So when do we get a Grillo here?
Mr Grillo’s simple and hugely popular argument is that Italian politics of both left and right is rotten to the core and the nation’s only hope is to sack all professional politicians – “tutti a casa!” roared the Rome crowd, “send them all home!” – and replace them with honest, well-intentioned Italians who will resist the temptations of power and set their country on the road back to sanity.
Sounds good to me and I hope he succeeds. Italy isn’t alone, though. Ours are just as bad. Sack the lot and start again. Yup, I could run with that.
And whom are you going to get to replace them?
Err ….
Not that I disagree with the original point, you understand!
Grillo has already answered that one. I’d go one step further and make the role part time, so that we can remove entirely the idea of a professional politician.
For a start, people who have a good track record doing something outside politics. I have no problem if that happens to be acting or being a comedian but would not include professional campaigners and interns. I do understand that this would not in itself exclude some very self serving unpleasant people but getting rid of career politicians would reduce their numbers to more manageable levels.
Excellent idea! How about setting up a Political Party of like minded people and getting some candidates for the next election.
Not beholden to anyone else, not controlled by patronage.
Simple Manifesto:
No MP to serve more than three terms. Thus 25 MP’s to resign annually and seats filled on that basis for as long as it takes, either voluntary or chosen by lot.
Any money earned other than through being an MP or a Minister / Shadow Minister to be deducted from Parliamentary salary.
MP’s expenses to be either a fixed subsistence amount or against invoiced train fares and nothing else (like the rest of the tax-paying population!).
All Ministers to be interviewed and approved by a Parliamentary Committee prior to taking up the post.
SpAD’s to cease to exist.
Political constituency offices to be replaced by permanent offices, paid for by the state.
No state funding of Political Parties.
Seems like Grillo has done well, but the loopy corruptght (Berlusconi) and the boring not quite so corrupt centre-left (Monti) will almost certainly try to form a guvmint (though they hate each other) rather than let Grillo in …..
In fairness to Monti, he did have a hell of a mess to sort out. He’s clearly got all the charisma of a month-old piece of cod, but that wasn’t why he was put in charge. He’s an economy geek. A nerd. His *sole* remit was to get the economy beaten back into some sort of shape. And he didn’t do *that* bad a job with the basics.
Italy doesn’t have much of a global presence in the banking sector. Aside from the BNL and Unicredit groups, almost every bank is regional. Every major town and city has its own building society / bank institution. (E.g. the “Cassa Di Risparmio di Viterbo” is Viterbo’s own building society.) Rather like their original British counterparts, these local and regional banks have a legal requirement to invest a certain percentage of their capital each year into their local economies. They don’t get to say “no”.
Italy’s problems are due to lack of economic growth. This is mostly caused by corruption and nepotism (mostly the latter), which has led to businesses tottering and stumbling frequently due to incompetence. It’s difficult to provide regulation or legislation for this; the few attempts have invariably created more red tape rather than less, and have impacted more on SMEs, not the larger companies, who can just hire more accountants and lawyers to navigate the bureaucracy.
I used to consider Italy’s corruption and incompetency problems unique, but having watched the UK’s economic clusterf*cks, it’s hard to continue seeing it as anything other than a worldwide malaise. We’ve seen the media and corporate idiots lauding Apple for merely doing exactly what it says in the “How to run a business… for Dummies!” textbooks. (Namely: the purpose of a business is to make a *profit*, not merely to gain market share while haemorrhaging money for years. Compared Amazon’s share price with their actual profits and you’ll wonder how Apple’s are priced so low. Something is clearly broken.)
Governments in many Western nations have become stuck in an infinite loop: they’re lobbied incessantly big Big Corporate to retain the status quo, but that’s antithetical to how economies are *supposed* to work. In the past, such attempts have utterly destroyed once-thriving economies. Instead of constantly looking ahead, managers became obsessed with retaining their current business models and brought about their own doom. Woolworth’s, Comet, and many more High Street names all went to the wall because they refused to understand what the Internet would do to them. They *deserved* to fail.
The upshot of all this is that governments and big, old, lumbering corporations are effectively locked together, trying to keep both houses of cards from falling through ever more desperate measures. Bailing out the banks should never have been necessary; they have only themselves to blame for the backlash that’s headed their way.
Tempting to say I agree. Also tempting to say where would we find these honest and well intentioned Italians to govern us? Seriously though, if power corrupts then the whole thing is doomed from the start, isn’t it?
Could be the beginnings of the rumbling over here.