Brexit, Democracy, and Casablanca

Our scene - outside some bar or other in London:

Police Chief: What in Heaven’s name brought you to the UK?

Rick: My politics. I came to the UK for the democracy.

Police Chief: The democracy? What democracy? We’re in an elitist oligarchy.

Rick: I was misinformed.

There you are. I always knew that piece of dialogue would come in useful someday. All right, I modified it. Just a little.

But today in the UK a lot of people feel just like Rick. We’ve always been told we live in a democracy. Not just any democracy, but one of the oldest and finest in the world.

Except it turns out that we don’t.

You want to know more? You’ll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.

But I’ve got a job to do.

Scratch the surface and the very same attitudes that resisted the widening of the franchise and the elimination of the property qualification for voting back in the nineteenth century are alive and well today. There are still bien-pensants aplenty who think that ordinary people don’t really understand the issues, are insufficiently well informed, are stupid, racist and in fact thoroughly unpleasant. In an ideal world, such people wouldn’t be allowed to exist. But somebody has to do the manual work, I suppose.

For a while, you can get away with lying to the people. You see, they’re so ignorant that the idea of their social betters lying to them just never crosses their minds.

“There are some in this country who fear that in going into Europe we shall in some way sacrifice independence and sovereignty. These fears, I need hardly say, are completely unjustified.” - Prime Minister Edward Heath, January 1973.

Oh, yes. Remember that one?

Not an easy day to forget.

Only now we can read the memo that was sent to Heath about it. The one where he was warned of “the ultimate creation of a European federal state, with a single currency. All the basic instruments of national economic management (fiscal, monetary, incomes and regional policies) would ultimately be handed over to the central federal authorities.”

That’s all right, the top men said, just as long as the plebs never find out. Don’t worry, guys, we’ll tell them it’s just a free trade area.

I’m shocked! Shocked to find that lying was going on here in the UK!

Now, of course, all this was more than forty years ago. Surely, it’s not relevant today?

Oh no. Of course it isn’t.

Look, I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

Remember Maastricht? It’s okay, we’ve got opt-outs; none of this EU integration stuff will ever affect the UK. Text? What text?

Remember Lisbon? So embarrassingly similar to the rejected EU Constitution on which we’d been promised a referendum that the UK PM had to turn up a day late and sign when hardly anyone was looking?

And remember how, before the referendum, the UK PM was going to negotiate a reformed EU where everything would be hunky-dory? Except it turns out the EU doesn’t want to reform because it thinks everything’s hunky-dory already, exactly on track.

Oh, well. Round up the usual suspects. Greece, Cyprus, Spain, Italy, Portugal- all you disorganised, hopeless countries with your hopeless levels of youth unemployment. Yes, and all you Eastern European states that don’t fancy freedom of movement for the vast number of refugees/immigrants admitted by Germany. It’s all going well, do you hear?

But do you want to know what’s really funny?

These days the plebs have figured it out. These days the plebs know they’re being lied to and have been lied to for decades. These days the so-called ignorant are the ones who actually realise what’s going on.

And who is it who now believes the propaganda that the powers-that-be have been spouting for fifty years?

Oh. You spoiled my surprise. You guessed it. It’s the bien-pensants of course. The smart people. The trendy classes who think there really is a pot of international brotherly love at the end of the EU rainbow.

Well, here’s looking at you, kids. You know how you sound? Like someone who’s trying to convince himself of something he doesn’t believe in his heart.

So to all my dispirited friends, watching the news, reading the papers and feeling more and more depressed, I say - Welcome back to the fight. This time I know our side will win.

The Family Demon

Preparations for the launch of the new Toby Le Tocq novel are proceeding well. Beta-reading and proof-reading are in hand and the e-book version at least should be ready in the not too far distant future.


Since I hope you, my readers, will be buying it, I'd like to consult you on the draft cover, which has gone through a variety of stage of mock-up and development and has now arrived at the design on the left. If you'd like to tell me what you think of it before we finally decide, now's your chance.

Now the context is a bride who's been driven mad by the death of her husband on their wedding night and imagines herself fleeing in terror across a trackless waste.

The lady turns out to be the niece of Toby's partner Fred, who persuades the reincarnated Solomon to take up yet another pro-bono case.

Nope. They don't seem to have learned their lesson last time!

Has Representative Democracy Failed In The UK?

I was recently asked this interesting question of Quora. Here's my answer:

Logically, in order to establish the success or failure of any system, we must first discover its intended objective and then the time frame over which we shall measure.

For representative democracy, there may not even be a universally accepted objective. Different people or different cultures, at different times, in different circumstances may seek different outcomes.

Abraham Lincoln famously defined democracy as government of the people, by the people, for the people.

A century and a half later, there are still many who believe his middle phrase to be a step too far. Some issues, they will tell you, are just too complex for the people to grasp; such decisions should be left in the hands of those who know what’s good for the people, by which term they mean, of course, people like themselves.

On the other side of the argument are ranged democrats who believe that everyone is the world’s leading expert in how things affect themselves. One does not need to be able to explain why rain falls in order to know that when rain falls one’s roof leaks. However, if the government is made up entirely of well-off people who don’t have leaky roofs then this problem is unlikely to be considered, let alone solved.

So now let’s extend the problem to cover not just leaky roofs but homelessness, substandard housing, overcrowding and so on. Do the people who suffer from these, and other social evils, have a right to be heard and to participate in the examination and solution of their problems, or should a paternalistic ruling class decide and administer what they consider to be in the poor’s best interests? Seems easy enough?

But before we run away with the idea that democracy solves everything, let’s consider the problem of hard choices. In the NHS, for example, everyone considers that their own needs should be attended to, but when we add up the implied expenditure from attending to everyone’s needs, we find we have a sum much larger than we are collectively willing to pay for the NHS.

The concept of representative democracy is supposed to provide a forum within which competing needs and wants of individuals in society can be prioritised in a rational way. In principle, we enjoy competition for power between different philosophies with different priorities, of which two important ones are wealth creation and wealth distribution. Usually, in order to win and hold power, some sort of centrist compromise has had to emerge.

The problem we face today is that, over time, the political parties embodying these philosophies have become transformed from organic plants, growing in the soil of local communities and nourished by local culture and information, into hothouse blooms that can only exist under London glass. Our nominal representatives have less and less genuine interaction with us, the people they supposedly represent. Not many of them are genuinely local people; they are career politicians who have climbed the greasy pole until they have been allocated a winnable seat. They are supposed to be the honourable member for Suchandsuchtown, but they possibly never heard of the place until they attended their selection meeting.

It seems to me that many of today’s MPs represent primarily themselves and their own ideas and careers, then the party to which they owe their elevation, and only as an afterthought the people who elected them. This does not necessarily make them bad people; many, I am sure, are honest, decent folk, doing what they believe to be best. But were their priorities not as I suggest above, you could not possibly have well over 400 Remainer MPs in a country where over 400 of 650 constituencies voted to leave the EU.

There. I arrived in the end at the issue which probably gave rise to your question. I tend to agree that hard cases make bad law, but the complete disconnect that has now arisen between representatives and represented is not, in my view, a sustainable situation.

I don’t think this is the same as saying that representative democracy has failed. In its relatively short history, it has done much to advance society. However, when citizens of the information age are still quoting an eighteenth-century, pre-democratic age political philosopher (Edmund Burke) in order to explain why parliament is not delivering what the electorate voted for, I suspect we have arrived at an era in which substantial reform is required for our system to continue (or perhaps recommence) effective functioning.