Can We Be Governed?

For many reasons a wide section of the population no longer trust politicians. We know they spin, we know they lie, we know they are selective in what they tell us, and now we know that some milk the system to their own personal advantage.

We  also know that not all are power hungry and manipulative and that there are those who are bright, intelligent, well informed, and highly competent (at lease in using the parliamentary procedures). However many are out of their depth – who is not in today’s world? Very few ministers are given jobs for which they have any training or technical expertise. If the focus of their job was switched to having to explain to and convince the general public in both technical and lay terms, and not just to vote according to the dictates of the whip, we might see more appropriate people promoted into post.

The ballot “slip” could be modified to deal with different parameters. Some could be simple Yes/No questions, some multiple choice, some even incorporating “critical path” type surveys.

Is there any other way of achieving the level of participation in and ownership of the problems now effecting  the future of ourselves and of our children, or are we more concerned with trying to  continue playing the silly games that have got us into the current mess? “Market forces” revel in shortages, they are actually designed to drive us into unsustainable situations. They profit from them, make a few even more obscenely wealthy, and starve even more large segments of the world’s population. One thing is certain if we try to carry on as before, if we try to restore “growth”, if we allow representative democracy to continue and do not fundamentally change our  politico/economic systems to start building a very different future, then we only have a very short one.

An interesting sub-plot emerges once you start discussing improving parliamentary procedures with people, and there are a number of worrying reactions. First almost all acknowledge that the system needs change, there is massive and almost universal anger at bad economic management and party politics in general. The government appears to have  totally abdicated financial responsibility to the city and has done absolutely nothing to check city activity and excesses. Here the States has given us a lead in the regulation that the President has now imposed on the banks.  The UK MPs current expenses debacle is almost an irrelevance.

Many people at most levels of society now require a fundamental remodelling of governmental processes and activity. There are however some quite strong anti- democratic suggestions – some people even long for  a “benign dictatorship” This is not however made so much as a positive suggestion but rather as a stamp of total disapproval of parliamentary democracy as it now happens.

Almost in the same vein there are the “I always vote …….” either “because it best represents my interests” or “because Labour looks after the workers.” Outside those actually working within the political process there is an almost total desire for proportional representation as being “infinitely more democratic (and ‘fair:’) than the present first-past-the-post system.”

Table the referenda idea and you get an interesting bag of negatives, all of which are, in different ways anti-democratic. These range from an unexplained – “Oh we don’t want to be like the Swiss, thank you,” through the “I  don’t want to be bothered with all that.” And “I expect my party to sort it out for me.” To an extreme reaction from those who consider themselves as being in the upper middle classes–“Oh you can’t  give the vote to the masses on important issues.”

Do we really want or believe in Democracy?