Who disconnected my MP !?!?

A recent survey in the newspapers this week revealed that MPs feel disconnected from the public, powerless and frustrated. Equally, the electorate feel that politicians are out of touch with their needs and that there is no point in voting in an election.

So what is it that has caused this rift between the government and the people?

To get to the root of this problem we need to look at the way policies are set at the highest levels of government and how they are implemented at the lowest levels. Everyone knows that unemployment is a bad thing. Unfortunately, in recent years the politicians at the top of the tree have decided to implement huge quantities of unnecessary and politically correct legislation in order to create jobs for civil servants and local government officials to implement.

People's lives are affected by it every day minutiae. If you have a problem with your environment, there are huge potholes in your roads, the guy in the house next door is running an illegal and noisy business or even a street light needs to be repaired then it is likely that you will have to deal with some form of local government clerk.

Regrettably, the chances are that the clerk you will be dealing with will be an otherwise unemployable youngster who has been given the job purely for the purposes of removing him from the unemployment statistics. He or she (note the careful observation of equalities legislation here) is probably ill educated and badly trained. It is further quite likely that the legislation and procedures they are being asked to implement are completely beyond their comprehension. Of course, you could argue that this is due to the shortcomings in educational and training policies in the first place.

So, you make your phone call or write your letter. You will probably receive standard response number 22 from the manual of how to deal with 'customers'. This makes you immensely frustrated so eventually you contact your MP. Unfortunately, your MP is locked away in the great white ivory tower known as the Houses of Parliament and is so busy deciding on high-level policies that they frankly do not have time to deal with your problem even if they actually want to.

The fact of the matter is that your MP answers to somewhere around 70,000 constituents -- most of whom must be remembered could not be bothered to vote for them in the first place -- and if every one of those constituents pulled his problem to his MP, he or she would simply be swamped.

So we need to inject some enthusiasm into the lower levels of government. The fact of the matter is that the quality of staff employed is inadequate, and they are demotivated, demoralised and disinterested. The greatest malaise of recent years is this government's obsession with targets. No one is interested in collecting meaningless statistics to be massaged by their manager so that it looks like central government is achieving a target.

To make things worse, the people at the top are obsessed with these targets because the figures that are then produced make it look as if they have actually achieved something. The fact of the matter is we have achieved absolutely nothing. What we have done is to create work at the top thinking up new targets and work at the bottom collecting statistics to prove that we have met these targets.

The answer then is quite simple -- we need to set a target for how many targets we can abolish. The money that we save by doing this can be spent on proper education, training and recruitment so that we have the right people in the right places to solve our everyday problems in the first place.

This will make our electorate much more contented, will demonstrate to them that the people we are paying taxes to employ actually have some effect, and will make them feel more inclined to go out and vote.

Alternatively, we could simply set a target to get more voters into the booths....