I have a proposal for a constitutional amendment.
It is very short.
It requires no lawyers, no commissions, no public hearings. It can fit on one line, and everyone will understand it immediately - which is probably why it will never be adopted.
It goes like this.
Any proposal you put forward in Parliament, you must yourself live under the consequences of for six to twenty-four months before it can apply to others.
That is all.
No exceptions, no transitional arrangements, no dispensation for being busy, on leave, or other loopholes.
Notice what happens the moment you say it out loud. No one can argue against the principle. No one can stand up and say that politicians naturally should not live under what they decide for others. One can only fall silent. And it is that silence which is interesting.
For try following the thought through with me -
If you propose further immigration from MENAPT countries, then you first open your own home. You house, you provide heating, you explain, you translate between two worldviews at your own breakfast table, and you live in the neighbourhood where the change actually takes place - not in the neighbourhood where one writes columns about it. And you take the conversation yourself, the morning your guests ask about the rainbow flag in the window and the Pride poster in the hallway - that conversation where two of your deepest convictions meet each other over the porridge, and you discover they have never before been in the same room. You voted for them both. Now they just have to live together. At your place.
If you propose milder sentences and faster releases, then you move into the stairwell where the released move in. Not as a visit. As a neighbour. Just 6 to 24 months depending on the proposal's risk to ordinary people.
If you propose cuts to elderly care, then your own mother moves into the nursing home where the staffing ratio applies. She gets the same fifteen minutes, the same cold bath, the same 20 grams of meat per week, the same temp worker who does not know her name.
If you propose a wind farm or a solar park with associated transformer station, then you move in as the nearest neighbour. Not in the summer house three quarters away - in the house where the blades cast shadows through the living room in the afternoon, where the low-frequency hum lies beneath the night's sleep, and where it is your property that can no longer be sold. You are welcome to call it green transition for the rest of our sake. You just have to live in it yourself. Two years. With your family.
If you propose a primary school where inclusion solves everything, then your own children go to the class where the equation must add up. Not at the private school three kilometres away, where one speaks warmly of the community one has oneself abandoned.
If you propose green taxes that make petrol, heating and flights more expensive, then you live for a year on a warehouse worker's salary in Herning with two children and forty kilometres to work - and then you do not fly to a climate summit in the meantime.
If you propose cuts to psychiatry, then you place yourself at the back of the waiting list the day it all catches fire in your own family. No private connections, no phone numbers one can just call.
If you propose a climate tax on beef, or you recommend that Danes limit themselves to 350 grams per week, then you weigh it yourself. Two full years on the ration - every steak on the scales, every meatball counted. Neatly documented and reported to the rest of us. No exceptions for receptions, no three-course menus at conferences on the green transition where beef tenderloin is served while one talks about what others should eat less of.
If you vote to send Danish soldiers to war, then your own son stands at the front of the first platoon - or you do it yourself, if age permits. Not as defence minister on a visit with press and home travel the same evening. As a private, with the others' children, in the mud the decision was made across.
One could go on. The list almost writes itself, and that is actually the point - for why is it so easy to fill it out? Why do we all instinctively know which proposals would fall the second the proposer had to live in them themselves?
Because there are two kinds of politics.
The kind you believe in, and the kind you believe in for others.
You can recognise the first by the fact that it can bear to move in with its originator. You can recognise the second by the distance - the geographical, the economic, the social distance between those who decide and those who afterwards must live in the decision. And the greater that distance has become, the more lofty the language has become.
One speaks of solidarity from neighbourhoods where it is never tested. One speaks of security from addresses where it has never been or will be threatened.
Our grandparents had a word for it when a man would not himself eat the food he served to others.
They did not call it politics.
A conviction you do not yourself dare live in is not a conviction. It is an order to others.
Shall we introduce it?
🤓🤷♂️
