Khoodeelaar! challenges UK Crossrail minsiter on railway claims
Muhammad Haque | 18.07.2006 19:06 | Analysis | Indymedia | Social Struggles | London | World
Just as Tony Blair has been shown this past week to have suffered another dramatic reduction of his image, 'thanks' to his visible alliance of stuttering supplication to G W Bush, so is the domestic UK legislature caught in a morass of unimaginative 'law'-making, as the CrossRail Bill 'scrutiny' committee has been showing by its failure to allow bona fide objectors put the evidence before it. Next week's filing in the High Court of the formal challenge against the Secretary of State is set to create a record in the history of battles to make the UK Parliament representative of basic standards of democracy that it is often claimed to typify. The constitutional contribution of the Khoodeelaar! campaign towards democratising the UK parliament will be a fitting one, given that the East End of London has been chosen by the Select Committee to be denied its say in the so-called peoples’ parliament.
So, the long-awaited legal action against the CrossRail plan is starting next week. Was that necessary?
Was that avoidable?
Was there an alternative to taking High Court action?
Will the High court agree with the applicants against the Secretary of State?
What about the local MPs for Tower Hamlets?
What about the local Councils?
Did they approach their local council?
All these questions can be firmly answered on the facts in the negative in that we have done all that could have been reasonably expected of us in the past 31 months since the KhoodeelaAr! Campaign began.
We asked the local council, the local councillors, the regional assembly member concerned, the ‘london mayor’ the local Blairing MP at the time to work with the campaign and in defence of the community against CrossRail.
We have seen the evidence of callous disregard and dishonesty. Blatant lying by all concerned against the community.
We have encountered such systematic corruption on the local Tower Hamlets Council and via that Council that no rational person could expect that council to deliver any ethical or democratic response to the campaign demand that the Council must say No to Crossrail hole project.
It has been a long while since the UK's actual law-making process was put to any real scrutiny at an independent forum.
What goes on in the name of scrutiny in the UK Parliament is so inappropriate, inadequate and patchy that to call it scrutiny is to really abuse the word scrutiny.
There are so many bureaucratic and anti-democratic factors for this lack of democratic audit of the UK parliament.
The most important one is that the 'people' are assumed to accept that elected members of the parliament are by that fact alone and actually actively engage d as the voices of the electors when conducting themselves in the Palace of Westminster.
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
And it is not a slogan.
The KhoodeelaAr! campaign over the past 32 months against the CrossRail project has unearthed enough evidence to show that parliament is not working.
It may not sound a staggering statement.
But it is a frightening state of affairs.
Without an active democratic and representative membership of parliament, the people do not stand a chance. The people therefore have no excuse to let the situation get out of control and for parliament to become a rubber stamp for what can only be an authoritarian order
Just so that the campaign against CrossRail is seen in the factual context, ALL THREE MAIN Parties are backing this fundamentally flawed project. The number of independent MPs who voted against is so small as to be insulting.
There is no way that those MPs will make any difference if they followed the in-house voting arithmetic.
Many hurdles have had to be got over before we arrived at this stage.
Was that avoidable?
Was there an alternative to taking High Court action?
Will the High court agree with the applicants against the Secretary of State?
What about the local MPs for Tower Hamlets?
What about the local Councils?
Did they approach their local council?
All these questions can be firmly answered on the facts in the negative in that we have done all that could have been reasonably expected of us in the past 31 months since the KhoodeelaAr! Campaign began.
We asked the local council, the local councillors, the regional assembly member concerned, the ‘london mayor’ the local Blairing MP at the time to work with the campaign and in defence of the community against CrossRail.
We have seen the evidence of callous disregard and dishonesty. Blatant lying by all concerned against the community.
We have encountered such systematic corruption on the local Tower Hamlets Council and via that Council that no rational person could expect that council to deliver any ethical or democratic response to the campaign demand that the Council must say No to Crossrail hole project.
It has been a long while since the UK's actual law-making process was put to any real scrutiny at an independent forum.
What goes on in the name of scrutiny in the UK Parliament is so inappropriate, inadequate and patchy that to call it scrutiny is to really abuse the word scrutiny.
There are so many bureaucratic and anti-democratic factors for this lack of democratic audit of the UK parliament.
The most important one is that the 'people' are assumed to accept that elected members of the parliament are by that fact alone and actually actively engage d as the voices of the electors when conducting themselves in the Palace of Westminster.
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
And it is not a slogan.
The KhoodeelaAr! campaign over the past 32 months against the CrossRail project has unearthed enough evidence to show that parliament is not working.
It may not sound a staggering statement.
But it is a frightening state of affairs.
Without an active democratic and representative membership of parliament, the people do not stand a chance. The people therefore have no excuse to let the situation get out of control and for parliament to become a rubber stamp for what can only be an authoritarian order
Just so that the campaign against CrossRail is seen in the factual context, ALL THREE MAIN Parties are backing this fundamentally flawed project. The number of independent MPs who voted against is so small as to be insulting.
There is no way that those MPs will make any difference if they followed the in-house voting arithmetic.
Many hurdles have had to be got over before we arrived at this stage.
Muhammad Haque
e-mail:
lawmedia@hotmal.com
Homepage:
http://www.khoodeelaar.com
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