Democracy Sucks Say Millennial's

The Center for the Future of Democracy has called their report that 52% of British under 38's say they are not satisfied with democracy worrying.
They don't offer any explanation of just why there is a disconnect between the next generation of Brits and Democracy but it isn't hard to hazard a guess, you only have to look at the inept morons in the White House and Downing Street to see that electing a leader is not always a considered vote for the best possible person to do the job.  
So if we are going to ditch Democracy then what could it be replaced with?
All have their good and bad points and it depends who you ask, Anarchist's believe the best form of Government is no Government at all while Communist's see it as a means of abolishing Societies inequalities.
We tried a Monarchy and it does tickle some people's ideological fancy but Communism's watered down sibling Socialism seems to be the most popular choice but there are plenty of others to mull over including a combination of the best bits from each.
As the British Government won't even contemplate abandoning the archaic First Past The Post system to make it more representative then it would appear that a form of Democracy is what we got and what we will be stuck with for the forseeable future, we can only hope that the Parties put up better candidates than they currently offer up.

Another Problem With Democracy

My main problem with Democracy has always been that once the person is voted in, they can be as awful as they like for the next four or five years and do untold damage until the election cycle comes around again before we can turf them out.
Placing a cross on a ballot paper every five years is as much say as we have and then we are stuck with them with no way to remove the party if its breaks its promises or u-turns on it's manifesto so i have often wondered if we could have a mechanism to call a General Election if countrywide support dips below a certain percentage but as i watched Theresa May quit, i pondered maybe there is another way, no elections at all.    
A leader is elected and as we have seen with Donald Trump in America, he set about dismantling all of which his predecessor had achieved and once Trump is removed, the next person will probably roll back on all his work and that goes on in every country as i expect the Labour Party will dismantle much of what the Conservatives have done over the last decade. 
With a four or five year cycle, the party in power only have eyes on the next election which leads to quick fixes and knee jerk reactions to get the public on side, such as Savid Javid's decision to remove Shamima Begum passport after an outcry, rather than dealing with the deeper issues.
If Governments are only looking and planning for the short term then long-term issues which they will make little political capital out of are forgotten, such as Climate Change, risky Ai or the pension timebomb which will effect the citizens of tomorrow.
The only way that i can see to stop this short term thinking is to have someone in post for a long time who will take a long term view, China being the obvious example with Xi Jinping being the latest who offers a long term plan for China and with the second largest economy and tipped to soon become first, they are a success story of sorts.  
Uncomfortably though, this does lead us into authoritarian dictatorship territory and the idea of a 'benign dictator', who can take the long view on multiple issues for future generations without having one eye on whether his or her decisions will prove unpopular and see them removed by the public and their plans scrapped by their predecessor at the next election. 
History has very few, if any, dictators who remain benign and enlightened for very long after gaining power so it probably isn't the answer to the problem of short-term planning and politicians only obsessed with the next election.

Global Democracy Declining

Winston Churchill said that the best argument against democracy is a conversation an average voter so he would be happy that the number of Democracies around the World is shrinking and we are now down to just 19 full democracies or less than 5% of the world's population according to the annual Democracy Index which looks at governments around the world and tracks elections, politics,
culture and civil rights.
As usual, Scandinavia comes out best with Norway the most democratic nation followed by Iceland and then Sweden, the UK is the 14th most democratic country while the USA is 21st and was downgraded to a 'flawed democracy' last year and remains in the same class as nations such as India, Chile, South Africa, Greece, Colombia and Mexico.
Overall, across the world, democratic norms are slipping, according to the Index authors blaming declining trust in institutions, erosion of civil liberties and curbs on freedom of speech and curtailing freedom of the media under the guise of prevention of terrorism laws, blasphemy and 'hate speech' laws.
The rest of the world’s population live in a hybrid or authoritarian regime with North Korea the lowest-ranking country on the list along with Syria, Chad and Central African Republic.
As for the 95% of those not living in a full democracy, placing a cross on a ballot paper every five years in order to hand over political control to a party is as much say as we have. Yes we can remove a Government but once in they are there for a long time and short of a revolution, we are stuck with them and it's 60 months until Democracy wheels its way back again.
I wouldn't be that upset if your country is not in the top class as Democracy is 1 day every 1826 days so for 1825 days we are no different.

America Not Meddling Looks Same As Them Meddling

The Hungarian government have accused the U.S. State Department of interfering in the country’s election campaign and has summoned the top American diplomat in Budapest, David Kostelancik to ask him what his country thinks they are playing at.
'No meddling' replied the U.S. 'just providing projects that increase citizens’ access to objective information about domestic and global issues in Hungary'.
In that case if Russia just say they had not been meddling in the US election and had just been making sure American voters had access to objective information about domestic and global issues in America nobody would have a problem with it?
You can't bitch and moan that another country is trying to influence your election when you are actively trying to influence another countries election, that's just hypocritical and makes a mockery of the Democracy which everyone, particularly America, seems so keen to go to war to protect.

Slippery Slope For Power Of Recall

Not that i have anything personal against Democracy, i do moan about it but only because much is made of it but my beef is that the whole process is only 1 day every 5 years and the MP can do what he wants without censor until the wheel slowly grinds back around again and we get the chance to vote him or her out.
What i would like to see is a way to remove the MP if they turn out to be a dud or found with their hands in the expenses still without having to wait half a decade before the opportunity.
The Tory manifesto in 2010 promised just such powers of recall and in the final Parliament before next years election, the Government have finally granted it, but with conditions.
The chance to recall an MP will be triggered only if the member of Parliament is given a jail sentence or if the House of Commons resolves that they have engaged in serious wrongdoing and voters would then have to collect the signatures of 10% of constituents to force a by election.    
The bottom line is that the parties MP's would still have a veto on whether they can be recalled so it obviously doesn't go far enough but for once the slippery slope may work in our favour because it's there now and future Governments can chip away at it until we have a real power of recall, not if their friends and colleagues decide we can have it.

Democracy & Capitalism Not That Good Really

The Bank of England Governor, Mark Carney, has been spelling out the risk of Capitalism destroying itself unless bankers realise they have an obligation to create a fairer society and Capitalism is doomed if ethics vanish.
I do take umbrage at the insinuation that the banks and financial houses are not full of people who do their jobs ethically and want the best for everyone, we call them the cleaners.
Two of the biggest white elephants of our time are Capitalism and Democracy but for some reason they are held up as the high water mark of human achievement.
Adam Smith, the father of modern Capitalism, was wildly wrong when he assumed that mankind's 'principles' would stop what we see today with the overwhelming majority of people continually having to do with less and less whilst the 1% enrich themselves to the level of obscenity.
Without doubt Adam Smith got that wrong, greed is not good and only fills the bank accounts of the top end while it empties those at the bottom but while we are governed by the millionaires at the top end, nothing is going to change until a crunch comes.
The Occupy movement is a start and it will get its act together one day and things will change but until then  it's austerity cuts for us and massive bonuses for the bankers. If Capitalism destroys itself through its own greed and lack of ethics then it shows what an awful and faulty system Adam Smith envisioned.  
As for Democracy, placing a cross on a ballot paper every five years in order to hand over political control to a party is as much say as we have. Yes we can remove a Government but once in they are there for a long time and can cause untold lasting damage to every corner of our lives.
Short of a revolution as in Ukraine, we are stuck with them and it's 60 months until Democracy wheels its way back again.
Democracy is 1 day every 1826 days and no way to remove the party if its breaks its promises or make u-turnd on the manifesto it was elected upon.    
It seems that the two things that we praise the highest and foist upon others, sometimes at the end of a gun, are really not that praiseworthy.

The Failing Of Democracy

The demonstrations and Government removal going on in Egypt highlight what, for me, is the major failing in Democracy in that once the Government is in, they are there for the duration regardless of how dire they are.  
The majority of people didn't much care for the religious way, lack of jobs created and the tanking economy that Morsi was overseeing and built up such a head of steam that the military intervened and removed him.
My biggest gripe about Democracy is that the voters have no way to force another election if the party who won turn out to be a disaster and it is only four or five years later we get to vote again.
What should be introduced is a way to remove a Government if they turn out to be a shambles or if the manifesto they promised before the election day turns out to be a pack of lies or if they are as corrupt as the last Government.
We are inundated with polls so why not have a poll made up of all polls which if support falls below a certain percentage, an Election is triggered.
No need for demonstrations or the military airing it's hardware in the streets, just the will of the people who the Government by all accounts is supposed to be representing us and if the people think you are lousy, off you go.

Democracy & The Will Of The People

Winston Churchill said it was 'the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried' and Abraham Lincoln defined it as 'rule of, by, and for, the people' but is Democracy really such the great thing as we are led to believe?
Politics is vital to all of our lives, almost everything depends on political decisions from how we travel to how our children are educated to how much tax we pay on our wages. 
We have elections, parties tell us what they will do if elected, we vote, and the winners governs until the next round of elections a number of years later.
My biggest gripe about Democracy is that the voters have no way to force another election if the party who won turn out to be a disaster, the argument being that what we have is representative democracy, where we choose others to decide for us and the winner is serving the will of the majority, but are they?
In Britain, David Cameron became Prime Minister with just 36% of the voting public voting for him, 64% of the population wanted someone else so is he really in his position due to the will of the British people when two thirds specifically said they didn't want him ruling over them?
In America which has a population of 311 million, only 70m said Obama could represent them leaving the other 241 million to watch on as he acts as he sees fit. If he starts a war, over three quarters of the population can rightfully say that he is not acting in their name, nothing to do with them. 
In most countries there is a minimum age that a person can vote at so you could argue that Julie Gillard's 6m votes in Australia represents 50% of the voting public but you could just as easily argue that she still doesn't represent 16m of the 22m in her country by virtue of not receiving their permission either because they couldn't, or didn't, give it to her. 
Stephen Harper of Canada is in power despite 61% of the countries voters not wanting him, in Japan 69% of the country wanted someone else except Yukio Hatoyama, 67% voted against Angela Merkel in Germany and a huge 74% said a resounding no to Mark Rutte but he still sits as Prime Minister making the laws and rules that dominate the lives of the three quarters of the voting population that rejected him in the Netherlands.
The will of the people in the last Finnish election was for 80% to look at Jurki Faymann and vote for another party but he took power representing just 2 out of every 10 of the voters.  
Looking at the numbers of the Democracies around the World, most of the ruling parties are not representing the vast majority of people in there countries, Norway 32%, India 35%, Ireland 36%, Iceland 29%, Sweden 30%, Switzerland 26%, Austria 29% and in Israel Benjamin Netanyahu can only declare to be representing 21% of his population.
As Churchill nodded towards, Democracy is deeply imperfect but with no real alternative to turn to, it is what we have. It's just obviously not that representative of the 'will of the people' which is it's whole point.

The Problem With Elections

One of the demands of the Liberal Democrats before they agreed to team up with the Conservatives and stab us all in the back was a referendum on the voting system.
Nick Clegg and his cohorts are demanding we switch from the first past the post system we currently where a voter puts an 'X' beside their favoured party on the ballot paper, to an alternative voting system where they rank the candidates on offer. 1 for Labour, 2 for Conservative etc.
The greatest difference i can see is it will be more representative of voters choice, Labour won the 2007 election with only 34% of the country voting for them meaning 66% didn't want them but were stuck with them anyway.
That is a good thing obviously but what grates with me is not the method of how they get in, it's how once they get the keys to the door, they are left alone for 5 years to do what they like.
I would like to see some mechanism where an election is triggered if the voters don't like what they are up to.
As things stand, the Lib Dem/Conservative coalition Government can slash and burn everything as much as they like for the next 4 years and there is nothing we can do about it.
That's what i want to see changed by having a threshold where if a Governments popularity sinks below 30%, the country holds another election. All the polls, and we have lots of them, would be gathered and analysed to make one final running percentage.
Alternatively, why not reduce the limit and hold elections every 2 years so we can remove them before any real damage is caused and scandals are not half forgotten by time.
It would also force them to consider things more carefully instead of front loading their time with all the bad decisions so they can offer election time bribes when they come into their final year.
We can tinker with how we elect our Prime Ministers all we want but it won't stop any of them being liabilities when they get in power. Isn't that so Mr Clegg.

The Majority But Nothing We Can Do

Tony Blair earned the nickname Teflon Tony because no matter what was thrown at him, he managed to wriggle out of it. He would come on TV, shrug and tell us that he really was a straight kind of guy and we'd collectively say okay then and he would go back to Downing Street and continue with his plans to illegally blow up Iraq.
His replacement, Gordon Brown, seems to be made more of something altogether more sticky as he continues to jump out of the frying pan, into the fire and then performs a double somersault into the furnace.
The latest scandal to hit him is MP's expenses which sees his cabinet and party colleagues fleecing the taxpayer for hundreds of thousands of pounds annually.
The Daily Telegraph has got their grubby mitts on the expenses claims of Parliament members and are drip feeding out the amounts our elected representatives are taking back from the public purse, and it's causing red faces and angry taxpayers all around.
Yes its outrageous and we can bounce off the walls in anger at what our Government gets up to but because of the way these things work, there is absolutely nothing we can do about it.
Once every five years we get to vote and if we don't like what the present lot are doing, we can boot them out but for the next five years we can only sit and watch them do what they like. So if in their allotted time they decide to have a war, hand out tens of billions to bankers, award themselves above inflation pay rises or bring in snooping techniques that would rival anything the Stasi had going, you have got to sit and take it.
A poll today put support for the Government at 23% which means that less than a quarter of the population think Labour is doing a good job but there is no mechanism for the overwhelming majority to call time on them.
I don't know of any other job where you can stay in charge when over three quarters of your customers think you are doing a lousy job so why should the Prime Minister's job be any different, especially when the importance and effect on all our lives is so important.
I will add it to the Lucy manifesto along with my other good ideas of paying everybody the same and choosing what departmental areas we want our tax to go on our tax returns.

My Idea Of Revolution

We have been talking Revolution over at David's blog and I'm always up for a bit of usurping but who to usurp and what system of Government will be imposed instead? Rather than a large scale revolution with tanks on the streets and guillotines, i propose a bastardised version of what we have now and laughably call Democracy.
The debate over the $700b to the financial markets is as good as an example as there will ever be of what's wrong with the system we have. We elect a person to represent us and they go off to do our business, or at least that's the idea.
What actually happens is they do what they want until approximately six months before they are up for nomination again and then they pay attention, don't want to upset the plebs that put him in that privileged position.
The House of Representatives that initially turned down the billion dollar hand-out
did it apparently because they had been receiving communications from their electorate telling them that they were against the idea. Very thoughtful although they wouldn't have given a second thought to their electorate a year ago.
And there is the nub of my revolution, to keep the people who we elect to do what's best for us in that perpetual state of having to do our bidding in order to stay in power. The simple answer is referendums and plenty of them coupled with a maximum of two years between elections.
We have a situation in the US and in the UK with two leaders with the lowest ratings in our lifetimes, a simple system where ratings below 35% would trigger an election would keep our leaders mind focused.
So there we have my back-of-a-cigarette-packet idea for a system of Government. Two year terms, referendums on the big decisions and a mechanism to remove unpopular leaders to stop them clinging to power at the detriment of the country they are charged with representing.
All i need now is to get elected so i can implement it.

Put That Wall Back Up!

Of course there are many forms of Government and being the brainwashed Marxist loving Stalinite that i am, i would have all you capitalist pig dogs eating turnips and toiling in fields all the live long day.
Luckily for you, i have as much chance of starting a Communist revolution as i have of become Pope but as the populations of countries such as Burma, Georgia and Pakistan march for Democracy, is it such a great thing to be demanding?
Best people to ask would be those who have lived under Socialism and Democracy and ask them which they preferred.
The Forsa Institute did just that in Germany and found only 3% of people who originated from East Germany said they were very satisfied with the way that democracy worked.
The poll by the Forsa institute showed that 73% of those from the east believed that socialism was a good idea in principle, but had been poorly implemented. Over 90% argued that they enjoyed better social protection during the GDR era.
The revolution is gaining pace comrades, order more turnips in preparation.

Democracy British Style

Oh look, it's British Prime Minister and World saviour Tony Blair! See how his tousled hair floats freely in the breeze! Marvel at his pretty daisy chains, his fair trade wine, his collection of Amazonian wood-carvings and his earnest expression as he reveals that - let's not mince our words - Nukes are good.
Such is Blair's weakness that even though 80 of his own party gave him a proverbial kick in the pants, the opposition Tory Party actually got the damn thing through for him.
In a success for Democracy, the members of the Labour and Tory Party were actually demanded to vote for the nukes by a three line whip*, so all the nonsense about people voting with their conscience and the 6 hour debate to help sway opinions was all rubbish. They were instructed to vote for the Prime Ministers idea or else.
Then, to cap the day it was leaked that the Government had actually began upgrading the Trident Nuclear missiles anyway.
British Democracy, you have just got to love it.

*In the UK a three line whip is a written notice, underlined three times to indicate its importance, to politicians belonging to a particular party that they must attend a vote in parliament and vote in the way in which they are instructed.