Yes in fact I have already done that, and they didn't reply. It might be because my words were a little heated. I do get kind of worked up about this particular issue.
Yes, in a way we are so predisposed. But whereas tribal groups are more directly "intentional" in that living in close-knit groups _directly_ conferred a survival advantage upon our ancestors, the two social structures you mentioned are only emergent properties of more basic underlying predispositions,
I access hotmail exclusively through Mozilla and I've had no trouble at all. However there are plenty of badly designed websites which don't work properly or render badly in Mozilla. One that springs to mind is the Royal Mail website. Absolutely appalling that a public utility website should be designed this way. There ought to be accessibility rules governing this sort of thing. Somebody should be fired for that.
Sure, I understand how that works. It's just that some scientists seem to get a bit carried away with their model; they seem to forget it's only a model composed of incomplete data and imperfect equations. eg. some planetologists got a bit of a shock when they discovered the surface of Titan wasn't exactly as they'd imagined it.
Personally I think w3m is WAY cooler. I mean, come on...displaying inline images within the xterm itself? The very idea! It's mind boggling to imagine how anybody could even come up with that idea in the first place.
Blix's final report before the US told him to get out. I mean final in the temporal sense rather than any spurious formal sense. It's the only final report that's worth a damn, because it's the most up to date inspection report that was available to the US when they made the final decision to go ahead.
They are supposed to release their first draft[...]next month
Any reports that come out now are tainted by a political necessity for the UN to follow along with the US in order to avoid losing all semblance of control - and by months of US occupation wherein all sorts of "evidence" suddenly turns up, meager though it may be. I'm only interested in Blix's impressions at the time therefore. Not in your neocon-rewritten history.
In any event it would be no surprise and no foul if Sadaam had found a way to keep working on some weapons programs. Just the US has ignored its own weapons treaty obligations in the past. Don't bother to pretend otherwise. The point of these treaties and enforced resolutions was to slow Sadaam down enough to contain him, and they were working fine according to Blix's team. The odd empty shells containing traces of this that or the other don't alter that.
Who else was in violation of [...] Security Council Resolutions?
Israel was in violation of several UN resolutions and the US took no action against *them*. If you're not going to enforce these resolutions impartially then you can hardly use them to justify your actions. As for orders to disarm, Blix proved they had done so most effectively.
As for willingness to use WMDs, to launch unprovoked attacks, to expand their borders, and direct ties to terrorist organizations - stop, you're making me laugh. By these definitions, the US is the world's public enemy no. 1 because it has done all these things and will no doubt continue to do so in the future.
And by the way no link was found between Sadaam and al Qaeda so that won't wash either.
Washington neocons have expressed a fondness for rewriting history, so I've little doubt that when each nation finds themself in a position where they owe the US a favour, they will surely manage to invent some piece of old intelligence which will be trotted out as retrospective justification for the US actions in Iraq and over the course of time, eventualy the current facts will be overturned or at least muddied somewhat. But this is meant only to fool the naive, which is most pepole and sufficient for the intended purpose.
Even if you thought that elements inside Iraq *were* sponsoring terrorists that is (under international law) insufficient reason to go to war, which is why the whole world was against it. But the US have regularly thumbed their noses at international law. Your famous constitution even appears to demand it. It's quite clear who is the *real* threat to global security.
You can't get 100% GM-free wheat when the GM wheat is grown next door. This is what happened in the UK when GM agro testing was stupidly set up in fields very close to organic farms.
There are conservatives of all types outside the US, and so much of the media outside the US is also heavily slanted toward the establishment - just not so ubiquitously as it is within the US. News sources inside the US are about as bad as it gets for political reportage. Because they are used to spread misinformation and disinformation instead of plain information, they actually have the effect of making you less well informed than you were when you were merely ignorant. You'd be better off not watching at all.
I just read your current draft for ep1 of "The Autonomy Project" last week and loved it to bits. Hardest part was getting to the end and realizing I have no idea when the next part will appear. Any plans yet?
Check http://www.hrw.org/doc?t=asia&c=nkorea and see just a few articles on who and what North Korea is. I think that it would be silly to say that they are a "good" nation. Furthermore, I think it would be irresponsible to not assign some sort of judgement to them due to their treatment of their populace and their constant manipulation and threats to the governments that are concerned with their power-centric attitudes.
I won't argue with North Korea's appalling human rights record. But you are still attempting to divide the world into good nations and evil nations and that is not just overly simplistic, but even a recipe for disaster. The realpolitik is that you can't go to war against North Korea; as Bismarck observed, politics is the art of the possible. What Clinton and Carter tried to do in 1994 was perfectly rational under the existing constraints.
GWB doesn't have a good grasp of international politics though - that should be obvious even to you by now - and the neocons who are pulling his strings suffer from such hubris ("you of the reality based community", indeed!) that they think they can just rewrite all the rules. Heh. Well I hate to say it (Godwins law and all) but so did the National Socialist policymakers of late 1930's Germany, and although they nearly got away with it we all know how *that* ended up. I'm not of course suggesting for one minute that Americans are Nazis or anything of the sort, merely that the foreign policy of one ascendant international power with a popular belief in manifest destiny and whose demagogue rulers are guided by people who think politics is both science and philosophy, is going to look pretty much like any other.
Regarding UN reports, this is disingenuous of you. The final reports from the UN inspection teams let by Hans Blix etc stated plainly that sanctions were working and there was no evidence of WMDs. Let me spell this out for you since you seem to find it hard to comprehend. The expert sent to determine whether there were any weapons on his final visit said that he had concluded there were none.
As to whether Sadaam was bending over backwards to comply genuinely or merely to seem to comply genuinely, who cares what he felt about it? The point was to make him comply and that is, (according to both the inspectors *and* UK and US intelligence) exactly what he was doing, whether he was enjoying it or not.
Your "charge sheet" bullet point list is not in dispute. He was an asshole dictator, just like numerous other asshole dictators around the world, many of them still supported by the US just like Sadaam used to be. But it is a straw man. The charge sheet is completely irrelevant to the question of "was he a big enough menace to justify invasion". None of these crimes made him a unique and direct threat to US national security which is presumably why the exaggerations about possible possession of WMD's had to be concocted as a pretext for war.
As to whether the earth is safer without Sadaam Hussein running Iraq - I am sure that some of his closest neighbours feel safer. But most of the world is I think a lot more worried about the new jackboot politics of the neocons in Washington. After all, Sadaam had very little capability to deliver destruction outside of his own immediate region. The US however has demonstrated both its capability to wage wars of shocking destructiveness against relatively defenseless enemies on the other side of the world (with an almost total disregard for tens of thousands of civilian casualties), *and* its willingness to do so regardless of all international opinion.
If the Iraq invasion was meant to be a response to 9/11 then it was truly an overreaction on a major scale. I'm not even going to get into how the White House tried for a long time to make it look like Saddam had something to do with the 9/11 attacks and failed to make it stick. But you're suggesting that its reasonable and acceptable to go around invading sovereign nations on the off chance that they might possibly assist terrorists later on. In the eyes of the rest of the world today, it's not reasonable and it's not acceptable. Especially when they are, as you were ready to admit, bent over backwards and pleading with you not to do it.
In your Hollywood movies, the hero is the guy who is viciously attacked but then goes after the perpetrator, gives him a taste of his own medicine thus humiliating him and turning him into a snivelling cowering wreck. Then he shows mercy and backs off saying "let that be a lesson". But the image of America today is of a protagonist who, with only a bloody nose (4,000 dead) in the first instance inflicted by someone else entirely who he couldn't get to, couldn't even be satisfied with winning against some other convenient bully of choice but had to beat seven colours of shit out of him as well in order that everybody would know who was the strongest.
Well, congratulations - so you are the strongest bully in the playground. But you're no hero, you're nobody's policeman and if this is you doing unasked favours for the rest of the world, no thanks and please don't do it in our name. We'd rather deal with a dozen small-time bullies on our own terms and take a bloody nose occasionally (the price of freedom maybe), than have to cope with a lone superpower bully who is bigger than everybody and beholden to nobody.
That quotation is not quite accuarate. It should be as follows:
"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss in Soviet Russia, the abyss gazes also into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche
The years of "peaceful diplomacy" (eg bombing civilian facilities, and withholding food and medical supplies) I remember those, sure.
The bit I have trouble understanding is the bit where according to you it suddenly "failed", providing the jusitification for an attack. See, Hussein was bending over backwards to comply with all US demands, and the UN inspectors said sanctions were working fine and that there were no weapons. The rest of the world was happy to continue with a policy of containment. But to you and the Bush regime, Iraq was now suddenly a target for invasion.
Lets not go through this all again. THERE WERE NO WEAPONS. Iraq was not a threat. The intelligence community knew it. The US and UK governments knew it. The reasons for invasion lay elsewhere (hint: all wars are fought for economic reasons). The whole world is aware of this. Including everybody in your own country who doesn't have his head up his ass. Why don't you get it?
"Scorched earth", AFAIK, usually refers to an invading force's destruction of the enemy's land, not their own.
The Romans had an interesting variation. After the siege of Carthage, they enslaved all the survivors *and* poured salt on the fields to ensure no crops would grow there. That was the end of Carthage.
In the US, you don't get to know what goes on at Guantanamo. That's why it's at Guantanamo in the first place. You need to try getting your news from someplace else than US media. You won't get balance any other way.
Naivety doesn't enter into it. I don't think anybody (and I include the Clinton adminstration) thought that North Korea's attempts at a nuclear weapons program would cease altogether even under the treaty. But they did expect it to be slowed down while the treaty lasted, as NK would have to do everything in secret. And something is better than nothing. What else could the US have done at the time? Invade?
Obviously, the only effect of the current warlike US policy stance has been to accelerate things and provoke the North Koreans into coming out into the open. I don't see that as a particularly positive development. Have you never heard of detente?
You, like Bush, attempt to divide the world into good nations and evil nations, and prejudging their motivations according to the category they find themselves in. Now that is what I call naive. Global politics isn't like a Western, with black hats and white hats. And if you try to make it into one, as the US govt. seems to be doing, no good can come of it.
Well at least you are honest, unlike the others who are taking the same line as you, in that you admit your distrust of the North Koreans is based only on supposition.
The facts speak otherwise though. So far as facts are concerned (and leaving out all name calling), we seem to have agreement that it went something like this:
1. 1992-1994: Clinton wants NK to abandon HWR technology (which can be used to breed weapons material) in favour of LWR, which can't. 2. 1994: Clinton and Carter broker the "Agreed Framework" deal where NK will be given LWR technology, and are provided with food and fuel oil to see them through their energy shortage while the LWR reactors are built. 3. 1996: Republicans win majority in Congress, and block fuel shipments to NK breaking the terms of the deal. 4. Now without fuel assistance, NK resumes their HWR nuclear power program to fulfil domestic energy requirements. 5. 2001/2002: Bush names NK member of "axis of evil" along with Iraq and repeatedly describes NK as an evil regime. 6. 2002/2003: US resolves to invade Iraq, against UN advice and flying in the face of world opinion. 7. 2003-2005: growing evidence of NK nuclear weapons program. (The earliest evidence I can find of a renewed NK weapons program is a missile test near Japan in 1998. The rest of the evidence postdates Bush's "axis of evil" announcement).
I wish you and your partyline-loving buddies would stop occasionally to consider such facts because they are very instructive. It was the US who abandoned the terms of the deal, not NK. This forced NK to resume their old energy program for reasons of domestic energy requirements. It was the US who then named NK an evil regime and then proceeded to demonstrate exactly what they do with evil regimes and exactly how much world opinion matters to them (not a lot).
It is hardly surprising that NK decided it was safest to beef up their deterrent and let the world know it. After all, it appears to have worked because Washington (and the world) knows the US won't invade a country so equipped. What would you have done? Exactly.
I've written to my local Labour MEP to complain about it - I didn't even get an acknowledgement. I wrote to the Tory MEP - he sent me a brief boilerplate statement of the party line (pro patents). I have written to my local Labout MP (Eleanor Laing, Epping) about this and other issues and she has never even bothered to reply.
My personal experience therefore is not good. I have concluded that a majority of these politicians - even many of the backbenchers - are corrupt to the core, routinely ignore any complaints from constituents that go against party policy, and care only about their political career and sucking up to the party leadership in the hope of rising to the front benches (and then staying there).
It's the same no matter what party is in power. It is the party political system that is to blame.
The only solution is defenestration it would appear.
So the OP is correct, and the parent is overly optimistic about the effectiveness of delegational "democracies" like ours. Don't forget that Blair very cleverly emasculated the upper house with the Parliament act a few years ago, and his government now routinely invokes it whenever they want to have their way. With an electoral system tuned to produce large majorities in the House of Commons, there is no longer any institution in Britain capable of opposing the government.
It has been said before, by a very senior British politician in fact, that the British parliamentary democracy behaves more like a serial dictatorship. Nothing could be more true.
I have up to now supported integration with the EU in the hope that this would help to regulate the UK government's wilder schemes. However if the Council of Ministers chooses to reject the European Parliament's decision now, I will end my support for the European Union until it becomes properly democratic.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes in fact I have already done that, and they didn't reply. It might be because my words were a little heated. I do get kind of worked up about this particular issue.
Yes, in a way we are so predisposed. But whereas tribal groups are more directly "intentional" in that living in close-knit groups _directly_ conferred a survival advantage upon our ancestors, the two social structures you mentioned are only emergent properties of more basic underlying predispositions,
I think Verdana's pretty nice actually. It's just about the most readable font there is IMHO. I'm using it for just about everything on my desktop.
I access hotmail exclusively through Mozilla and I've had no trouble at all. However there are plenty of badly designed websites which don't work properly or render badly in Mozilla. One that springs to mind is the Royal Mail website. Absolutely appalling that a public utility website should be designed this way. There ought to be accessibility rules governing this sort of thing. Somebody should be fired for that.
Exactly right. The city's attitude is affront to the people. Who the fuck do they think they are?
Sure, I understand how that works. It's just that some scientists seem to get a bit carried away with their model; they seem to forget it's only a model composed of incomplete data and imperfect equations.
eg. some planetologists got a bit of a shock when they discovered the surface of Titan wasn't exactly as they'd imagined it.
Surely the word "may" belongs in there somewhere?
Personally I think w3m is WAY cooler. I mean, come on...displaying inline images within the xterm itself? The very idea! It's mind boggling to imagine how anybody could even come up with that idea in the first place.
Can't wait!
May I suggest a mailing list, so you can notify everyone whenever there's something new there to read.
Hmm. I wonder if Prof Egan's seen it yet.
In any event it would be no surprise and no foul if Sadaam had found a way to keep working on some weapons programs. Just the US has ignored its own weapons treaty obligations in the past. Don't bother to pretend otherwise. The point of these treaties and enforced resolutions was to slow Sadaam down enough to contain him, and they were working fine according to Blix's team. The odd empty shells containing traces of this that or the other don't alter that.
Israel was in violation of several UN resolutions and the US took no action against *them*. If you're not going to enforce these resolutions impartially then you can hardly use them to justify your actions. As for orders to disarm, Blix proved they had done so most effectively.As for willingness to use WMDs, to launch unprovoked attacks, to expand their borders, and direct ties to terrorist organizations - stop, you're making me laugh. By these definitions, the US is the world's public enemy no. 1 because it has done all these things and will no doubt continue to do so in the future.
And by the way no link was found between Sadaam and al Qaeda so that won't wash either.
Washington neocons have expressed a fondness for rewriting history, so I've little doubt that when each nation finds themself in a position where they owe the US a favour, they will surely manage to invent some piece of old intelligence which will be trotted out as retrospective justification for the US actions in Iraq and over the course of time, eventualy the current facts will be overturned or at least muddied somewhat. But this is meant only to fool the naive, which is most pepole and sufficient for the intended purpose.
Even if you thought that elements inside Iraq *were* sponsoring terrorists that is (under international law) insufficient reason to go to war, which is why the whole world was against it. But the US have regularly thumbed their noses at international law. Your famous constitution even appears to demand it. It's quite clear who is the *real* threat to global security.
You can't get 100% GM-free wheat when the GM wheat is grown next door. This is what happened in the UK when GM agro testing was stupidly set up in fields very close to organic farms.
There are conservatives of all types outside the US, and so much of the media outside the US is also heavily slanted toward the establishment - just not so ubiquitously as it is within the US. News sources inside the US are about as bad as it gets for political reportage. Because they are used to spread misinformation and disinformation instead of plain information, they actually have the effect of making you less well informed than you were when you were merely ignorant. You'd be better off not watching at all.
Hey Jean-Michel,
I just read your current draft for ep1 of "The Autonomy Project" last week and loved it to bits. Hardest part was getting to the end and realizing I have no idea when the next part will appear. Any plans yet?
Ralph
Yes, but the "micro-soft" part of the name might put people off.
I won't argue with North Korea's appalling human rights record. But you are still attempting to divide the world into good nations and evil nations and that is not just overly simplistic, but even a recipe for disaster. The realpolitik is that you can't go to war against North Korea; as Bismarck observed, politics is the art of the possible. What Clinton and Carter tried to do in 1994 was perfectly rational under the existing constraints.
GWB doesn't have a good grasp of international politics though - that should be obvious even to you by now - and the neocons who are pulling his strings suffer from such hubris ("you of the reality based community", indeed!) that they think they can just rewrite all the rules. Heh. Well I hate to say it (Godwins law and all) but so did the National Socialist policymakers of late 1930's Germany, and although they nearly got away with it we all know how *that* ended up. I'm not of course suggesting for one minute that Americans are Nazis or anything of the sort, merely that the foreign policy of one ascendant international power with a popular belief in manifest destiny and whose demagogue rulers are guided by people who think politics is both science and philosophy, is going to look pretty much like any other.
Regarding UN reports, this is disingenuous of you. The final reports from the UN inspection teams let by Hans Blix etc stated plainly that sanctions were working and there was no evidence of WMDs. Let me spell this out for you since you seem to find it hard to comprehend. The expert sent to determine whether there were any weapons on his final visit said that he had concluded there were none.
As to whether Sadaam was bending over backwards to comply genuinely or merely to seem to comply genuinely, who cares what he felt about it? The point was to make him comply and that is, (according to both the inspectors *and* UK and US intelligence) exactly what he was doing, whether he was enjoying it or not.
Your "charge sheet" bullet point list is not in dispute. He was an asshole dictator, just like numerous other asshole dictators around the world, many of them still supported by the US just like Sadaam used to be. But it is a straw man. The charge sheet is completely irrelevant to the question of "was he a big enough menace to justify invasion". None of these crimes made him a unique and direct threat to US national security which is presumably why the exaggerations about possible possession of WMD's had to be concocted as a pretext for war.
As to whether the earth is safer without Sadaam Hussein running Iraq - I am sure that some of his closest neighbours feel safer. But most of the world is I think a lot more worried about the new jackboot politics of the neocons in Washington. After all, Sadaam had very little capability to deliver destruction outside of his own immediate region. The US however has demonstrated both its capability to wage wars of shocking destructiveness against relatively defenseless enemies on the other side of the world (with an almost total disregard for tens of thousands of civilian casualties), *and* its willingness to do so regardless of all international opinion.
If the Iraq invasion was meant to be a response to 9/11 then it was truly an overreaction on a major scale. I'm not even going to get into how the White House tried for a long time to make it look like Saddam had something to do with the 9/11 attacks and failed to make it stick. But you're suggesting that its reasonable and acceptable to go around invading sovereign nations on the off chance that they might possibly assist terrorists later on. In the eyes of the rest of the world today, it's not reasonable and it's not acceptable. Especially when they are, as you were ready to admit, bent over backwards and pleading with you not to do it.
In your Hollywood movies, the hero is the guy who is viciously attacked but then goes after the perpetrator, gives him a taste of his own medicine thus humiliating him and turning him into a snivelling cowering wreck. Then he shows mercy and backs off saying "let that be a lesson". But the image of America today is of a protagonist who, with only a bloody nose (4,000 dead) in the first instance inflicted by someone else entirely who he couldn't get to, couldn't even be satisfied with winning against some other convenient bully of choice but had to beat seven colours of shit out of him as well in order that everybody would know who was the strongest.
Well, congratulations - so you are the strongest bully in the playground. But you're no hero, you're nobody's policeman and if this is you doing unasked favours for the rest of the world, no thanks and please don't do it in our name. We'd rather deal with a dozen small-time bullies on our own terms and take a bloody nose occasionally (the price of freedom maybe), than have to cope with a lone superpower bully who is bigger than everybody and beholden to nobody.
"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss in Soviet Russia, the abyss gazes also into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche
The years of "peaceful diplomacy" (eg bombing civilian facilities, and withholding food and medical supplies) I remember those, sure.
The bit I have trouble understanding is the bit where according to you it suddenly "failed", providing the jusitification for an attack. See, Hussein was bending over backwards to comply with all US demands, and the UN inspectors said sanctions were working fine and that there were no weapons. The rest of the world was happy to continue with a policy of containment. But to you and the Bush regime, Iraq was now suddenly a target for invasion.
Lets not go through this all again. THERE WERE NO WEAPONS. Iraq was not a threat. The intelligence community knew it. The US and UK governments knew it. The reasons for invasion lay elsewhere (hint: all wars are fought for economic reasons). The whole world is aware of this. Including everybody in your own country who doesn't have his head up his ass. Why don't you get it?
That's it! I'm off to Bouvet Island!
What? They don't have broadband there? Nooo!
Troll.
"Scorched earth", AFAIK, usually refers to an invading force's destruction of the enemy's land, not their own.
The Romans had an interesting variation. After the siege of Carthage, they enslaved all the survivors *and* poured salt on the fields to ensure no crops would grow there. That was the end of Carthage.
In the US, you don't get to know what goes on at Guantanamo. That's why it's at Guantanamo in the first place. You need to try getting your news from someplace else than US media. You won't get balance any other way.
Naivety doesn't enter into it. I don't think anybody (and I include the Clinton adminstration) thought that North Korea's attempts at a nuclear weapons program would cease altogether even under the treaty. But they did expect it to be slowed down while the treaty lasted, as NK would have to do everything in secret. And something is better than nothing. What else could the US have done at the time? Invade?
Obviously, the only effect of the current warlike US policy stance has been to accelerate things and provoke the North Koreans into coming out into the open. I don't see that as a particularly positive development. Have you never heard of detente?
You, like Bush, attempt to divide the world into good nations and evil nations, and prejudging their motivations according to the category they find themselves in. Now that is what I call naive. Global politics isn't like a Western, with black hats and white hats. And if you try to make it into one, as the US govt. seems to be doing, no good can come of it.
Well at least you are honest, unlike the others who are taking the same line as you, in that you admit your distrust of the North Koreans is based only on supposition.
The facts speak otherwise though. So far as facts are concerned (and leaving out all name calling), we seem to have agreement that it went something like this:
1. 1992-1994: Clinton wants NK to abandon HWR technology (which can be used to breed weapons material) in favour of LWR, which can't.
2. 1994: Clinton and Carter broker the "Agreed Framework" deal where NK will be given LWR technology, and are provided with food and fuel oil to see them through their energy shortage while the LWR reactors are built.
3. 1996: Republicans win majority in Congress, and block fuel shipments to NK breaking the terms of the deal.
4. Now without fuel assistance, NK resumes their HWR nuclear power program to fulfil domestic energy requirements.
5. 2001/2002: Bush names NK member of "axis of evil" along with Iraq and repeatedly describes NK as an evil regime.
6. 2002/2003: US resolves to invade Iraq, against UN advice and flying in the face of world opinion.
7. 2003-2005: growing evidence of NK nuclear weapons program. (The earliest evidence I can find of a renewed NK weapons program is a missile test near Japan in 1998. The rest of the evidence postdates Bush's "axis of evil" announcement).
I wish you and your partyline-loving buddies would stop occasionally to consider such facts because they are very instructive. It was the US who abandoned the terms of the deal, not NK. This forced NK to resume their old energy program for reasons of domestic energy requirements. It was the US who then named NK an evil regime and then proceeded to demonstrate exactly what they do with evil regimes and exactly how much world opinion matters to them (not a lot).
It is hardly surprising that NK decided it was safest to beef up their deterrent and let the world know it. After all, it appears to have worked because Washington (and the world) knows the US won't invade a country so equipped. What would you have done? Exactly.
I've written to my local Labour MEP to complain about it - I didn't even get an acknowledgement. I wrote to the Tory MEP - he sent me a brief boilerplate statement of the party line (pro patents). I have written to my local Labout MP (Eleanor Laing, Epping) about this and other issues and she has never even bothered to reply.
My personal experience therefore is not good. I have concluded that a majority of these politicians - even many of the backbenchers - are corrupt to the core, routinely ignore any complaints from constituents that go against party policy, and care only about their political career and sucking up to the party leadership in the hope of rising to the front benches (and then staying there).
It's the same no matter what party is in power. It is the party political system that is to blame.
The only solution is defenestration it would appear.
So the OP is correct, and the parent is overly optimistic about the effectiveness of delegational "democracies" like ours. Don't forget that Blair very cleverly emasculated the upper house with the Parliament act a few years ago, and his government now routinely invokes it whenever they want to have their way. With an electoral system tuned to produce large majorities in the House of Commons, there is no longer any institution in Britain capable of opposing the government.
It has been said before, by a very senior British politician in fact, that the British parliamentary democracy behaves more like a serial dictatorship. Nothing could be more true.
I have up to now supported integration with the EU in the hope that this would help to regulate the UK government's wilder schemes. However if the Council of Ministers chooses to reject the European Parliament's decision now, I will end my support for the European Union until it becomes properly democratic.