US Election Hysteria

Everyone please take a deep breath, sit down and count to ten.

In the great scheme of things, the success of a protest candidate in a reasonably democratic election should not rank very high on the scariness scale.

It has been my feeling for a long time that democracy was decaying into a shell of itself with the rapid growth of a class of professional politicians that had little or no idea of the problems confronting the folk they allegedly represented.

Brexit came as a shock to this class when if they had being doing their job properly it might not even have happened, let alone come as a bolt from the blue.

The Beltway politicians in the US are similar in this respect to the London-centric UK political elite, a similar class in France, Germany, Holland etc. In Scotland the SNP are riding a wave of inchoate (and innumerate) populist revolt against the system.

It's forty years since Lord Hailsham drew attention to what he called 'Elective Dictatorship'. The re-energising of the whole process is overdue and sadly the professional political classes would not listen any other way.

Of course it remains to be seen if they will listen this way. 

In the words of the old Chinese curse, we live in interesting times.