrote that: 

“Good manners disappear in proportion to the slackening of the influence of the court and of a closed aristocracy: one can observe this decline from decade to decade if one keeps an eye on public behaviour, which is plainly growing more and more plebeian.” 

He wrote that in 1878. God knows what our moustachioed German nutcase would make of things all these decades later. 

Nietzsche’s “slackening of the influence of the court and of a closed aristocracy” comes coupled with the rise of the influence of the democratic ideal, best expressed through universal suffrage. In the past no one paid attention to the masses because they didn’t mean anything. Then some fool gave them the vote and we ended up with the News of the World, Big Brother and the rebarbative rasp of June Sarpong. 

Universal suffrage is also directly responsible for the evolution-defyingly slow uptake of ideas and innovations among those with the power to do anything with them. Base ideas are much easier to comprehend and share with other people for the purposes of feeling that bit less pathetic. It’s much easier to make judgements based on image or the rude words of some limpid loudmouth operating in an intellectual Sahara than it is to bother with the actual details. “The truth, to the overwhelming majority of mankind, is indistinguishable from a headache.” 

With everyone programmed to put personal good above greater good, and consequently to not care all that much if everything starts to go heinously wrong, trying to shepherd the herd down avenues for advancement is something of a waste of time. These are the days of Bush, not Jefferson: human society doesn’t want progress, it wants placebos and palliatives (so long as they can make use of the progress later, of course). 

There is, thankfully, an upside to all this. However depressing such a comparison may be, think to yourself this: in a hundred years’ time, which one – Thomas or George – will be the most widely quoted (outside of jokes)? Which one will have the greatest influence? 

Like classical music, good things have a habit of surviving, precisely because the grubby hands of ephemeral popularity want nothing to do with them. James Blunt will outsell Beethoven this year, and possibly for most of the next few years as well. But only one will still be being listened to as little as twenty years from now. 

Furthermore, very few great men have ever found fame in their own time. Today’s heroes are here, but they’ll only be properly appreciated when the rest of the world catches up enough to look past Big Brother and see what these folks were on about, at which point they’ll be praised rather than distrusted. 

In the meantime, throw away the papers, pick up a penguin classic and relax. Look to the future, for when you are old, these just may be the good old days.

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. —H. L. Mencken, “Bayard vs. Lionheart”, The Baltimore Evening Sun, 26^th July 1920

Political blogs, whatever their outlook, however honourable their intentions and however many hours are wasted in their creation, exist to arouse the amour-propre of the author through the medium of explaining how the writer of the blog is smarter than the politicians they are writing about. They thus operate in exactly the same way as the more important and influential main-stream self-fellators. Occasionally, the blogger or media commenter may even be right; people often get lucky, after all.

With most people’s political opinions being formed from these two outlets of ornamental oratory (with optional analysis), the public’s appreciation of the political classes is none too numinous.

The House of Commons is run, apparently, by mephitic mountebanks and malefactors, deluded by meliorism and protected by their minatory myrmidons against the archenemies of reason and common decency. They, our elected representatives are also stupid. Or rather not just stupid; they’re criminally capricious, monumentally moronic and, most unfortunately of all, ineluctably incompetent. It is a wonder any of them are allowed out in polite society, let alone given the opportunity to run the country. Politicians as a group are disliked and distrusted more than any other section of society.

The above view is one I’ve been known to supplement, subscribe to and generally show sympathy with. This is because I’m very cynical, and it’s very right.

However, to view the House of Commons as an unusually ornate clown-college-cum-asylum is to profoundly misunderstand its purpose.

MPs are smarter than the average person. In some cases, a lot smarter. Furthermore, the majority are often honest, scarily assiduous and, certain ministerial mockeries aside, genuinely dedicated to their jobs.

They are only ever completely useless and lost in the sense that they try too hard in too many areas in which only a very few would even come close to avoiding abject failure. The rest of the time, they know exactly what they’re up to. Most of them have been in the job, or at least the sphere, for a bewilderingly long time, and in a job as human as politics, experience counts for plenty.

Even the corpulent King of Catachresis, the Rt Hon Deputy Prime Minister, must know more or less what he’s doing. If he really was as retarded as he is lecherous, his fat ass would’ve been toasted, fried, fricasseed and served back to him before things were ever allowed to get this far. A political observer should never forget that knowing how to make yourself useful is the ne plus ultra of practical politics.

It’s not pretty, especially to the censorious and all-too-airily-idealistic commentariat, but it is true. However much we may wish for the good of the country to be of paramount concern to those in the best singular positions to affect it, we need only ask ourselves if it would be our main focus of attention if we were in such a position to know full well that it isn’t.

If we wanted a wise collection of individuals following their consciences, their wisdoms and their senses of civic responsibility in an attempt to run the country in a sensible and mostly harmless manner, we wouldn’t have a democracy. Or at least we’d be trying harder to not get too carried away with the one we’ve got, lest we see it through to its logical conclusion and stump ourselves with an ochlocracy that seeks to purge all the funny looking characters from the streets so we can fly to America without being troubled by our own startling psychological inadequacies and general unfitness for living.

A great deal of the apparent ineptitude displayed by our chieftains is genuine. As well as being above average in general capability, they’re also above average in terms of delusions, and are thus prone to losing sight of their actual abilities the moment someone pins a rosette on their chest and declares them best in show. However, vanity accounts for only a part of their tendency to mess stuff up.

A lot can be equally well explained as an inevitable outcome of the job’s dilettantish demands and the necessity of allocating all the very best resources towards furthering one’s own interests, or being human as it’s otherwise known. In many ways, it’s a wonder there aren’t more obdurate oafs wobbling along the corridors of power, playing at being in the West Wing.

So consider this a one time only ode to the obsequious: the biggest bunch of bastards there is, except for the others.

Although we are in the privileged position of being able to make the token gesture of electing into the executive the crème de la crème of the nation’s obsequious, oleaginous and devious psychological oddballs, this simply isn’t enough.

We have an entire chamber of parliament, one that, when its members can be bothered to turn up to do more than claim expenses, actually has more than an iota of influence on the country’s legislation, that is mostly-hand-picked by a prime minister who has shown significant signs of being utterly mad. There are still 92 dear old fellows in there by virtue of their ancestors knowing how to wield a claymore, or how to order a minion to fire a cannon into some dastardly foreigners to bloody effect.

Taken as a whole, the members of the House of Lords are expensively-educated, well-spoken, courteous and have (token political appointments aside) achieved something tangible in their short spell on this planet. They’re thus the most unrepresentative group of people in the whole country. What right, therefore, do they have to tell us, or tell our directly elected government what we should be doing?

They are revered, mainly among Daily Mail readers and other such types, for their rectitude, wisdom, and fancy garb, which the reverers one day hope to don themselves.

These people know nothing. Wisdom doesn’t reside in so-called ‘experts’ and underneath strange off-white wigs. Wisdom resides in crowds, not in cliques of people that operate in a polite little world that hardly ever changes, save for the odd dip into a dinner suit, listening to classical music, reading books with ubiquitous black spines and talking about class as if it is something to be cherished. I have nothing against these folk, of course, but this is politics: you need street-smarts, not Cicero.

You also need passion. Anger. Envy. Rivalry. Virtues decried and denounced by our dear unelected Lords as inhibiting and unnecessary. Nothing’s ever going to be done ‘right’, so why waste time trying? Much easier and more expedient to concentrate the effort on emasculating the enemy, the people that would make things even worse.

Champions of an anti-democratic chamber are also always going on about ‘experts': smart people, unleashing their intellectual power on us in the name of the Greater Good. An expert, by definition, is something of a specialist. You want a chamber of parliament full of specialists? Don’t be daft. Not only would that cost a tremendous amount of cash, as they’d be so bloody many of the bastards, but we’d have people with a super-specialised knowledge of one thing voting on all sorts of other shit. Which is asking for trouble; some ‘experts’ are like those autistic kids that can multiply together 7 figure numbers in their heads, but can’t work out how to bowl a cricket ball. What does an engineering genius who’s lived his life guided by a physics book know about child-care?

Some anti-democracy people are smarter than that of course – they say a big fat ‘no’ to these experts. Instead, they clamour for indistinct lovers of knowledge, philosophers, astonishingly insightful apolitical animals. However, if they were that clever, they’d be lying on a beach somewhere and we’d be left with the pretenders. And nothing’s worse than a pretend smart-arse.

No. There is only one sensible, sane option. We have to elect the Lords.

Detractors will object that hardly anyone will bother voting, that the whole thing will be another party-political farce. So what if hardly anyone can be arsed voting? Ignore them. There were about 350 people in my college at university, all living within 10 minutes of each other. Did I know them all? Did I bollocks. Half of them were working all the time, and were thus rightly ignored. One of the joys of democracy is that it gives people the choice to stay away and in doing so weights the thoughts of those with an unusual attachment to political affairs more heavily than those with better things to do.

It is refreshing that after so many policies seemingly designed to take power away from the people, and legislation away from anything resembling sensible, there finally appears to be a chance to set something straight, a chance to take an obviously faulty area and reform it for the better.

If anything, this penchant for real democracy hasn’t gone nearly far enough. Too many important jobs and positions of influence are allocated in a manner at odds with the people that provide the custom.

The Nobel Prize committee is shamelessly elitist. It, like, totally removes any legitimacy any of its winners think they might have. Being judged worthy by other worthies is all sweet and lovely, but what does it mean for the rest of us? It’s almost like the mass of mankind isn’t capable of knowing about such things, which is both mean and nasty.

It’s the same everywhere. Senior doctors and consultants are appointed by a small group of men and women that claim to know what they’re talking about. Didn’t stop Shipman, though, did it? Put to the vote, a man with such a manky beard would never have got a job outside Lib Dem HQ.

The best men and women for the job are always those the most careerist of politicians deem worthy enough to put up for the job, and those that the 20% with most time to kill in each appropriate region can be made to agree with. Entrusting our ‘betters’ to do the appointing for us is a relic of a foolish and naïve age.

No. When it comes down to it: You can never have too much democracy.

It’s not the best analogy, I grant you. Mr Muscle is well-equipped for the task in hand and doesn’t have an inflated sense of his (its?) importance. But then the slogan, like politics, isn’t based around competence and self-realisation.

Assuming we can’t replace our vapid mountebanks with an altogether superior class of wise and noble leaders, we should rather seek (or perhaps merely hope) to do what we can to lessen the zeal with which the more unsightly and unpalatable aspects of a politician’s ruling urges are played out.

It occurs to me that a large part of the troubles politicians cause can be more or less directly related to their vanity. They seek the job as an end in itself, a curious sort of status symbol, and as ‘evidence’ of their unfailing correctness. In the sheltered insider world of politics, this vanity, rather than being checked, is nurtured, and nurtured well.

The ideal solution would be to crush these invidious vanities before they got a chance to suckle on the fat pig of power; or perhaps to emaciate the pig itself. Unfortunately, idealism and politics don’t mix well. So instead we need a tougher solution; a venal, in-your-face and above all simple solution that acts as a counter to the vain ways of the corridors of power. And I think I have just the thing.

It wouldn’t be perfect, of course, but it could be both amusing and publicly beneficent. It is this: upon becoming an elected representative, be it a councillor, an AM, an MP or whatever else, the successful candidate should be appropriately branded, prominently, on the forehead, with a disfiguring and garishly-coloured mark indicating what it is that they have chosen to do. Bonus marks would be used to indicate extra-importance, like being a junior minister or a member of the cabinet.

Ideally these marks would fade after a given time period, to forgive youthful indiscretions, but we can’t complain too much if such a thing is impossible.

The elected types most likely to get a bit carried away once in office are those that seek at every turn to flatter their own vanity above all else. By removing (or rather negating) this, we can look forward to an altogether brighter future. Outside of certain special places in Camden Town, a job that comes complete with facial mutilation becomes less of an end in itself, and more an occupational hazard that concentrates the mind on the actual stuff to be done.

The astute among you will automatically see a few problems with a branding programme. As an off-putting gesture, branding could scare off potentially useful candidates. Yet given the vast, unbridgeable chasm between the qualities needed to get elected and the qualities to do the job well, most of these people (not all) eschew the scene already. This is a major problem, but an insoluble one, and not one that would be at all exacerbated by a spot of hot-iron action.

Of more concern is the idea that my proposal could lead to an increase in the proportion of politicians from the ‘evangelical’ grouping: those that see it as their purpose to impose their good intentions on the rest of us, lest we look like we’re having too much fun. These are the people of such poor taste and such delusional belief in their ability (and often even their obligation to make the world a better place) that the scheme may even backfire: they may even aspire to having their foreheads mutilated.

This is disturbingly possible. However, it is my contention that evangelicalism is based upon a deeper vanity, and these people would thus spend more time calling for the abolition of the branding process than they would getting into power and calling for the abolition of smiling. Failing that, we could be in trouble. A trial period is probably the best way round this.

There is another possible drawback, in that more of these disturbed souls will be driven out of the democratic domain, and into quangos, and other bodies with the power to waste public money.

Again, this is probable. However, the branded ones are unlikely to keep giving power away to institutions whose employees can walk around with socially-acceptable brows. Jealousy would see to that. Power in such institutions would therefore wane.

These drawbacks are real, but they are not insurmountable, nor are they any more publicly pernicious than the current canyon of calamities.

In my humble opinion, it is certainly worth a try.