Free The Light's on at Signpost by George MacDonald Fraser Page A

I speak of the majority, not of the handful who have not forgotten what honour means.
    Occasionally, and more often since we became involved in the European folly, it is suggested that we need a constitution. This is puerile. There is not, and never has been, a written constitution worth powder to blow it to hell, including the collection of platitudes and wishful thinking by which Americans set such misguided store. Why it should be supposed that a document drawn up by a group of eighteenth-century English squires and merchants for a largely agricultural country should be thought suitable for the governance of a modern, highly industrialised, multi-national state, has never been clear to me, but then I have always been mistrustful of vague, high-sounding, and sometimes downright daffy pontifications, and uncomfortably aware that a constitution means what you want it to mean. We have seen the US Constitution twisted and distorted and turned inside out by slick lawyers to a degreewhich Jefferson and Co. wouldn’t believe; to take one small example, they wouldn’t have equated pornography with freedom of speech.
    We must remember also that any constitution endures only until someone comes along who is powerful enough to tear it up, as the history of Germany, and others, bears witness.
    That, of course, is the ever-present danger, and it applies regardless of whether a country has a constitution or not. Any democracy which plays its people false is liable to find itself displaced by tyranny, and don’t think it couldn’t happen in dear, sane, sensible old Britain. All it takes is enough betrayal by dishonest government, and enough public disillusion, and suddenly Wodehouse’s wonderful fun about “Spode swanking about in his footer bags” is funny no longer.
    We can only hope for the best, reminding ourselves that our creaky old “democracy” can work, given integrity and courage in those charged with operating it; even the ghastly party system needn’t be an insuperable obstacle to good government. It’s a bloody awful manifestation of the worst in human and political nature, but it’s inevitable, as is the lure of politics to the corrupt and venal personality. The days when Cincinnatus could be called from the plough are long gone—and if he could be called he would be derided as a comic figure at Westminster.
    In closing, I must cite a prime example of hypocrisy in the so-called mother of Parliaments: the clamour from the Liberal Democrat benches for proportional representation. They demand it as the only fair, equitable, sensible, honourable, etc., etc., system. In fact, fairness, equity, sense, and most of all honour, have nothing to do with it; the Liberals want it because it’s the only possible way by which their clapped-out party can ever hope to get a share of power. Strange that their cry was never heard in the days (now some time ago, fortunately) when the Liberal Party meant something; was it not fair and equitable then? The truth is that today’s Liberal Democrats are like a football team fed up and resentful at languishingpermanently at the bottom of the league, crying: “The rules must be changed, so that we can win.” It is a pathetic, typically dishonest plea.
    Quite apart from the moral one, there are many reasons why proportional representation, in any form, would be an extremely bad thing. One is that in Britain we traditionally vote for people, not parties, and the notion of party lists of candidates, chosen by the party hierarchy, is totally odious to any serious democrat. Not only is it wrong in principle; in fact it would mean that you could never get rid of those parliamentary disasters who so often rise to the top in their parties; p.r. would guarantee them permanent seats.
    On that last ground alone p.r. is abominable, but we may add the equally convincing objection, namely that it doesn’t work, as consideration of the havoc it has wreaked in various continental countries shows all