John Jackson chairs the law firm Mishcon de Reya, is a director of openDemocracy and History Today and is on the committee of Unlock Democracy.

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On Tuesday morning one of our Treasury Ministers, Paul (Lord) Myners, remarked in a radio interview on the dangers inherent in ‘push button' computerised trading which now accounts for some 70% of all transactions in company shares in the U.S. and is a growing practice here in the U.K. Myners, a self-made man with a distinguished city career, was brought into the government by Gordon Brown to assist with the financial crisis in September 2008. The crisis has led to considerable, sometimes justified, finger-pointing at small sets of individuals and companies. Now Myners has raised a wider and deeper system issue and, predictably, this has received almost no public discussion. But it is just the kind of issue that demands wide debate. For Myners has raised the question of whether the fundamental relationship which he believes in between investors, especially institutional investors like pension funds, and the companies they invest in, will be destroyed by the spread of pre-programmed computers making buy or sell decisions.

Paul Myners has long argued that the best way to ensure that boards of directors manage effectively and with due regard to the social obligations of their companies is for shareholders to behave as responsible owners and play a stronger supervisory role in the companies in which they invest.

The trouble with this is that most institutional shareholders are disinclined to take on such a role. They have arguments on their side. They own shares in companies not the companies themselves. There are severe practical limits to the influence they can sensibly bring to bear on managers who know their businesses. And their own responsibilities to those whose funds they manage may be better discharged if they can take unrestrained advantage of the liquidity that a modern stock exchange affords them.

Moreover, it is simply not possible to plug the holes that the new computerised world has bored through the dyke: the old idea of joint stock companies - from which comes the notion of distributed ownership which Myners is talking about - is being swept away in the flood.

Nonetheless Myners has identified a serious structural problem. The boards of companies have great economic and social power. To put it at its lowest, it is in the interests of all of us that they are interrogated on how they use their power. If shareholders do not, who will?

This article originally appeared on the blog of Open Up Now, the campaign for open primaries.

I have just finished reading a fascinating book about the collapse in September 2008 of Lehman Brothers. Well informed and informative, it describes in vivid and authentic detail how that banking house careered towards the biggest bankruptcy in history dragging much of the world's financial system into chaos with it. The book is titled A Colossal Failure of Common Sense and is a study of the deadly interplay between personal and institutional greed for both money and power, the desire of those in power to maintain the status quo, the reluctance to recognise inconvenient facts and the willingness of those with "common sense" to become complicit and not ask the key "what if?" questions. It should be required reading for the leaders of our political parties.

It is our political parties that have become a necessity in, but also the kidnappers of, our representative democracy. And it is they that are leading us headlong towards the collapse of public confidence in our parliamentary system. They are doing this, as they have for some time, in three main ways.

They exercise substantial control of parliamentary candidacy by deciding at central or local level who is allowed to put themselves up for election as representatives of constituencies.

They are the self-appointed guardians of the rule that all holders of ministerial positions sit in one of the two houses of Parliament and are members of (or, in rare cases, supporters of) "the party".

They make clear to "their" MPs (via the whipping system and other more subtle pressures) that the realisation of any ambition to have a political career including ministerial office is dependent on supporting "their" government and not "rocking the boat".

By these means the political parties have captured our freedoms and largely destroyed the notions that Government should be subject to the control of Parliament and that Parliament should consist of the people's representatives freely elected. We are, in effect, forced to vote for a party which will create the next government with our MPs reduced substantially to cannon fodder in relation to national matters and encouraged to focus on "constituency matters". Test this by asking your MP two questions, one relating to a purely local matter and the other to a national matter. You will get a prompt response to the former but, very likely, will have to wait for a response to the latter until someone on the MP's staff has checked with "central office" what the party line is.

I have just returned from a short visit to some of the (increasingly expensive) countries of the European Union. For much of the time I was in the enjoyable company of couples from the U.S. and had ample opportunity to overhear their conversations.

One such conversation between a wife who was a Democrat and her husband who was a Republican was brief and instantly amusing but as I pondered on it I was reminded that we need to be careful in wishing for what we want: we might get it.

The conversation ran thus:-

Wife. ‘The reason I like Obama is that he believes in what he says.'

Husband. ‘That is just what worries me.'

My first reaction was that the husband was simply reflecting a Republican view that Obama was both dangerous and seriously wrong in believing that the U.S. would be a more successful society if it embraced policies which were redistributive of wealth and ‘socialist'. I put ‘socialist' within quotation marks because, as another of my travelling companions explained to me, it is seen by many in the U.S. as a word connoting a political system based on the taking of money from those who work and giving it, in cash or kind  ( e.g. ‘excessive' access to education or health care), to those who don't  - ‘like in the U.K. and France'.

But on reflection I wondered if the husband also meant that, in an inherently selfish world, the interests of the U.S. would be served better by a leader who was more practised in the arts of deception and less inclined to honesty and openness.

The man in the moon observing the current political scene in our country could be forgiven for concluding that our supposed leaders are competing with each other to see which of them can make us the most miserable. Egged on by the media in pre-election mode they are describing our present economic position in exaggerated and horrific terms and delight in telling us how they propose to put the situation right by ‘savage cuts', housewifely prudence and, of course, new and larger taxes.

Before long people, particularly those suffering the real misery of unemployment, whether directly or through members of their families, will notice two things. None of those leaders, including particularly those in official opposition, are anxious to accept that anything they did (or did not do) as cogs in our parliamentary system contributed to our problems. Also that their remedies presume that they should carry on as usual - and they are simply competing over who should ‘take the lead' in doing what they claim needs to be done. And that the question of whether their unchanged system might in any way be part of the problem, or might itself need to be ‘savagely' changed, is not asked. And that therefore all the leaders on offer wish to continue doing things to us - not with us.

When such pennies do drop questions will be asked and asked with increasing vigour. Questions that could include the following: Does our parliamentary system work? Can our members of parliament truly represent us if their future depends in any degree on how their party whips report to party leaders on their commitment to the party cause? Do we get the best ministers if they have to be members of either house? Why can we not have primaries before a general election? Should we have fixed term parliaments? Why not proportional representation? Why not more civic involvement in the lead up to fundamental decisions, culminating in some cases in national referendums?

When I was very young in the early 1930s there was a period of some two years during which my parents could not afford to buy a daily newspaper. Instead my father, who was out of work and on the very small, state provided, dole, would call in to our local public library to read, I think, the Daily Mirror and the Times. Sometimes the library copies were in use - there were many families needing to watch every penny - and he had to wait his turn. Others were waiting their turn too and the library became a local, entirely male, gossip parlour.

My brother and I were ‘little pigs with big ears' and we would eavesdrop as my father, on his return, told my mother what was up nationally and, courtesy of the gossip parlour, locally. So I grew up believing that buying a newspaper was a luxury - something like an orange or a banana - and that access, free, to ‘the news' was one of the civic rights that came with being a member of a benevolent society.

It never occurred to me to wonder what would happen if nobody bought a daily newspaper and everyone's father went to the public library instead. That, in essence, is the situation  which the newspaper proprietors are threatened with: not by the public libraries but by the web.

Rupert Murdoch has now said that he intends to charge web users for access to some (what ‘some' is he has not said) of the contents of his newspapers. He is not the first proprietor to take this line but he has distinguished himself from the others by making his private intentions public as an important news item in their own right. He is taking the web on.