Stop politicians lying in Parliament

What people hate most about politicians is that they're all a bunch of liars.

Britain's political and media establishment claim that MPs do not lie in Parliament, because its against Parliamentary rules. This is nonsense. They lie all the time. This is not a minor complaint. The essence of democracy is accountability. The way British democracy is supposed to work is that the government is accountable to Parliament, and MPs are accountable to the voters at general elections. However, you can't judge a government on its record if you don't know what they've been up to, and too often, you can't find out what's been going on because they control access to all the information. This makes a nonsense of democracy and opens up enormous scope for incompetence, abuse of power and corruption.

Parliament is useless. The party whipping system has reduced it to little more than an electoral collage for selecting the Prime Minister.

We need a written constitution which lays down both the rules for government, and institutions to enforce those rules. To be of any use, the constitution must be amendable only through a referendum, and such a referendum should occur only as a result of a petition being signed by, say 10% of ordinary voters. The most important rules should be:

• Anyone can be summoned and made to answer questions in Parliament.
• Anyone giving information to Parliament must tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
• Anyone breaking these rules should be tried before a Grand Jury (30 people, whereas a normal jury has only 12 members) which will not only determine guilt or innocence, but also fix sentences. The penalties available to the jury should include unlimited fines and unlimited prison sentences.
• Judges, prosecutors and investigators, like jury members, should be chosen at random from among qualified people.

Politicians like to invent scenrios where they have to be dishonest; however, faced with these penalties, I am certain few would feel confident of their arguments. If a genuine case did arise where a politician was justified in being less than honest, the jury could choose not to impose any penalty.

This propopsal would put real power into the hands of ordinary MPs and make Parliamentary democracy function the way its was always supposed to work.