The problem with democracy…

… is that we haven’t managed, some 2,500 years after the first records of it were set out, to think of anything better. I’m wondering whether we have really tried – after all, it’s not an easy subject to broach. The moment anyone tries is a precursor to immediate howls of ‘fascist’ and ‘autocrat’ and the perception that turning away from that which we understand as being ‘good’ is somehow destined to be ‘bad’.

It seems to me this is a quantum leap of quite unsupportable proportions.

Giving women the vote in 1918 was, surely, a good thing. But does that mean that the Representation of the People Act of 1928, which gave the vote to women who weren’t over the age of 30 (providing they were householders or married to a householder) or if they held a university degree, a bad thing?

The first act (the Qualification of Women Act) was good, but it didn’t go far enough. It was ‘qualified goodness’. The second put right the shortcomings of the first and allowed women to vote by the same criteria as men.

And this is my problem with democracy. Yes, it is a good thing – of course it is – but does it go far enough? Are there improvements to be made?

For many years I have thought that the British constitution-less parliamentary system was the ideal way for democracy to progress as it meant that some revolutionary law that could benefit everyone would never get embroiled in legal entanglements that aim to define and interpret some constitution as though it were a divine gauge against which everything can be judged.

Constitutions, like laws, represent the best possible wording for the protection of rights for a given population at a given time. But time and people move on. Thankfully, so do laws. Constitutions, unfortunately, tend not to.

The last (the 27th) amendment to the US Constitution was ratified in 1992… 203 years after it was proposed (and if you are interested, it prohibits any law that increases or decreases the salary of members of the Congress from taking effect until the start of the next set of terms of office for Representatives. The 26th Amendment was ratified 21 years earlier and forced each state to abandon age-based denials of suffrage for those 18 and older).

Constitutions tend to be set in stone (okay, possibly sandstone in many cases) the ideals of a group of academics and politicians representing a particular time, place and set of circumstances. Laws tend to recognise exactly that fact and are open to be repealed should times, places and circumstances change – which they undoubtedly will.

My problem with the law-based parliamentary system really came to a head this year, however, with the referendum (in the UK) for the alternative vote system of electing politicians. The ensuing campaign starkly illustrated (for me) the problems with modern democracies.

The ‘No’ campaigners set out to establish that (a) the first past the post system has worked perfectly well for a hundred years, (b) the alternative vote system is too complicated, and (c) it is unfair to give the first prize to the person who actually has come second or third instead of the real winner.

Of these three arguments, one is correct: that the old system has worked well to now. Yes, it has, but times change and now there is something better. Of the other two, one can only conclude that either the campaigners are pretty thick or, even more worryingly, they think the electorate is. The third point is simply a prime example of politicians saying that black is white and repeating it until it becomes true. It is the first past the post system that gives a person a seat in parliament when they have a minority of votes, not AV.

The reasons, I believe, the nation voted so overwhelmingly against AV are because the ‘No’ campaigners (as you would expect) put on a damn good show and expressed their arguments well, a good number of conservative-type Brits took argument one as reason enough to say ‘no’ (the old system works well enough), and that the figurehead of the ‘Yes’ campaign, Nick Clegg, was undergoing a serious image crisis because, as a partner in a coalition he had had to abandon a couple of sensitive policies in favour of his partner’s.

But this is the problem with modern democracy. When Blair took the country into an illegal war in Iraq, the line was: ‘this is a parliamentary democracy and you have voted for us, therefore, we say what goes.’ So, thousands have died as a result of us having ‘made our bed’ and being forced to lie in it.

When it comes to finding a fairer way of voting for these self-interested jingoists, we ‘ask the nation’. Why? Well, the Westminster Johnnies would say that it is only regarding constitutional issues that we have national referenda (three in the nation’s history for remaining in the EEC, for the devolution of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and this last one).

I’m afraid I would be a lot more cynical. It seems to me that they choose to ‘ask the nation’ when they know what the nation will say, or when they know they can manipulate the arguments to get us to vote as they want. The modern world of mass and multi-media, soundbites and populism does, I’m afraid, make us a lot more susceptible to the insidious self-interest of these people… But only when it suits them… That is, I guess, the nature of self-interest.

Genuinely catering to the popular vote would bring any nation to its knees in a few years. It would go bankrupt. So, why pretend that the popular vote counts? It didn’t count over Iraq or university fees. It only counts when it suits whoever is in charge. This is the problem.

Recourse – or the lack thereof

The three stooges, Cameron, Milliband and Clegg (although I would hate you to think for a single fraction of a nano-second that these are the only three such clones currently wallowing in positions of power and/or privilege, as the briefest of scans around any parliament, political party, council meeting, corporate board or city trading place will turn up hundreds of the same identical faces, haircuts and suits) have been spluttering and dissembling about the recent riots and generally trying to tell us that they know exactly what the causes are and what to do about them.

“We have been too unwilling for too long to talk about what is right and what is wrong,” Cameron droned. “We have too often avoided saying what needs to be said, about everything from marriage to welfare to common courtesy.” Have we, David?

“If we want to stop for good the outbreak of crime, of looting and criminality, of what we saw last week, we need to get tough on the causes of repeat crime,” intoned Clegg. Do we, Nick?

“What the decent people I met on the streets of London and Manchester told me, and will tell the prime minister, is that they want their voice to be heard,” whined Milliband. Is that so Ed?

Actually, all three of them are absolutely right, but I fear that nothing will come of their laudable rhetoric unless these three stuffed-shirt charlatans make headway into the sort of social engineering we have not seen since… Blimey, I don’t know… Since Disraeli gave middle-class men the vote in the 1830s, perhaps, or since women achieved the same right after the first world war.

The problem with these half-arsed club members (and their half-arsed clubs that go under the spurious epithet of ‘political party’) is that they are by their very nature populist. When it boils down to it, all they are interested in is making sure that the next time we come to vote, we vote for them.

Milliband even went as far as saying something like ‘let’s see an end to knee-jerk policies and remedies’ while suggesting a couple of his own (and from the helm of a club that has made a very tidy living out of knee-jerk policies for the past 20 years).

Let’s have a look at these three comments…

‘We have too often avoided saying what needs to be said, about everything from marriage to welfare to common courtesy.’ Very much so, but mostly because when any stuffed parliamentary shirt develops enough temporary balls to actually confront such issues, the media, the opposition, the NGOs, the unions and the general populace (particularly those with the benefit of a broadcast camera or microphone in touching distance) holler ‘nanny state’ and ‘fascist’ or some other such handy label that will see said balls scurrying quickly back into the stuffed shirt’s abdomen, choking his vocal chords as they do so.

‘If we want to stop for good the outbreak of crime, of looting and criminality, of what we saw last week, we need to get tough on the causes of repeat crime.’ Well, yes, of course we do – but this is simply the regurgitation of a Blair comment in the late 90s / early noughties. And what happened as a result? More prisoners than ever… Can someone remind me what we think of prisons? Haven’t I heard people saying that the worst thing to do with a criminal is hole him (or her) up with hundreds of other criminals? What are we doing about that?

No, my dear stuffed shirts, far better to cram them into prison. Looks tough. Wins votes.

‘What the decent people I met on the streets of London and Manchester told me, and will tell the prime minister, is that they want their voice to be heard.’ Hmm. Little do you know, Mr Milliband clone, but you have hit the nail on the head here. What you say I pop over to yours some time this week and we can talk about it between the two of us, before we pop over to the Cameron/Clegg love-in and discuss it in real detail?

No? Too busy? Better things to do? More important people to meet? Of course you have. Funnily enough, so have all the parliamentary clones… Oh, and the political parties, councils, corporate boards and city trading places. Come to that, so have the newspapers and magazines, the radio stations and the TV channels… And don’t forget the telecom companies and mobile phone operators and the energy suppliers, the water companies and retail chains – while we are at it, we have to mention the banks and the credit companies, insurance companies and brokers, transport suppliers, airport operators, record companies and book publishers…

The pseudo socialist clone got it absolutely spot on when he said people want to be heard. Yes, we do. We want to be heard. We have created a world of instant communication. A world where I find out what these faceless, characterless hypocrites say in their club house before I know what my friends and family think. But when I want to say something back to them (or any of the other people and organisations I have mentioned) the doors are closed, the channels locked, the ears blocked. And that’s just me – a bloke who isn’t particularly stupid and who doesn’t really give a toss about the living, social prison these fat cats have created for us.

For the uneducated and the stupid, who are spoon-fed their rights with great wobbling dollops of individualism and daily portions of hate-soaps and fuck-you entertainment, the realisation that none of us are worth the dna we are made of is a powerful one. ‘I am worthless. You are worthless. You see me as worthless. You will never listen to me or even consider me. I can speak to no-one about my gas bill, let alone about the social conditions of the state. A gang has just broken a load of shop windows and are taking stuff. I might as well have some of that.’

Are these three pointless men really going to unravel the three or four decades of insularisation and selfishness created by, in great part, the very populist clubs they belong to? When catering to the masses, we discover very quickly that what people want is something for nothing, the ability to live for as little effort as possible – oh, and if you could throw in a bit of porn for good measure, that would be good, too. And so the populists have given a good helping of exactly what we want.

If these political johnnies are genuinely hoping to unravel this mess, what are they going to use to fill the void they will be creating? When you drill decay out of a tooth, the hole is a lot larger than before.

Unfortunately, unlike teeth, there is no anaesthetic for a society being forced to find purpose and responsibility. That sort of engineering is mighty painful – and voters hate pain.

If these three miserable nonentities really want to do something about the mess our society finds itself in, they will have to do it together and brace themselves for the waves of wrath that will crash upon them for years to come. The moment one of them sees the opportunity to break ranks and win a few votes is the same moment the dam breaks and the conscientious submerge.

So, don’t hold your breath waiting for these idiots to do anything. Save that for when the flood waters of either anarchy or violent repression genuinely arrive. Shouldn’t be too long now.