advertisement


What do we want from democracy?

Seeker_UK said:
I'm sure there are better ways. There's enough suggestions on this thread already. I think that there are many we could implement before PR, which I would consider a next step ponce all the possible changes have been made and tested.

TL/DR - I think that PR will cause a lot of upheaval and chaos to get in and implement and is not counterbalanced by the benefit it offers (at this stage). :)
Click to expand...

I get where you are coming from but I'd say our current electoral system is already very, very broken causing a lot of upheaval, distress, chaos and just plain bad governance. I'd dismantle it in a heartbeat to try something more democratic.
 
Is there such a thing as 'Too much democracy'?

Here in Bristol some years back we had a referendum on whether to have an elected Mayor. Now, some Councillors have decided that the elected Mayor is 'undemocratic' because the party he represents is no longer the majority party on the City Council, and because some of his policies have gone ahead against local opinion. So there's to be another referendum to decide whether to carry on with the Mayoral system or replace it with a committee system which would (it is claimed) be a better reflection of voting patterns. (I only became aware of all this when a polling card came through the letterbox the other day).

Now, I'm not particularly well-placed to judge what the correct answer is, and thus how to vote. I'm being asked to choose between an existing system and a hypothetical new one. From what I've read of it, the proposed committee system looks like being more expensive and potentially slower to operate, but it may be more representative, and thus more 'democratic', but to be honest I'm a great big 'Don't Know' on this particular subject.
 
Joe Hutch said:
Is there such a thing as 'Too much democracy'?

Here in Bristol some years back we had a referendum on whether to have an elected Mayor. Now, some Councillors have decided that the elected Mayor is 'undemocratic' because the party he represents is no longer the majority party on the City Council, and because some of his policies have gone ahead against local opinion. So there's to be another referendum to decide whether to carry on with the Mayoral system or replace it with a committee system which would (it is claimed) be a better reflection of voting patterns. (I only became aware of all this when a polling card came through the letterbox the other day).

Now, I'm not particularly well-placed to judge what the correct answer is, and thus how to vote. I'm being asked to choose between an existing system and a hypothetical new one. From what I've read of it, the proposed committee system looks like being more expensive and potentially slower to operate, but it may be more representative, and thus more 'democratic', but to be honest I'm a great big 'Don't Know' on this particular subject.
Click to expand...

More participation is always a good thing but when it takes an age to make critical, time-sensitive national decisions, it's not so good. Like you, though, I'm not sure where you draw the line and balance the two.

 
Joe Hutch said:
Is there such a thing as 'Too much democracy'?

Here in Bristol some years back we had a referendum on whether to have an elected Mayor. Now, some Councillors have decided that the elected Mayor is 'undemocratic' because the party he represents is no longer the majority party on the City Council, and because some of his policies have gone ahead against local opinion. So there's to be another referendum to decide whether to carry on with the Mayoral system or replace it with a committee system which would (it is claimed) be a better reflection of voting patterns. (I only became aware of all this when a polling card came through the letterbox the other day).

Now, I'm not particularly well-placed to judge what the correct answer is, and thus how to vote. I'm being asked to choose between an existing system and a hypothetical new one. From what I've read of it, the proposed committee system looks like being more expensive and potentially slower to operate, but it may be more representative, and thus more 'democratic', but to be honest I'm a great big 'Don't Know' on this particular subject.
Click to expand...

The committee system is PR, it has its advantages in representing a spectrum of opinion, but it can also result in endless talks and results that are so compromised as to be unrecognisable from original intentions. The giraffe was, I’ve heard, a horse designed by a committee
 
ks.234 said:
giphy.gif
Click to expand...

“Fly or pie” is one of the best movie lines ever. Loved Chicken Run, and must watch again soon. Aardman 4ever! :cool:
 
Seeker_UK said:
More participation is always a good thing but when it takes an age to make critical, time-sensitive national decisions, it's not so good. Like you, though, I'm not sure where you draw the line and balance the two.

Click to expand...
This is one of my all time favourite sequences in this film!
 
Joe Hutch said:
Is there such a thing as 'Too much democracy'?

Here in Bristol some years back we had a referendum on whether to have an elected Mayor. Now, some Councillors have decided that the elected Mayor is 'undemocratic' because the party he represents is no longer the majority party on the City Council, and because some of his policies have gone ahead against local opinion. So there's to be another referendum to decide whether to carry on with the Mayoral system or replace it with a committee system which would (it is claimed) be a better reflection of voting patterns. (I only became aware of all this when a polling card came through the letterbox the other day).

Now, I'm not particularly well-placed to judge what the correct answer is, and thus how to vote. I'm being asked to choose between an existing system and a hypothetical new one. From what I've read of it, the proposed committee system looks like being more expensive and potentially slower to operate, but it may be more representative, and thus more 'democratic', but to be honest I'm a great big 'Don't Know' on this particular subject.
Click to expand...
I cynically regard this as just a scheme for the current council to get around a mayor who is in their way. Give one person the executive power and hold them accountable, would be my general feeling. Some of holding them accountable is a competing party with institutional powers of their own. Beware of any scheme that gets rid of competing power!
 
boneman said:
This is one of my all time favourite sequences in this film!
Click to expand...

It really is a very good piece. From my point of view, this sketch mocks the King's validity as much as the anarcho-syndicated peasants. "Listen! Strange wimmin lying in ponds, distributin' swords, is no basis for a system of government..."

You could easily say the thing same about Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (Her Royal Madge). A magical old lady in a gold and diamond hat, wearing dead weasel fur is no mandate for wielding supreme power. (The Crown in Parliament)

People from both sides of the divide can watch this sketch and laugh at the truths it exposes.
 
I haven't read all the thread but I'm not sure we are ready for democracy in this country. Too many with too much and too many with not enough and only a very few with any real power and the last thing they want is change.

Muddle through is all we can do.
 
MVV said:
I haven't read all the thread but I'm not sure we are ready for democracy in this country. Too many with too much and too many with not enough and only a very few with any real power and the last thing they want is change.

Muddle through is all we can do.
Click to expand...
Stop voting for the few?
 
we have a designed in guaranteed stasis. Minor shifts around a central nothingness is what we call democracy.

Meanwhile the wealthy flourish. It's like those old films where the Roman gods look down through a porthole while we scurry from treadmill to feeder and crowd around every four years to 'vote' for nothing at all.

I'd love to be a fly on the wall at one of Mogg's dinner parties with Cameron, Jonson et al talking about how we are getting on down here.
 
Sue Pertwee-Tyr said:
Do we, for example, even need or want a representative democracy system in these days of hyper-connectivity? Does Parliament/Congress still have an essential role? Could we not run plebiscites, citizens juries, etc over the big decisions, rather than electing representatives who may be ill-equipped to marshal the arguments and make the decisions on our behalf, even if their interests align with ours.

Or could plebiscites, etc, be a way for people to be more actively involved and influence a Parliament v2.0, perhaps?
Click to expand...

Check out "The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer"
 
Sue Pertwee-Tyr said:
Perhaps we can also loop in a discussion about 'what are countries for?' because I think that also feeds into the discussions about toxic nationalism, and whether we need, ever bigger, federalisation towards true globalisation, or might that be a mistake and we need more localisation? And arguably, until we know what countries are for, we might not have a satisfactory answer for what is democracy for, because democracy, at its heart, is about running a country.
Click to expand...

As no one else is biting I may as well. Countries define and separate top level jurisdictions and that is their one and only purpose. And that has always been their sole purpose right back to the days of gangster feudalism. Jurisdiction sounds very dry and boring but means only we don't elect or obey the government in Gabon or France or Peru but we do, if we're lucky, get to elect and obey our own. A government that has a duty to us and we can evict if they fail in that duty. If we elect the government jurisdiction becomes ours. Without countries our jurisdiction has no focus, it'll be hi-jacked, deleted, shrunk or diluted by others to the point where it rarely counts for much and arguments about electoral systems become moot.

Which all sounds like a Brexit related argument but isn't really because state federations are only one issue. Other things limit the value of our jurisdiction. Some are hard to avoid (competing countries), much is subverted by lobbyists, political donors and corruption, some has been sneakily given away (Investor State Dispute Resolution agreements) some more openly surrendered (international treaties) and some is deliberately pushed beyond our reach by those who don't want to de democratically accountable or taxed - big investors, big corporations and high net worth types, and some areas we are tricked into believing are beyond us by dumb theologies that depict markets or huge private properties or big companies or the super rich as god like things we interfere with at our peril. The last forty years has seen the range of things we can vote on shrunk a great deal.

So from that you'd think a country doesn't want to be too big and doesn't want to be too small. Things like the EU could help or hinder depending on who runs it and to what end. But without any effective jurisdiction democracy however it is organised will eventually shrink to deciding on the bin collection day. Only the weak or the ordinary need democracy, the wealthy and influential have many ways of getting what they want and for them democracy is a threat and so they are attacking it from all sides. They always have done but recently they're winning.
 
Last edited:
Purposes of government: say you go to the bank to get your money out, and they tell you they've never heard of you. Or say you go home and some guys have taken over your house, and they tell you to go away. Or say you're just trying to live your life, and some guys from the next country over come in and start blowing everything up. Both rich people and everyone else can have problems like these, and governments exist, first of all, to try to solve them.
 
Top-level jurisdiction. The is the jurisdiction that enforces (more or less) a monopoly of force in a defined area. This is generally viewed as the desirable solution to the bad effects, for everyone, of rich people trying to solve disputes and otherwise be aggressive with their private armies. Instead the top-level jurisdiction bans private armies, and insists everyone resolve disputes, seek justice, etc. in it's courts.

Noting that this seems to work fairly decently within countries, some have suggested it would be good to have such a top-level jurisdiction for the whole world, thereby eliminating war, which is very bad for everyone. So far the existing top-level jurisdictions have blocked progress on implementing this idea. If you consider how the existing top-level jurisdictions established their monopolies-of-force, you can see that doing that on a world scale would be quite a process. An approach would be for someone with 'overwhelming' force available to take over other countries one at a time, similar to how kings subdued the castles of over-independent nobles one at a time, but current attempts show big problems with that approach.
 
MVV said:
I haven't read all the thread but I'm not sure we are ready for democracy in this country. Too many with too much and too many with not enough and only a very few with any real power and the last thing they want is change.

Muddle through is all we can do.
Click to expand...

You are wrong you know. They only have the power that we allow them. "Muddling through" is an enslaved mindset.
 
Some interesting thoughts about what countries are for. I broadly agree with the concepts. So a country is a delineated area where there is a pact with the people. In return for providing security and stability, the people will accept (and contribute to) the jurisdiction providing that security, and get to decide what form it takes (within set parameters); so as to prevent abuse of the power the people collectively have the means of disbanding the jurisdiction, and of exercising a choice over it.

It’s not working out so well just now, though, is it? So do we perhaps need to revisit this concept of top level jurisdiction, and work out why it’s not delivering what it is supposed to, and what we’d do to fix it? Is the principle still sound, albeit in need of an update, or does the modern, connected world need something different?
 
You had a referendum back in 2016, remember that one? Democracy in action, oh, you didn't like it..........(or may be you did?).
 
Sue Pertwee-Tyr said:
Some interesting thoughts about what countries are for. I broadly agree with the concepts. So a country is a delineated area where there is a pact with the people. In return for providing security and stability, the people will accept (and contribute to) the jurisdiction providing that security, and get to decide what form it takes (within set parameters); so as to prevent abuse of the power the people collectively have the means of disbanding the jurisdiction, and of exercising a choice over it.

It’s not working out so well just now, though, is it? So do we perhaps need to revisit this concept of top level jurisdiction, and work out why it’s not delivering what it is supposed to, and what we’d do to fix it? Is the principle still sound, albeit in need of an update, or does the modern, connected world need something different?
Click to expand...

I reckon its not working well mostly because Thatcher announced there was no longer any such thing as society. Winner takes all. Of course I'm being a bit flippant there was obviously more to it than Thatcher but that was essentially the starting gun on the race that has taken us to this. Now everyone from corporations to chancellors wives to Piers Morgan and that bloke who ran BHS is on the take and on the make. The public follow suit. Politicians on left right and centre are little more than empty headed rabble rousers trashing anyone and everyone in ever more bizarre combinations. Divisiveness is the order of the day. Mayhem makes it easier to grab and go.

Few any longer care about issues that don't directly effect them. And make no bones about it. That has been a very striking change in my adult lifetime. In the 1970's no one would dream of saying such a thing out loud. Now people shout it at you. When elections were talked about in my youth nearly everyone would argue over what was best for us all. The first time I ever heard someone say to a TV crew that they would vote for the party that was best for them personally, I was shocked. It was in the 1987 election. I distinctly remember searching their face for any hint of shame. There was none. That too is now common. Of course people often lied in the past about their voting motivation but the fact they felt obliged to hide any selfishness contained it.

A generation later the nation is more divided than it ever has been for an ever expanding bunch of reasons. More or less everyone has been radicalised by their own self interest. No one need listen anymore to anyone beyond their own bubble other than for bear pit entertainment purposes. Anyone attempting to reconcile groups is instantly denounced by one and all. No one really wants democracy unless they can be guaranteed to win.

And those now that still that do think about the bigger picture are more likely to care about issues beyond our borders (and so beyond our jurisdiction) than our own problems. I think that is the wrong thing to do to. Not because our jurisdiction is more important than the wider world but because looking after ours is our primary job and duty as voters. No one else can or will do it for us.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.


advertisement


Back
Top