DODGY democracy

You know that quote often at­trib­uted to Win­ston Churchill that “democ­racy is the worst form of gov­ern­ment, ex­cept for all the oth­ers”? I’m sure I’ve bandied it about my­self at par­ties, but of course that’s not what he said. What he ac­tu­ally said was “it has been said that democ­racy is the worst form of gov­ern­ment ex­cept for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” In fact, Churchill wasn’t trash­ing democ­racy, he was de­fend­ing it. And why wouldn’t he, he was a politi­cian who gained power and fame thanks to the de­mo­c­ra­tic process.

It seems true that when you look at the al­ter­na­tives, it is hard to ques­tion democ­racy, but the prob­lem is it doesn’t seem to work very well. Brexit is now a re­al­ity (check out our se­ries of ar­ti­cles from pages 16 to 21 on what the UK leav­ing the EU might mean for us in the fu­ture), and yet no one seems to have any idea about whether it’s a good or bad thing, it seems poorly thought out, mis­rep­re­sented by both sides, and has po­ten­tially left a coun­try di­vided while leav­ing a major breach in an al­ready un­steady Eu­ro­pean Union. And yet, Brexit is the re­sult of a valid, free and fair de­mo­c­ra­tic process that you would pre­sume can only lead to the best pos­si­ble out­come for a ma­jor­ity of peo­ple. It may do in the end, but it doesn’t look like it at the mo­ment.

Mean­while, Brexit is only one ex­am­ple of how dodgy democ­racy can be. Closer to home, we have a Cata­lan gov­ern­ment that is based on a nar­row ma­jor­ity of pro-in­de­pen­dence par­ties. When you’re hang­ing in there thanks to a seat or two in the cham­ber, you would think that it might be a good idea to put your plan to turn an en­tire coun­try up­side down on the back burner until you’ve con­vinced a few more peo­ple to come over to your side, in­clud­ing the pro-in­de­pen­dence party that held its nose to lend you their seats so you could get into gov­ern­ment in the first place. But no, it’s a case of the “peo­ple have voted; we have a man­date. Let’s party!” And don’t for­get Don­ald Trump and Vladimir Putin are the re­sult of de­mo­c­ra­tic elec­tions, as was Mar­i­ano Rajoy and – God help us - now Pedro Sánchez. Also don’t for­get, as it’s cus­tom­ary to men­tion him in these cases, Hitler came to power in Ger­many through a de­mo­c­ra­tic elec­tion.

Even on the micro-level democ­racy doesn’t seem to live up to its hype. Speak­ing for my­self, de­spite liv­ing in this coun­try for over 20 years, work­ing here and pay­ing taxes, and bring­ing up chil­dren who will them­selves be­come tax­pay­ers (and vot­ers), I have never been able to vote in a Span­ish or Cata­lan elec­tion, and now thanks to Brexit I will lose the chance to vote in EU elec­tions (for what that’s worth), leav­ing me with a sin­gle vote in local elec­tions, and I live in a mu­nic­i­pal­ity that has had the same party in power for the past 30 years with lit­tle sign of that chang­ing. Mean­while, my vote in the UK lapsed after I had been out of the coun­try for 15 years, so there’s no joy there ei­ther. And I’m not alone.

Any­way, I’m not sug­gest­ing we scrap democ­racy and go back to the feu­dal sys­tem or any­thing, and I’m cer­tainly not of­fer­ing any an­swers – god for­bid – but this democ­racy busi­ness seems very dodgy in­deed and needs look­ing at, and how we go about choos­ing our po­lit­i­cal lead­ers and mak­ing the nec­es­sary re­forms so that the sys­tem does what it says on the label might be a good place to start.