The way British Politics works is that i get to vote for a local MP who then goes off to Westminster to represent me and the people of my city. The party that achieves the most number of MPs then goes on to form the Government and they make the decisions for the country.
Five years later i get to vote again and either the same guy or another guy toddles off to Westminster again and if he or she is part of the largest party, they make the Government.
Never in my life has my local MP asked me or anyone else in the city what we thought of the big decisions. He is supposed to be representing us and our city but he never ask us for our thoughts on anything.
The same goes for the Government, they are there for us but we are never consulted, the decisions are imposed on us and come with fines and penalties if we don't observe them.
The Political Parties have people called Whips who 'lean' on the MP's on ways to vote. A free vote is very rare, what happens is the MP's are guided on how to vote by 3 line whips and on some occasions when the subject matter is very important to the Government, a 5 line whip. This is where the Prime Minister or party leader sends the Whips around with a letter saying he suggests that the MP should vote in a certain way with the direction underlined 3 or 5 times making the suggestion pretty clear what the person who can make or break careers wants.
With this going on a Government not winning the vote is a rarity, they are the Government by virtue of having the most MPs who have been informed how to vote regardless of their own personal feelings.
I don't know why this is tolerated because it makes a mockery of Democracy because what it comes down to is a small group making all the decisions.
With all the 3 main parties being such a shambles, it is time someone offered something else, some sort of referendum party.
All the big decisions from Europe to tax rates to deficit reduction are voted on by the public in referendums. We already have a large amount of polls from the likes of Gallup and Mori so combining all their findings along with telephone, postal and voting booths would give a very clear answer to what the country thinks.
Pre-vote debates, expert opinion and a fair representation of the pros and cons of any decisions would mean an informed decision made.
There would be no ideological bias, pandering to big business or media moguls and most importantly, the majority decision and will of the people would be actioned and that would be true Democracy and not something that just pretends to be.
The largest advantage would be the ruling party, if it operated things properly, would be as good as unmovable from power because if things go wrong, the voters will be unable to blame it as it is just there to facilitate their wishes.
Of course this is a work in progress and i will come back to it after some more thought but i can only see advantages to anyone brave enough to take it on. That said, there may be a reason that i have yet to stumble upon why nobody has because it seems so obvious.
4 comments:
Government by referendum is great in theory, and shockingly bad in practice. For interesting psychological reasons, it’s far easier to mobilise the masses to vote AGAINST something (i.e. against change) than it is to motivate them to vote FOR something. It favours the reactionary, scaredy-cat lobby. Witness the piss-poor referendum debate about electoral reform a couple of months ago. The level of debate was pathetically low. Consequently, progressive change is stifled through this form of government. Switzerland uses referendums for all their important constitutional issues and, as a direct result, women didn’t get the vote until the 1970s! Homosexuality would still be against the law in this country if we had government by referendum, no doubt about that. Ultimately, I don’t want to be governed by the whim of a constituency whose two favourite newspapers are The Sun and The Daily Hate...Do you, Hanz?... Representative democracy is a long way from being perfect, but it’s a whole lot better than that… I sympathise that things aren’t so great at the moment (in terms of the translating ‘the will of the people’ into governmental action) but thinking that it would all be OK if Joe Mouthbreather had more of a say is utopian poppycock, in my opinion. Most people are idiots, unfortunately.
If there were one thing that I would change about the fabric of reality to make politics better, it wouldn't be to make politicians honest, it would be to make voters educated. A dishonest politician couldn't get much by an educated voting base. An honest politician will always be crushed be crushed by an ill-informed electorate. And unfortunately, pretty much all electorates are ill-informed.
As California amply demonstrates, a referendum heavy system doesn't work because voters vote for more government spending, and against the taxes necessary to pay for the spending that they just voted for.
"the voters will be unable to blame it as it is just there to facilitate their wishes"
The cold hard truth is that folks in western democracies get more or less exactly what they voted for. As de Tocqueville pointed out in Democracy in America, voters will always blame politicians for whatever goes wrong, even if the voters voted for the ultimately foolhardy policy. Voters blame governments for doing things that they elected the government to do.
-Nog
I did have a discussion that was along the same lines as you pointed out Cheesy, that we would get some shockingly bad laws and exhibit 1 was my post about how the people who read the 'proper' newspapers are a fraction of the ones who read the red-tops and while we would be hoping for a world voted for by Guardian readers, we would end up with one voted for by red-top readers.
That ties in with your point nog about ill-informed voters and them not voting for things like tax rises.
There must be a halfway between the two systems where we are not run by a small cabal and where the decisions are made by the majority. A sort of referendum lite.
A quote from Churchill on democracy: "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."
I would start by abolishing political parties. Candidates in each constituency would then have to explain where they stood, personally on all the important issues of the day. And they wouldn't be able to make any promises. It should throw up some interesting debates. Or, once voters realize that they can't follow their usual habit and vote for whichever party they think will put more money in their pocket, turnout in general elections will drop off a cliff.
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