POWER TO THE PEOPLE?

The sort of so­ci­ety we live in means that con­cepts like ’democ­racy’ and ’peo­ple power’ are al­most un­touch­able prin­ci­ples. If a ma­jor­ity of the peo­ple want some­thing, it seems as if it doesn’t mat­ter what ’it’ might be, the peo­ple have spo­ken and that’s it. How­ever, in re­cent times we have seen the lim­i­ta­tions to this over-sim­pli­fied view of how our so­ci­ety works. Dyed-in-the-wool de­moc­rats have had a prob­lem con­test­ing the re­sult of the Brexit ref­er­en­dum, for ex­am­ple, be­cause a ma­jor­ity voted in favour of leav­ing the EU, and they well-know that if a ma­jor­ity had voted to re­main, they would now be hail­ing the re­sult as a tri­umph.

The po­lit­i­cal events in Cat­alo­nia and Spain in the past few years pro­vide an even bet­ter ex­am­ple to ex­pose the short­com­ings of a phi­los­o­phy that de­pends on a mass of peo­ple ex­press­ing their con­cerns in the ex­pec­ta­tion that doing so is enough to make what they want a re­al­ity. The naivety of Cata­lan politi­cians think­ing that as long as they stick to the rules of democ­racy every­thing will be fine is there for all to see, as is the naivety of large num­bers of peo­ple be­liev­ing that sim­ply be­cause there are a lot of them, their re­quests will au­to­mat­i­cally be granted.

This skewed view of how power works is some­thing we need to come to terms with. While it’s true that large groups of like-minded in­di­vid­u­als com­ing to­gether to ad­vo­cate for a par­tic­u­lar course of ac­tion car­ries major weight, there are plenty of other repos­i­to­ries of power in our so­ci­ety. All those other peo­ple who do not want the same thing can pro­vide le­git­i­macy to a gov­ern­ment that then feels con­fi­dent in its op­po­si­tion, the jus­tice sys­tem is a major focus of power that draws on the le­git­i­macy of a set of laws we are all sub­ject to and often voted for, the mil­i­tary and the se­cu­rity forces are po­ten­tially ex­tremely pow­er­ful and rarely fol­low the or­ders of the masses, busi­nesses wield great power, and as pri­vate en­ti­ties have in­de­pen­dence of ac­tion and the re­sources to achieve their in­ter­ests as long as they keep their cus­tomers and stake­hold­ers happy, who might not share the in­ter­ests of those hun­dreds of thou­sands, and some­times even mil­lions, of peo­ple call­ing for change.

Yet, when a num­ber of these el­e­ments all want the same thing, when the in­ter­ests of a ma­jor­ity of peo­ple are aligned with those of both busi­ness and gov­ern­ment, when the hoped-for process of change car­ries no threat of vi­o­lence, and when there is a clear path for mak­ing the nec­es­sary legal re­forms, then that change should be­come just about in­evitable.

Such is­sues as Brexit or in­de­pen­dence do not nec­es­sar­ily fall into this cat­e­gory, but there are plenty of is­sues that do. One of them is ra­tio­nal­is­ing timeta­bles so as to bring every­day sched­ules into line with those of other coun­tries. As you will see from our se­ries of ar­ti­cles in this mag­a­zine (pages 20 to 27) on abol­ish­ing day­light sav­ing time, de­spite there being real ma­jor­ity sup­port in favour of re­struc­tur­ing our days, that wide­spread sup­port has not been trans­lated into ef­fec­tive ac­tion. Gov­ern­ment, busi­ness, ex­perts, peo­ple in gen­eral all agree that chang­ing our daily sched­ules will make us health­ier, with more free time, work­ing less but being more pro­duc­tive, while sav­ing en­ergy and ben­e­fit­ing our chil­dren. If there was ever a no-brainer, this is it. So, where are the tens of thou­sands on the streets clam­our­ing for change?