Friday 15 September 2023

Today Is...International Day Of Democracy

Winston Churchill said that the best argument against democracy is a conversation with the 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 and the youth are catching on to the idea with a Center for the Future of Democracy report finding that 52% of British under 38's say they are not satisfied with democracy.
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 Downing Street to see that electing a leader is not always a considered vote for the best possible person to do the job. 
There are many forms of Government, some are better than others, but we can look around now and honestly say something has to be better than what we have but with AI becoming more important in running our lives, there must be something said for removing humans from the decision making process because we have made a bit of a pigs ear of it so far.

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