POLL AFTER POLL has demonstrated that British voters are largely opposed to the privatisation and outsourcing of essential services and want them returned to public control.

With energy prices soaring, train fares the most expensive in Europe, schools falling apart and our rivers and coasts becoming open sewers, this is hardly surprising, yet the politicians who have the power to effect the change that people want do little or nothing about it.

Worse still, in the face of huge protests, the 411 Labour MPs effectively condone and encourage genocide in occupied Palestine as Israel’s armed forces have killed and maimed tens of thousands of children with materiel and logistical support from their government.

That same government spends hundreds of billions of pounds on maintaining US-controlled nuclear warheads in Scotland and on supporting Nato expansionism in Ukraine while simultaneously making savage budget cuts that will disproportionately affect the poorest members of our society.

While wasting colossal amounts of money on everything from HS2 to half-built nuclear power stations and allowing private enterprise to make huge profits on what should be state monopolies, we are told that there are no funds for the public realm.

It should, therefore, be abundantly clear that, far from constituting the will of the people, Parliament exists to protect the capitalist status quo and is tolerated by the Establishment insofar as it does nothing to threaten their vested interests.

If anybody doubts this, they need only look at the vicious campaign of slurs and lies directed against Jeremy Corbyn when his programme of mild social democratic reforms and, more significantly, his support for Palestine proved to be popular enough to nearly win him an election. State and corporate media led the charge in branding him as being anti-semitic, aided and abetted by the most reactionary elements of his own Labour Party that has now been returned to the safe hands of Keir Starmer, the ultimate Establishment stooge.

None of this will come as a surprise. The House of Commons is populated by a dismal, self-serving coterie whose loyalties are to themselves, their political party and, to a limited extent, their constituents, in that order. Not being satisfied with the generous salaries they draw, dozens of MPs have retained their seats in local government and scores of others have second jobs or consultancies, not to mention the preponderance of landlords making a tidy sum out of their rented houses.

Expecting them to pass legislation curbing the profit motive or challenging private property is akin to expecting the proverbial turkeys to vote for Christmas. The vast majority of constituents have never met their “representative,” and research has shown that 70 per cent of those under 18 years old do not even know who they are.

Faith in Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system has diminished to such an extent that the 2024 general election turnout was the lowest since 2001, notwithstanding the usual wall-to-wall media coverage lending undeserved credence to the whole “rotten boroughs” process, designed to lend it a veneer of respectability.

Meanwhile, the upper house of our great Parliament is home to an unelected, unrepresentative motley collection of 829 grifters, has-beens and purveyors of religious superstition who are entitled to claim over £1,800 per week plus expenses just for turning up. No wonder cynics have called it the House of Frauds. And if that were not enough, all parliamentarians swear allegiance to an obscenely rich head of state who, together with his extended family, is only in post by an accident of birth.

Leftist scepticism of what is laughably described as “liberal democracy” is not a recent phenomenon. In 1910, the legendary trade unionist Tom Mann said that “Parliament was brought into existence by the ruling class … to enable them to have more effective means of dominating and subjugating the working class.”

Mann believed that trade unions should be agents of change, dedicated to defeating capitalism, and he would have been dismayed to see the leaders of today who have allowed their unions to become a stepping stone for Labour Party parliamentary aspirants and have wasted untold amounts of members’ money on getting Labour governments elected with little discernible benefit.

Antonio Gramsci observed that too many trade union leaders see their organisations merely as a means to improve conditions within the existing structure by indulging in what he termed “vulgar economism,” and that remains relevant today.

As Gramsci would instantly recognise, the ruling class has developed a hegemonic culture propagating its own values and norms that have become accepted as the “common sense” values of all. Even though people are suffering from not having enough money to pay the rent or feed their children, there remains an acceptance that capitalism and its parliamentary watchdog are the natural order of things. As Margaret Thatcher once said, “There is no alternative.” So, what is to be done?

A start can be made at the local council level, using existing structures to articulate and advance popular demands for the provision of people’s basic needs that successive governments have been unable or unwilling to deliver. The ruling class and their compliant parliamentarians have long understood the potential of local authorities to upset the apple cart, which is why so much effort has gone into neutralising their influence and making Britain the most centralised state in Western Europe.

By the introduction of compulsory competitive tendering, elected mayors, paid cabinet members and the removal of the committee system, not to mention the abolition of the rates, local councils have neither the money nor the ability to support their communities. All too often, careerist politicians running local authorities meekly administer central government cuts without a shred of resistance.

Labour authorities in particular have comprehensively failed their residents by not mobilising local public opinion and joining other Labour councils in mounting a sustained nationwide campaign against them. Consequently, apathy and low turnouts at council elections are inevitable because voters realise all too well that, regardless of which party they vote for, nothing will change.

What would make a huge difference is a root and branch reform of local authority finances in a devolved tax structure that would allow councils to be self-funding rather than dependent on central government largesse.

Allowing them the ability to properly manage private-sector rents and have access to capital for a renewed house building programme (with no right to buy), for example, would revolutionise local government and would undoubtedly be reflected in public participation and heightened voter interest.

It will be obvious that such radical measures are not going to occur overnight, but a start can be made by removing the dead hand of bourgeois party politics from our town halls and organising to replace it with elected representatives whose only allegiance is to their community.

For this to happen, it will require the building of a broad-based popular front, perhaps coming from local versions of the People’s Assembly, that nominates candidates on an agreed basic non-sectarian manifesto setting out the road to a fundamental shift in power that would return hospitals, colleges, schools and council services to accountable local government control.

The alternative is to do nothing and watch what vestiges of local democracy we have left be further eroded and eventually disappear. Or are we just going to rely on our MPs?