What is this Democracy?

So what is this 'Democracy'?

"Democracy," said Winston Churchill, "is the worst form of government except all those others that have been tried from time to time."

That could well be true, but it doesn’t mean we have to treat it as a holy cow that must not be criticised. It’s about time we had a look at it to try and see what it is and ask just how well or badly it works.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘democracy’ as: “Government by the people” and it adds: “That form of government in which the sovereign power resides in the people, and is exercised either directly or by officers elected by them.”
Is that what we have today?

Parliamentary democracy, in which officers (MPs) are elected by the people to sit together in the House of Commons to discuss, and try to seek agreement on, the wisest way to order the affairs of the country, sounds, on the face of it, to be very sensible.

However, what we seem to have, (and when convenient refer to as democracy), is something rather different. For a start, although they duly elect Members to sit in Parliament, the wishes of the people who elect them have precious little influence on what they can do when they get there, because the only candidates who have any chance of being elected are almost always already the creatures of large associations called political parties, which choose them, groom them and organise support for them.

Although it may be, strictly-speaking, a betrayal of democracy, the grouping together of like-minded people into parties is a fairly natural and probably inevitable development of democracy, and in theory, at least, the current Parliamentary system, which has evolved over centuries, in which the party with the most members is able to form a Government with a Prime Minister who selects a Cabinet to attend to the day-to day running of the country, may well be the most workable system. But it is workable and democratic only so long as it is fully accepted that it is Parliament as a whole which finally decides what shall or shall not be the law.

Unfortunately, although the individual Members are elected to do the the job they are paid by the people to do, ie, sit in the House of Commons and seek agreement among themselves on the wisest way to order the affairs of the country, they very rarely have a chance to take part in anything like that because, having contrived their election, the party which owns them assumes that it can command their support and whip them into line to vote on 'party lines' regardless of their views.

This situation has become so entrenched that, even though by now it has little resemblance to democracy, we more or less accept it without thought. But it has some really tiresome consequences.

One is, to put it baldly, that the business of the House of Commons has to a large extent been taken over by the political parties, and the search for agreement has had to give way to a form of ongoing bickering in which the parties concentrate on slagging off their “opponents” suggestions in order to gain political advantage in what seems to be a struggle for the power to govern.

Years ago, when the political parties represented radically different social purposes, this use of parliamentary time might have had some relevance. But today, when there is, frankly, little to choose between the parties’ programmes, it simply takes up time and attention which should be put to some real purpose and has had the sad effect of turning the legislative body of the nation into something which, to the onlooker, often looks like nothing more that an inter-party squabbling-house, with the actual business of government and the formulation of policies taking place somewhere else.

Nevertheless the procedure seems to work, but in a very cumbersome way because every issue to be discussed has both a party-political aspect and a practical aspect. It is only on the rare occasions when all the parties agree to declare a ‘free vote’ that a properly unbiased discussion can take place. For the rest of the time the MPs are more or less herded.

Even though it works, the system has one major flaw. This is that once a single political party can obtain control of a sufficiently overwhelming majority of MPs, Parliament ceases to be the final legislative body and becomes the creature of the party in power. This can then, by using its majority, do more or less do as it chooses. What it chooses to do may not necessarily be bad for the country, but it puts one person, its Prime Minister, in a position of almost absolute power, from which he and his ministers can treat Parliament with contempt and he, if he wishes, can behave, in the nicest possible way of course, like a total despot.

Once achieved, that Prime Ministerial power can only rarely be thwarted, and then only by the MPs of his own party daring to raise what amounts to a palace revolution. This happened recently, over the 90 day detention clause, when they deliberately refused to do as they were told. (Whether they did so out of real conscience or out of political disenchantment with their master’s style of government is still unclear).

In general it goes without saying that the basic purpose and ambition of each political party is to get itself into this ‘landslide’ position and so be able to sideline Parliament and itself run the country. But, of course, before it can do that, a party must first go back to the people for a General Election and set about getting itself elected. This it must do by offering a manifesto and a political programme which it hopes will receive the support of the majority of the electorate.

In the past such manifestos have not been too difficult to prepare because the political parties have represented the genuine interests and aspirations of distinctly different sections of society. Their policies have reflected these and they have thus been able to give the electorate meaningful choices to make. However, now that they can no longer offer the electorate reasoned political argument with the aim of redressing tangible injustices, and because much of the electorate has become disenchanted with politicians and their machinations, the parties have had to find a new way to attract the attention and the votes of the people.

So today the task of persuading the electorate has been computerised. The modern way to obtain votes is to identify in detail certain sections of the electorate and concentrate on selectively currying favour with them by the intensive use of focus-group and market-research methods of the sort usually employed by sophisticated public relations firms to sell goods. This involves all the usual advertising-campaign paraphernalia, the use of spin, slogans and sound-bites, the endorsements of celebrities and the grooming of the politicians themselves into lovable, persuasive image-people. But the core of the process is to find out, by statistical means, what the majority of the electorate would fancy to have in the way of extra goodies and then promise to supply them. (That the goodies don’t in the end get delivered is of little interest once the election victory has been achieved).

For this purpose the voting public has to be sociologically categorised into various types of consumption-unit each of which is assumed to have certain primary needs in life - to be kept feeling superior, righteous, loved, safe, sexy, well looked after and above all complacent. To that end the image of the party seeking power as overall shepherd and carer has to be nurtured, and the party must at all times maintain the feeling that we are riding high in a gloriously successful economy.

As part of this processing it is obviously necessary to avoid ‘committing electoral suicide’ by intoducing legislation that is not directly and tangibly beneficial to the electorate, because to do that would be to invite one of the other parties to step in. And at the same time it is essential to promise the electorate an ever-increasing ‘standard of living’, regardless of absurdity, because in our ever-growing economy the luxury of our lifestyle is assumed to be the measure of our competitive economic and political success.

One natural effect of this attitude is the likelihood that some distant but potentially unpleasant long-term circumstances, like for instance the plight of the people in the poor countries who have to provide us with our luxuries, will be passed by and simply not considered, on the grounds that to do so would not be ‘politically realistic’.

Similarly, in their approach to the wider world, the ruling parties’ ministers take the view that while they may claim to have a duty of care towards the country and the world as a whole, they consider that they are not empowered actually to exercise that duty unless and until they already have sufficient public support at home to make the necessary action ‘politically realistic’.

A striking example of this phenomenon occurred in November 1989, when Mrs Thatcher resoundingly declared to the UN that: “the evidence [of global warming] is there, the damage is being done . . .” and asked: “What do we, the international community, do about it?”
The unheard answer was: “Nothing at all.”
As always, ‘political reality’ was paramount. Perhaps against her better judgement (who knows?), Mrs Thatcher duly indulged the electorate’s lust for more and more motor cars and airline flights and, as a direct result the gas-greenhouse of global warming was left to grow apace, until today it secretly threatens the very life of the planet.
So the rule seems to be that ‘political reality’ requires that politicians who are in the public eye because they have a role to play in international politics, can speak and negotiate diplomatically, but have a duty to act only in ways that accord with the prejudices and interests of their electoral ‘power-base’.

For example, we know that we have to bear in mind that every speech made by President Bush is in fact being directed simultaneously to his supporters in the Middle West of America and the big Corporations that support him, as well as to the rest of the world. He can appear to be realistic, generous or humane in his attitude, but he could not act upon that attitude unless he was sure that by doing so he would not weaken his power-base or threaten his popularity ratings in the U.S.

So, overall, it seems to be true that the effect of what we now call democracy has been to replace stewardship with salesmanship, with the result that although genuine wisdom and concern for long-term problems might be awarded lip-service, these must, of necessity, be kept secondary to the short-term imperatives of party-political expediency.

The processes described above may perhaps “be better than all those other forms of government that have been tried”, but perhaps today’s carry-on may not after all be the “democracy” to which Winston Churchill was referring.

Be that as it may, it is my feeling that, as a form of government, what we call democracy is dysfunctional, myopic and bigoted, and it has habitually caused, or tacitly allowed, profoundly dangerous things to happen.

These things are not the stuff of history. History is a record of what was was seen to happen and was heard about. These are the dangers and potential disasters that were not recorded or taken into account but were passed by and left to fester.

That is why, at the end of my life, I have come to see that most of the things which happen in the world today are not the results of policies which successive governments have adopted and carried through, but are part of a slow invisible tide of come-uppances - the inadvertent effects of long-term mistakes committed for short-term gain, the results of our going on doing damaging things to the land and to the sea, to the forests, the ice-caps and the air, long, long after it has become obvious to anybody who cared enough to notice that they should have stopped. These neglects, degradations, pollutions and exploitations, unnoticed by us perhaps but nevertheless committed by our democratically elected leaders in our name, are now, at last, coming home to roost.

So, where once, in the nineteen-thirties when I was young, people felt that there was a bright future out there in front, today I can see that the real future is what is inexorably coming up behind us. It is there, but somehow we can't see it clearly, because somebody has stuck smiley faces over the wing-mirrors.

Oliver Postgate November 2005

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