As a result of the questions I have asked over the last few days it was suggested I ask another question. I will summarise this as 'do we live in a democracy?'
I am committed to democracy. It is not ideal. It is just that every other form of government that we have tried is worse, as Winston Churchill once put it.
The trouble is I very much doubt we have democracy.
The Tories have moved to the far-right without asking anyone whether they should.
Labour has moved to the centre-right despite the objections of very large parts of its membership.
And, with the best will in the world, in a first past-the-post-electoral system these two parties will dominate the next election and will as a result deny most voters any real electoral choice.
But then, that has long been a feature of first-past-the-post politics, which system is used only by the UK and Belarus in Europe. That system is glaringly obviously unable to support real democratic choice and leaves some people without the chance to ever choose a representative in government with whom their views align for their whole lifetime purely because of where they live.
I suggest that first-past-the-post is exploited by our current two major parties to now actively deny people access to democracy in a way not seen before. The Labour leadership know this. The membership have said they wish to be rid of it. The leadership refuses to consider that.
We also know that the Tories are gerrymandering the chance of voting, and maybe seat boundaries too.
So, do we live in a democracy? A poll:
Do we live in a democracy?
- No, because the two main parties will keep first-past-the-post to deny us democracy which they have no interest in (54%, 422 Votes)
- No (22%, 171 Votes)
- No, because first-past-the-post is inherently biased (15%, 117 Votes)
- I'm abstaining, but show me the results anyway (4%, 35 Votes)
- Yes (3%, 21 Votes)
- No, because the two-party system is inherently biased (2%, 13 Votes)
- Yes, because this is as good as it gets (1%, 6 Votes)
Total Voters: 785
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I suggest that you could have set this poll up on April 1st!
My answer is no and we could do better.
For me the weak underbelly of our sham-rocracy is party funding and lobbying.
And – as I probably say too often – it is ridden with fascist political science and neo-liberalism.
I won’t be voting in the future. None of it has been doing anything for me as it is and I refuse to legitimise it anymore. I’ve dropped out.
I have read many of your statements and agree with the large majority of what you say PSR. This one however gets a total thumbs up from me. It reflects where I stand and will remain until there is a discernible change. It’s not just the Political class it’s the establishment that perpetuates its existence. Supporting something that is harming you is an odd position to take. We are being failed on a grand scale. Salutations.
If you think that not voting is a good idea, why not “waste” your vote by voting green. At least it shows you still care about the people who died to get you a vote.
PSR, I agree with many of your comments and share your anger but I can’t agree with you on this. I think it extremely dangerous to go down the road of not voting. It is a right that people fought and died for, and however depressing and corrupt the system and the politics, it is better to live in a country where you can vote than not. What do you offer as an alternative? The logical conclusion to this would be to accept a dictatorship. If it were not for the vote (and a turnout of 72%) we wouldn’t have had the NHS, state education for all, a welfare state and all the other reforms of the post war Labour government. I know these reforms have been long under attack but for many people they are still a lifeline that didn’t exist before. I despair at the current state of things and the errosion of so many rights but I can’t see how not voting would help. We need to use our vote for the least worst option….it’s the least we can do.
I will always vote
I admit I do not agree with PSR on this one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ1I0_JYel8&t=1629s
A reason to vote Green. The Energy Pricing Revolution, with Caroline Lucas, Clive Lewis and lots of others speaking, at the inaugural meeting of the Fuel Poverty Action group.
If you don’t want a vote, at least spoil your ballot paper with something amusing/poisonous/relevant.
The counting process is monstrously boring, and it’s one way you can get your views rammed home to all the candidates’ agents – who are often more influential in local politics than the candidates…
As Mark Twain once said: “If voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it”
And as Charles Schultz once said,
“No-one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them.”
Even Blair’s “education, education, education” was a sleight of hand – what we were told isn’t what we got.
Whatever they do, politicians (especially Labour) will be hounded by the right-wing press. For instance, Murdoch does not understand climate science; he knows how to use a selection of news to sell advertising.
The film ‘I Claudius’ portrayed a reluctant Emperor wanting senators who ‘loved Rome more than they loved their purses’ – ‘pro bono publico’. The BBC? The NHS? Worthy MPs?
Yesterday, I sighed – so I explained my anxiety to the friend I was with, that the UN Secretary General, the Intergovernmental Panel, and climate scientists, are all frantic for *rapid* cuts in CO2. (Here is a sequel to the Jonathan Pie translation (https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2023/03/22/its-really-not-rocket-science/) – this time with Prof Bill McGuire (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxLpoPKF7lw.)
I referred to the tornado that has blown Mississippi towns to ruin – so that people who now have no homes cannot escape *radical changes* in their way of life. They now have no choice!
We, on the other hand, can still choose whether to make *radical changes* such as stopping most of our flying and driving. We need to do this *now* to cut our CO2 emissions – a lot – and fast.
If we do this, even ordinary things will be more difficult or will take more time. Many of us will not like such changes. The airlines and oil companies, the bankers and billionaires won’t like us stopping. Some local businesses will be ruined. They’ll resist even though money will be of no use on a dead planet – and a ‘dead planet’ is where we are heading.
My friend is the mother of a 6-year-old. As I spoke her face crumpled. She burst into tears and told me that most parents of toddlers can’t talk about such things. Fantasies about university education and pensions are easier to discuss.
Rich country governments – and political parties – kid themselves that talk of solar panels and electric cars will reassure such parents. They could not be more wrong.
Thank you
Believe me, parents of adult children are talking to them about such issues, and vice versa. And those toddlers will be asking quite pointed questions of their parents and grandparents in a few years time. The time to act is now (well, it was yesterday, but now is better than tomorrow).
In our political discussion group on Sunday, I became rather unhappy with the labels “left wing” “right wing” which are elements (labelling) in what passes for our “democracy” (“trot” seems popular with some elements in Liebore). Below are a couple of examples of problems which one would think, in a reasonable democracy, all parties would agree to address. The UK is not a “reasonable democracy”, it is a one-party state with two wings whose direction is defined by a combo of newspaper oligarchs and corporations. A number of experiments have taken place in the UK over the last 40-odd years. They show, beyond reasonable doubt that:
1. If you want clean rivers then you need a functioning sewage system. The privatised system does not & never has delivered that, regardless of the promises made. Improvements to the system will, whoever owns it, be delivered by private contractors, but it should be state owned entities that own and control the system & plan for improvements (rather than private-owned entities that plan for profit extraction)..
2. If the South East wants drinking water the first step is to plug leaks – putting more water from somewhere else into a leaky system is not the solution. The privatised system does not & never has delivered that, regardless of the promises made. Improvements to the system will, whoever owns it, be delivered by private contractors, but it should be state owned entities that own and control the system & plan for improvements (rather than private-owned entities that plan for profit extraction)
You notice a certain repetition, which could be applied to energy, transport, housing, the list is long. Liebore people would label me “trot” for the above views. Thus demonstrating their unfitness to be a lollipop person.
3. Health. Doctors, nurses and dentists: training more of them and making sure they are well paid – otherwise – how do you retain them? But the plan of both parties is not to retain them – the plan is health-care a la USA, i.e. no health care. Liebore has said as much, one can judge the tories by their actions. Surveys ad-nauseaum have shown that UK serfs love their NHS – UK political parties don’t care, & thus are at heart anti-democratic since all theyr care about is power and its retention – not power & its use (for the benefit of the population as a whole).
The UK is not a democratic state, it has a façade of democracy, whilst underneath it is corporatist. I am unconvinced that even a move to PR would result in substantive change. The issue is how to connect citizens to politicos, hopefully, the former keeping the latter honest and sane.
Yes, we live in a democracy, albeit an indirect and representative one embedded within a monarchical state where the executive control significant prerogative powers, with slow and limited transmission of signals from the people to the legislature and the executive. If we want something else, we can vote for it.
But it seems to me there is a crisis in democracy across much of the world, whether it is Trumpian populism and near insurrection in the US, or the inexorable drift to the right in the UK, or presidential decree overruling parliament in France, or the far-right sharing power in Israel. And that is without getting to Poland or Hungary or Turkey or Russia. And the motor for much of that democratic crisis is economic – unconstrained neoliberal capitalism failing to deliver acceptable living standards for many people, impoverishing the many while the inevitable sucking machine scoops up more wealth for the already wealthy few.
It does not have to be this way. There is an alternative.
‘Yes, this is coffee…
…except it’s cold and in a polystyrene cup and it’s Tesco’s own brand instant decaffeinated granules.’
In my more optimistic moments I like to think that the recent crises in energy, water, sewage and now perhaps the Post Office, are awakening the public to the destruction of public services through privatisation and in turn, the neo-liberalisation of society. It took many years for neo-liberalism to take hold and perhaps like turning a super tanker, it will take many years to reverse the process. I also like to think that an independent Scotland, with a commitment to Proportional Representation, a greater social consciousness and size of population (big enough and with enough natural resources to seek an alternative path but small enough to make the stealth of the oligarchs harder to conceal) could be a role model for England in future as they see Scotland flourishing. Like I say, I’m an optimist.
The media should not get a free pass in this, their hand in glove bias is crucial to this sorry state.
A complex and vital question that demonstrates both the strengths and weaknesses of click polling.
So yes we live in a Democracy of sorts, that despite continued attempts by the rich and powerful to weaken and corrupt it to serve their own interests still provides a level of freedom and equality denied the majority of people on this planet, but obviously both of those ideals are now on life support in the UK.
I notice that Martin Wolf and Tim Bale have both recently published books looking at aspects of the problem. Has anybody read them yet?
No….
Under FPTP 3/4 of the population are living is “safe seats” and effectively disenfranchised. To paraphrase Donald Trump, Lucy Fraser could probably claim Boris Johnson is a serious, honest politician and still get my neighbours’ votes – (ooopps… I think she actually DID say that!!).
Although the Brexit referendum was a disaster on so many levels it did energise voters who realised that for the first time in their lives their vote WOULD count equally with everyone else…. and they used that vote to stick two fingers up at the establishment (often without regard to the issue at hand)*.
We need to harness that engagement productively. If, out of the blue, you ask a disempowered child to make a decision you should not be surprised if it is a bad one… but keep asking, listening and acting… and the child matures into a responsible decision maker. Democracy requires participation – real engagement by the public. If we get it the “child” will grow up.
We need:
Proportional representation in Parliament
More devolution of powers locally
More use of technology to allow more frequent participation – our current system was build for the horse and cart age where representatives travelled days to reach Westminster, we can do better with the internet.
*(Yes, I know we had a referendum on our voting system before but let’s be honest, the issues did not set the average voter alight and the circumstances where we got a vote – a hung parliament – seemed to make the case for change less compelling).
I didn’t know Lucy Fraser was your MP
She is mine
… I almost feel sorry for her… both you and me as constituents!
She doesn’t appreciate me
3 of my family, too, who are all staunch socialists.
I think the test for democracy goes much deeper.
We should start with;
Does our education system equip us with the critical thinking skills necessary to negotiate lies from truth and to understand statements and actions through the prism of the motivation of the speaker or actor?
Do we have a truly unbiased media?
Does our legal system – from lawmakers to police to judiciary – treat everybody with the same level of respect?
Is freedom of speech enshrined and protected?
All this, before we even get to voting and the party system!
BTW, for the UK, the answer to all the above is a resounding NO.
I’m reminded of an article I read, I think by George Monbiot, in which he referred to “system justification”, that a system itself justifies its own existence – to call a system itself into question is unconscionable. For me, democracy as a concept has been traduced, and conflated with the idea of voting for a representative of a political party. I would argue that voting for a political party has very little, if anything, to do with democracy. From my experience, government by representation is a failed idea, and that, far from enfranchising people, it is a crucial part of disenfranchisement. Take France as an example – Macron, as one person, attempted to raise the pension age for everyone and there were no mechanisms available to everyone else to stop this happening outside of civil unrest. That is a glaring indictment of the idea that voting leads to the representation of voters’ interests. The harms perpetrated by governments of elected representatives the world over spanning centuries is undeniable. To claim that this type of system, which is hastening the end of all life on earth and is so hostile to so many that it is measurably shortening life and killing thousands each year through callous disregard (referred to by Naom Chomsky as “needless cruelty”), is democratic seems utterly bizarre to me. We might believe that this kind of system can work if only we elect the right people to the job, but it has never yet happened anywhere. There’s an old saying about madness and doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different outcome.
I anwered no, but might have added the option that real democracy isn’t possible in a country where the mainstream media is owned and controlled by a small elite with very clear vested interests and an education system which discourages any questioning of the status quo or the possibility of citizens having agency in the creation of their own society.
Thanks
And good point
I don’t think of democracy as a binary differentiation where you either are or are not a democracy. I think of it more as a scale. If we have a scale of say 0% democracy to 100% democracy I don’t think any country is or could realistically be 0% or 100% or even close to these. The UK is a lot closer to the good end than North Korea, and closer too than the US. I don’t know enough about the politics of other countries and so can’t comment on which are the most democratic, but from what I do know there are plenty that are more democratic than the UK.
Whatever criticisms we had about Labour in 2019, at least there was a genuine choice on offer to the electorate, which won’t be there next time. I’m not sure if the leaders of the two main parties have even been as close to each other as Sunak and Starmer. Even Blair and Cameron had more distance between them. In this sense and for other reasons I would say we have become less democratic since 2019.
Proportional representation wouldn’t switch the UK from being undemocratic to democratic, but it would move us a lot further along the scale towards the good end.
Thanks
These figures from the House of Commons library show how flawed our current system is: –
The disproportionality between votes and seats can also be calculated in terms of votes-per-seat-won. In 2019 the Conservatives got one seat for every 38,264 votes, while Labour got one seat for every 50,837 votes. It took many more votes to elect a Lib Dem (336,038) and Green MP (866,435), but far fewer to elect an SNP MP (25,883).
As an illustration of how perverse FPTP is, in theory Party A could win 649 seats by just 1 vote in each constituency and Party B the last seat by 1000 votes. Party A would then have all but 1 of the MPs in the Commons, with less than 50% of the national vote.
Of course this would never happen in reality, but in 2015, the SNP got 95% of the seats with just less than 50% of the vote.
“That system is glaringly obviously unable to support real democratic choice and leaves some people without the chance to ever choose a representative in government with whom their views align for their whole lifetime purely because of where they live.”
Which agrees with the point you make John. FPTP is a grotesque system. It has disenfranchised me my entire life, as I’ve lived in safe tory seats nearly all of it, except for the New Labour terms of 2001, and I didn’t vote for New Labour. I’ve tried tactical voting, makes no difference. I would have voted green because I agree with their environmental policies, and their attitude to public ownership. As it happens, the science has proved them 1000% correct, but due to FPTP and labour’s idiot tribalism, they never get a sniff of power, unlike, say Germany or the Scottish Parliament.
Some democracy we’ve got hey?
At school, we are conditioned into authoritarian control with no say in what goes on until age 18 when you are still dismissed as “too young” though there are notable exceptions – thank you, Greta Thunberg. At work, we are still mainly working in top-down bureaucratic structures with little voice unless there is a strong union membership. The continuing class divisions in which the majority are subordinated to mainly undemocratic forces of big capital and corrupt politics create a sense of alienation and apathy (as PSL has sunk into). The vote may be the writing of a cross the sign of the illiterate, on a ballot paper every few years and distorted out of all proportion by first past the post, but is all we have, so in answer to the question do we have democracy? the answer is yes, but very weak and only hanging by a thread as the forces of fascism come ever closer.
FPTP is profoundly undemocratic.
The two party system that it creates, i think deters a great many minds from wanting to get involved with politics.
Governance should be through consent. It can only be through consent through a process of dialogue and compromise.
Any system which closes the negotiation table to anyone outside of the ruling party, is not democratic.
FPTP is the reason why the UK is in such a mess.
I answered No, because our democracy is a sham. Democracy always had a bad name in the past because it had some weaknesses, making the benefits of democratic fairness hard to maintain. The following is a quote from the preface of A.C. Grayling’s book, Democracy and its Crisis (ISBN 978-1-78607-289-4), which I think I’ve quoted before on this site;
“This book is about the failure of the best political system we have: democracy. And it is about how to put it right.
‘Democracy’ has been given many meanings, and the word ‘democratic’ has even been used to describe political systems that are anything but democratic, those typically known as ‘The People’s Democratic Republic of X’. But one system of democracy – representative democracy – was painstakingly thought out and constructed with the aim of making democracy really work, and was applied in almost all of what we think of as the ‘liberal democracies of the Western world’. But in at least two of its leading examples in today’s world, the United States and the United Kingdom, representative democracy has been made to fail. Notice these words: ‘made to fail’. I argue that if the ideas that underlie the concept of representative democracy were properly and transparently applied, democracy would truly be, as Winston Churchill claimed, the least bad of all systems. But it has been made to fail by a combination of causes, all of them deliberate.”
Whilst I fully support PR (personally prefer the German model), it is not a panacea. Even in PR systems the so called Socialist or social Democratic parties have moved to the right, often replaced by a new left party, Die Linke in Germany, Podemos in Spain etc. but in most cases they struggle to make massive inroads and often disaffected voters have turned to right rather than the left.
I know Richard and probably most on here will disagree but I largely blame the adherence of the centre left to the EU orthodox economics, which has negated their radicalism and restricted the acceptable political spectrum.
I do blame the left for being neoliberal for their decline
But you still unequivocally favour UK membership (and i do understand there are good reasons) but i would argue that is largely the cause of the left becoming neo liberal.
Portugal proves you can work as a left of centre government in the EU
And anyway, the EU as a whole has to be persuaded neoliberalism does not work
Best done from the inside, wouldn’t you agree?
I hear your argument and was a reluctant remainer till they bullied Greece. I am not sure Portugal would have been considered particularly lft in the 70s and think that Maastricht enshrines so much neo–liberalism into the EU that it is not realistic to be able to change it. You would have to get all members to unanimously agree.
I think lessons have been learned
That’s the way life works
Like, I suspect, most regular readers of this column, I’m seriously concerned about the BBC’s reporting of political and economic issues. However, I was greatly cheered by two excellent programmes that popped up on the radio tonight.
First, an hour long discussion about the Casey report into the Met. An excellent all-round panel, unobtrusively prodded where necessary by Misha Husain https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001kpms. However, Misha made what might be interpreted as a very gentle suggestion that the home secretary might not be entirely signed up to Louise Casey’s message, so she may not be around for much longer…
Second, John Gray’s Point of View: 8 minutes of common sense on post-1979 economic policy and the relationship between government and the market, on how both big parties are out of tune with the majority of the population wrt to publicly run services, what would happen if Labour win a working majority (or rather, what essential changes probably wouldn’t happen) and why we need PR. Essential listening https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001k856
Thank you
David Byrne says:
The key issue concerning democracy is the concentration of Power and Wealth in a few hands and the way in which this has corrupted the UK political “elite”.
We, the powerless people, possess the democratic right to purge politics of this corrupted class both locally and nationally.
We must vote to rid the system of the tainted, unprincipled and extreme politicians (both right and left) who have been responsible for our social and economic decline.
How, David? How in this system?
So the party that is in power (now and majority of the time) is dismantling our democracy piece by piece, while the other party’s internal machinery kicks in to block the path to reviving democracy in future. It’s so hard wired.
As someone once said, if voting changed anything, they wouldn’t let us vote. This system is so full of holes, so many are disenfranchised by FPTP. I have supported PR all my life and try to persuade others that nothing will change until the current system changes. On my black days I think we need a revolt. Women died to get me a vote, I hate to think it might come to that again to get a vote that actually counts.
I have over the past couple of years completely changed my opinion on voting requirements & now believe that voting should be compulsory & an absolute responsibility to facilitate that should be placed on National/local government.It is clear to me that the two leading parties would willingly disenfranchise large swathes of the population.First PTP. must go, an unelected Head of state must go an unelected 2nd chamber must go.From a Scottish perspective the idea we have a functioning Democracy is frankly laughable.
We should definitely be campaigning for automatic voter registration https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/why-its-time-for-automatic-voter-registration/
There is a groundswell of opinion in favour of PR now. In addition to political parties that have always argued for it, the Labour Party membership is now in favour, and so are most trade unions. While some of us have argued for it on principle for a long time, there are many new converts who recognise that the two parties are now dysfunctional as coalitions (so-called broad churches) and that PR is necessary (necessary but not sufficient, true, but surely necessary) to revive our democracy. A big question is how to make this a “doorstep issue” in a way that can withstand the onslaught from what must be the worst print media in the world if they get an inkling this might just happen.
The most profound factor in failure of democracy is the engineered failure of the education system. Authoritarian, essentially privatised now, with a syllabus that is constructed to deny even the most basic understanding of being a citizen. (Spoiler: I’m a teacher who started in 1975 and still working). The second factor is the ‘soma’ of social and national media, all of them largely penetrated and corrupted by malign actors such as non-dom billionaires, foreign governments, anti-climate change corporations and the bot-banks of funded political agents (e.g. IEA, Taxpayers Alliance etc).
Most of the students I teach (16-19) know little of anything to do with democracy, and some even think Andrew Tate is OK (misogyny doesn’t get far in our 6th form, fortunately).
I see too much misogyny in teenage boys. It’s nit just Tate promoting it
David Byrne clarification:
To improve the system will take time.
In the interim, vote out all the current incumbents and rid the country of the corrupt, entitled, smug, self-centred and greedy politicians of all persuasions.
The ‘voice of the people’ will then serve as a warning to those who follow that democratic change for the better must take place.
One answer to party funding is, membership fees only.
No donations, no loans, just membership fees.
One problematic part of that would be if it then gives too much power to the media who can pick and choose who they promote.