Perhaps we need to start this investigation by going back to basics to see what a government is traditionally supposed to be.
I maintain that right now there is a misunderstanding of what government is even supposed to be about. Things weren't always that way. Let me suggest a start point which happens to be identical for both the UK and the USA.
In the UK let me take you back to the early nineteenth century and the Representation of the Peoples Act, which sets out a set of rules for the way the country is to be run by certain persons who are to be regarded as the representatives of the people who live in certain electoral divisions.
There have been several updates, and all the Bills are described as being about the representation of the general public or certain classes within the population. In 1918 for instance women were given the vote. But all the titles of these various Bills have one thing in common, they discuss the representation of the people. In short, the UK parliament is there to represent the people.
Has anybody spotted that things have changed? Not only has there been a change of perspective, but an assumption has developed that is precisely at variance with the descriptions of the various Acts of Parliament.
No matter where you look, or what document you peruse, or what speech you listen to today our representatives are consistently referred to as our leaders.
Let's get this straight. They are NOT our leaders, they are, by statutory definition, our representatives.
This may be regarded as a bit of nit-picking, but I maintain that the current misconception of what government is supposed to be leads to the complete mismanagement and manipulation of the forms put in place to govern a country.
As time goes on the whole concept of government as a method of control becomes more and more ingrained in the general consciousness and it is about time this pernicious creep in conception was stopped, and indeed reversed.
Exactly the same is supposed to be true in the USA. Doesn't that country have a government body known as the House of Representatives? Is that word "representatives" so difficult to understand? It certainly seems to be very easy to subvert the word to mean what the heck anyone chooses it to mean. Wouldn't it be a good idea to go back to basics and stop playing around with words to make them mean something they dont mean and were never intended to mean?
Doing just that has become very difficult over the past decade or so as woke ideas have latched on to a wonderful idea which plays out in George Orwell's infamous book 1984. In that book the concept is known quite simply as doublespeak, where meanings are quite deliberately turned round to mean the opposite of what the dictionary of normal speak defines.
A very simple use of this concept is the American newly acquired habit of calling people who have black skin, people of colour, when we all know, or should know, that black is a word used scientifically to mean a lack of colour.
And that leads us further into a linguistic mire where science is these days more often than not mocked, which is odd, as our lives are in so many ways enriched by the findings of science.
I dont want to pursue too many threads in this introductory chapter, but merely to point out that we have some serious problems with communication right at the start of our enquiry into government.
Let us return to our servants in parliament, or the people who are supposed to be our servants there.
They are assisted in their representative duties by a bunch of back-room folks who are referred to as the civil service. They are not bosses. They are not employed to tell us what to do, they are our servants (is there not a rather strong clue in the name -- civil servant?), and it is about time we started to remember and enforce these fundamental and important points. Unless we get some fundamental definitions agreed at the outset we shall all be going round in circles for ever more. That sounds just like what is going on in the current houses of parliament in the UK.
It seems to me that the first job for any government reformation is to return the system to basic principles, and for us to insist on the proper use of language and nomenclature.
The second problem reminds me of an earlier problem with British government. In the days when history was taught in schools we learned something about our past which allowed us to place ourselves in a context, something that once upon a time was regarded as useful.
I recall a certain John Dunning, and his famous resolution which stated that "The influence of the crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished".
Perhaps that ought to be updated by Clare's self evident resolution that "The power of government has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished".
The really fundamental question we need to address is the rather awkward matter of deciding what government is for. It is certainly not an institution created to rule. Kings used to do that. Despots continue to do that. Governments are supposed to be one side of a social contract. The other side is of course, the general public.
Perhaps it is time we reminded ourselves what the social contract is supposed to be.