advertisement


What do we want from democracy?

A few random thoughts...

My Dorset town is a calm oasis of Greens and Lib Dems in a sea of rural blue, there is only one Tory on the Town Council. Our MP is a Tory.

Talking to a Danish colleague a few years ago, he said that he was shocked that 20% of Danes actually voted for one of the far right parties, so gained 20% of the seats.

I'd like to be able to vote positively for a change rather than casting a tactical vote for whoever stands the best chance of defeating the Tory candidate.

Tony L said:
As an example I’d currently have to move to Brighton to cast a Green vote and actually get a Green representative. I’d rather like to live in Brighton as it is a cool place
Click to expand...
To be honest I wouldn't want to live there (I never did, I grew up in Worthing). Last time I was there in the city I was shocked by the sheer number of rough sleepers, the streets felt dirty (worse than That London) and, despite attempts at reducing car use, it is utterly choked by traffic. (The Amex is actually outside the city boundary so despite being a regular there, I rarely venture into the city centre).
 
If experience tells us anything, it should be that Political change will not come from our political class that rules over us. The impetus and the demand for change has always come from below. If we want change now, we will have to demand it.

Our forebears have fought and died to give us the tools for change, we have allowed those tools to become blunted.

Democracy has been blunted by lies, lies told by our political class, lies that centre around the price of democracy. We are told that if we want our basic human rights, then we will have to pay for them, and the more human rights we demand, the more we will have to pay.

We are told that government spending is spending of our money, we are told that the deceit is our deficit and the national debt is our national debt and if we don’t pay, we are threatened with the certainty that our children and grandchildren will have to pay.

We are not told that government debt is an asset. The Bank of England came into existence as a means of financing wars by selling shares in government debt, and people bought those share because there was a profit in them. While we are told that government debt is our loss, we are not told that it is also someone else’s private profit. In more modern times it has been said more than once by learned economists that one of the economic problems now faced by Putin is that he can no longer sell his government debt on the international market. Debt and obligation are different sides of the same coin.

The big lie that seeks to restrict our democracy rests on socialising the liability while privatising the asset.

Our democratic deficit rests on the assumption that if we want our human rights, as outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we will have to pay for them. We are told that we can only pick such human rights as we the electorate can afford to pay for.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not a menu that we pick from, it is a complete set of ingredients necessary for a decent democracy. If we are not getting all of them, we are accepting a human rights deficit.

If we want a proper democracy we must realise the lies we are told, and we must demand all of our basic Human Rights, because they are, well, our human rights.

Human Rights are not conditional on the ability to pay. Human Rights are not just for the rich.

Democracy and Human Rights go hand in hand
 
One problem with representative democracy is how the representatives are chosen. I don't mean at the ballot box, I mean the process by which the candidates are chosen by the parties. We, the electorate, get no say in that, we merely get Hobson's choice of candidates to vote for (or occasionally some no-hoper of an independent). Imagine what the Tory or Labour parties might look like if the likes of Johnson, Rees-Mogg, Patel, Hoey, Frank Field, Truss, Sunak, Davies, etc, etc had never been candidates.
 
Sue Pertwee-Tyr said:
One problem with representative democracy is how the representatives are chosen. I don't mean at the ballot box, I mean the process by which the candidates are chosen by the parties. We, the electorate, get no say in that, we merely get Hobson's choice of candidates to vote for (or occasionally some no-hoper of an independent). Imagine what the Tory or Labour parties might look like if the likes of Johnson, Rees-Mogg, Patel, Hoey, Frank Field, Truss, Sunak, Davies, etc, etc had never been candidates.
Click to expand...

There is no reason they couldn’t be democratically selected by members online, at party conference, or endless other opportunities. We live in a high-tech connected world, and olitics has a hell of a long way to catch up with the rest of us being so steeped in pointless archaic ritual and tradition. The Conservative Party is clearly its own thing. The selection process there seems to largely be at birth, Eton, or Oxbridge based mainly on family wealth, privilege etc, but the other parties could run as democratic a process as they choose.

Things could be vastly improved from where they are right now. We have seen how selection processes of all parties have failed horrifically over recent years producing an endless catalogue of grifters and cartoon characters who wouldn’t even be believable in fiction, plus local constituencies of all colours being overruled and candidates from the other end of the country with zero local knowledge being parachuted in from the party’s central office. There have to be far better ways to do this stuff. The current FPTP system blue-screened decades ago and needs a lot more than a simple reboot.
 
This is partly my point. The last two years have shown us that a lot of business can be done from home, so why can't politics be more inclusive and involve people at the grass roots level? We seem to have the sort of technology that would permit us to interact, make decisions, record preferences, etc, so why not use it to get people more involved in the decisions that affect us all?

We had a representative democracy because the alternative was unwieldy. We chose representatives to, er, represent our interests in the Big Decision Making Forum because we couldn't make those decisions known to the Forum as individuals. Nowadays, the internet would enable us to do so, but the representatives are unlikely to want to relinquish the levers of power, or the keys to the trough. But it does seem to me that democracy 2.0 ought to be able to go back to the Greek ideals where the 'demos' has its say directly.
 
Anyone can join a political party and have a say in which representatives are selected. Corbyn went further than most in democratising that process, but that was seen as the problem, not the solution.

Corbyn himself was chosen by the membership, but again, this is now predominantly seen as the problem, not the solution.
 
ks.234 said:
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not a menu that we pick from, it is a complete set of ingredients necessary for a decent democracy. If we are not getting all of them, we are accepting a human rights deficit.

If we want a proper democracy we must realise the lies we are told, and we must demand all of our basic Human Rights, because they are, well, our human rights.

Human Rights are not conditional on the ability to pay. Human Rights are not just for the rich.

Democracy and Human Rights go hand in hand
Click to expand...
Amnesty International has just published its Annual Report. It is worth reading the UK-only section here.

It is highly critical of the UK government's proposed police and refugee laws, which the head of Amnesty International UK calls 'human rights vandalism', as reported in The Guardian, here.
 
Seeker_UK said:
Please feel free to explain where the methodology is flawed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#Methodology
Click to expand...
From your link:

"Investment analyst Peter Tasker has criticised the Democracy Index for lacking transparency and accountability beyond the numbers. To generate the index, the Economist Intelligence Unit has a scoring system in which various experts are asked to answer 60 questions and assign each reply a number, with the weighted average deciding the ranking. However, the final report does not indicate what kinds of experts, nor their number, nor whether the experts are employees of the Economist Intelligence Unit or independent scholars, nor the nationalities of the experts.[21]"

I don't know who Peter Tasker is but it's a very significant criticism IMO. Democracy is a complex and contested concept, and so are the terms being used to quantify it ("political participation" etc.) All difficult things to attach numbers to and the least we ought to expect before granting the Economist's exercise any legitimacy at all is full transparency about the process by which criteria and definitions are agreed upon and applied in each situation.

In the absence of such transparency, and given The Economist's strong ideological preferences, I'm going to assume that their experts skew towards liberalism, and liberalism's tendency towards abstraction and formalism. By that I mean, liberals tend to be satisfied with e.g. formal equality before the law, discounting the effects of economic inequality; formal rights to free expression, ignoring the power structures that limit actual access to expression, etc. This kind of formal approach is going to flatter British democracy (unsurprisingly, given the provenance of a lot of these ideas), which excels in formal egalitarianism and openness, and de facto secrecy and privilege.

For instance, formally our press is unusually free, with no statutory regulation at all and no formal ties to parties or individual politicians. According to liberal precepts (free market- free expression) it ought to be exceptionally diverse and pluralistic, holding power rigorously to account. In actuality, well. Formally, it is not possible for the wealthy to buy influence in the British system. In actuality, the parties are so interlocked with hereditary and commercial wealth that it becomes very difficult to establish the difference between graft and clientelism and ordinary governance. Formally, our democracy is highly participatory, based as it is on mass membership parties governed by internal democratic processes. In actuality the parties are organised by patronage networks and ordinary members have almost no say in important decisions.

I could go on. The Democracy Index is basically a political weapon used to agitate for light touch regulation, and more broadly, to flatter certain kinds of western liberal democracies. Britain meanwhile is a very effectively managed managed democracy, IMO. Certain regimes need to imprison a lot of journalists and opposition politicians to achieve the kind of results our ruling class accomplish with little more than private schools, the honours system, an insane Australian billionaire and the annual Spectator garden party.
 
Athenian democracy is hardly a shining example; the idea of everyone having a say was manageable only because in that case "everyone" were citizens and that as a group didn't include males aged under 20, females of all ages, all slaves, all immigrants and most foreigners.

As for everyone having a say can cause huge problems - look at the chaos and rancour 52/48 caused. Imagine that multiplied a hundred-fold. Also, greater say in things has a downside; everything takes time and there are occasions where that's a problem. For example, decisions that need an immediate response, such as dealing with another pandemic or defence-related issues. Obviously, then, you'd probably want to exclude some votes from the system, so you'd have to build a clause in the constitution to allow those to be made by Parliament; unless you'd have it nailed down, that's a hook for more and more to go to the elected representatives again.

I have my doubts about the basic tenet of this idea, that there would be a huge increase in participation. Frankly, I see people who struggle to decide what cat food to buy and how they would cope with deciding to support or reject the budget I don't know. I think many would simply disengage. Many would get fed up with having to vote all the time. Many would not bother after they were on the 'losing' side for a string of votes.

The other idea, that this would generate more equitable and fairer society is also obe to test. Polls regularly show that the UK population is socially conservative, that'll just come through with wider participation.
 
Last edited:
Seanm said:
Certain regimes need to imprison a lot of journalists and opposition politicians to achieve the kind of results our ruling class accomplish with little more than private schools, the honours system, an insane Australian billionaire and the annual Spectator garden party.
Click to expand...

Also worth mentioning the prevalence of SLAPP cases, superinjunctions etc where the millionaire/billionaire class just silence the genuinely good journalists with legal action they do not have any financial means to fight. Wealth > law. Always.
 
Seeker_UK said:
Athenian democracy is hardly a shining example the idea of everyone having a say was manageable only because in that case "everyone" were citizens and that as a group didn't include males aged under 20, females of all ages, all slaves, all immigrants and most foreigners.

As for everyone having a say can cause huge problems - look at the chaos and rancour 52/48 caused. Imagine that multiplied a hundred-fold. Also, greater say in things has a downside; everything takes time and there are occasions where that's a problem. For example, decisions that need an immediate response, such as dealing with another pandemic or defence-related issues. Obviously, then, you'd probably want to exclude some votes from the system, so you'd have to build a clause in the constitution to allow those to be made by Parliament; unless you'd have it nailed down, that's a hook for more and more to go to the elected representatives again.

I have my doubts about the basic tenet of this idea, that there would be a huge increase in participation. Frankly, I see people who struggle to decide what cat food to buy and how they would cope with deciding to support or reject the budget I don't know. I think many would simply disengage. Many would get fed up with having to vote all the time. Many would not bother after they were on the 'losing' side for a string of votes.

The other idea, that this would generate more equitable and fairer society is also obe to test. Polls regularly show that the UK population is socially conservative, that'll just come through with wider participation.
Click to expand...
I worry that you are right, and that we're in a bind that we can't escape. I think I have in mind some sort of middle ground - much greater use of citizens juries and similar, expert-guided panels to give a steer. But yes, you're right, we do need some way for important and urgent decisions to be made with due authority.

On the polling point, I wonder whether that is because it is the socially conservative, more politically engaged, types who respond to pollsters. It is often said that the young don't engage with politics, and it is by and large the young who are less socially conservative, so I'd want any changes to be ones that got the young more actively engaged in politics which affect their futures. That's more likely if they can see that their participation has an effect. We saw it in the Corbyn Effect, and its failure has just led to more disillusionment and disengagement, AFAICS.
 
Sue Pertwee-Tyr said:
One problem with representative democracy is how the representatives are chosen. I don't mean at the ballot box, I mean the process by which the candidates are chosen by the parties. We, the electorate, get no say in that, we merely get Hobson's choice of candidates to vote for (or occasionally some no-hoper of an independent). Imagine what the Tory or Labour parties might look like if the likes of Johnson, Rees-Mogg, Patel, Hoey, Frank Field, Truss, Sunak, Davies, etc, etc had never been candidates.
Click to expand...

That post, and indeed the entire premise of your thread, was flawed by your subjectively prejudicial shortlist. It sort of says that the only sort of democracy that is acceptable to me is the sort where only the representatives that I approve of are legitimate.

Sue Pertwee-Tyr said:
This is partly my point. The last two years have shown us that a lot of business can be done from home, so why can't politics be more inclusive and involve people at the grass roots level? We seem to have the sort of technology that would permit us to interact, make decisions, record preferences, etc, so why not use it to get people more involved in the decisions that affect us all?

We had a representative democracy because the alternative was unwieldy. We chose representatives to, er, represent our interests in the Big Decision Making Forum because we couldn't make those decisions known to the Forum as individuals. Nowadays, the internet would enable us to do so, but the representatives are unlikely to want to relinquish the levers of power, or the keys to the trough. But it does seem to me that democracy 2.0 ought to be able to go back to the Greek ideals where the 'demos' has its say directly.
Click to expand...

Switzerland?
 
eternumviti said:
That post, and indeed the entire premise of your thread, was flawed by your subjectively prejudicial shortlist. It sort of says that the only sort of democracy that is acceptable to me is the sort where only the representatives that I approve of are legitimate.
Click to expand...
There was an 'etc' on the list, but the examples I chose were, I thought, pretty uncontroversial in terms of being examples of the sort of politicians we have ended up with, and who are generally reviled for all sorts of reasons, whether their personal conduct, or behaviour at odds with the professed aims of the party they are members of.
 
I'm not convinced. Sometimes a politician might be right to hold against his or her own party, usually on the basis of matters of finely judged principle, not necessarily their own, but that conveyed to them by individuals whom they represent. A party or government of 'yes men' represents only the party. Representation of the demos is surely the whole point of representative democracy.

I know that Frank Field is reviled by many on the left, but he is or was one of our more cerebral politicians.
 
eternumviti said:
I'm not convinced. Sometimes a politician might be right to hold against his or her own party, usually on the basis of matters of finely judged principle, not necessarily their own, but that conveyed to them by individuals whom they represent. A party or government of 'yes men' represents only the party. Representation of the demos is surely the whole point of representative democracy.

I know that Frank Field is reviled by many on the left, but he is or was one of our more cerebral politicians.
Click to expand...
I chose him, and Hoey as examples from the Labour side largely on the basis that they rarely seemed to stand for or support the left-leaning aims of their party, and often voted in ways more consistent with the party they were supposed to be in opposition to. On the other side, the flaws of Johnson, Rees-Mogg, Patel and Truss surely need no further explanation from me? I could have added Gove, Hancock, and others, but felt the point was made already.

Sorry if you think my off the cuff choice of examples invalidates my argument. I chose them more as 'what on Earth were they thinking when they chose these as candidates to represent their party'. But your wider point is a little unworthy. I don't think I'm in a minority in thinking the calibre of politicians in general is not what we should expect, but that's a long way from thinking that only politicians who meet my personal criteria should be eligible.
 
I’ve deliberately avoided partisan arguments. It is the structural concept of democracy that interests me and I would like to see rethought from the ground up. That the current government is just so horrifically corrupt and has such utter contempt for existing laws only underscores my belief that we need an accountable, proportional and genuinely representative democracy as a matter of some real urgency. We are well into full systemic failure right now. Right back to the world of robber barons enforcing one set of laws for us whilst living by another set themselves.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.


advertisement


Back
Top