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 Laws tend to recognise exactly that fact and are open to be repealed should times, places and circumstances change – which they undoubtedly will.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.
