Someone needs to fix democracy

Dire times for democracy it seems. Wherever it happens those who fear and mistrust it seem either to ignore, suppress or crush it. Whatever the intricate rights or wrongs of the Thai “red” protest, the government’s decision to increase the force of its response is hardly helpful or constructive.

Garda presence on the streets of Dublin was stepped up for the ‘Right to Work’ protest this week and the British establishment remained baffled by the choice of the people to land them with a hung parliament. Over the weekend we travelled to middle England to reunite with other people who had volunteered with VSO in The Gambia.
During the visit I was talking politics with a Gambian man who now resides in the rural idyll of Derbyshire. He shook his head in resignation when we discussed his President Yahya Jammeh saying, “he will never be removed by a vote or election”.
I agreed and we sat in silence, slightly defeated by the awful reality. 
In the United States, which promotes itself as the world leader in democratic terms, we saw an election stolen by George W Bush in the most audacious style in 2000. It leaves a mind to wonder whether true democracy exists at all.
The attitude of British politicians to the latest election result here has been amusing to watch but slightly disconcerting at the same time. During the negotiations to form a government many seemed to be almost scolding the electorate for not giving one party a majority over the others.
“This is what you voted for” or “you caused this” were the undertones during interviews with senior British politicians as they struggled to come to grips with the reality of sharing power between parties. In the end a coalition was formed but it has been dragged together grudgingly and there remains a deep suspicion toward it in both the media and political circles. The servants of the people seem irritated by what their masters have ordered them to do.
The horror of the British establishment at the concept of power sharing is not without deep roots. In the 1930’s in Britain there was a fairly powerful movement against democracy as a concept by various thinkers and intellectuals. Among the most outspoken of these was the author Aldous Huxley.
He proposed an end to parliamentary democracy and felt that the country should be run, “by men who compel us to do and suffer what a rational foresight demands”. Such a thought is rightly anathema to us now but in a sense elements of it live on. One would be hard pressed not to detect in Brian Cowen a distaste for the public who elected him. He radiates an air of I know what is best for you people so sit down and accept it.
In Britain there is also the class system to be considered. The percentage of the new government here who attended Oxford is quite unbelievable. Figures published by the BBC in 1995 show that one third of MPs and two thirds of the House of Lords were privately educated compared with 7% of the general population. In addition 27% of the House of Commons and 42% of the House of Lords were educated at Oxford or Cambridge. The concept of a ruling class is alive and well in Britain.
To a lesser extent Ireland has a ruling class of its own. It is less connected with which university you attended, a factor certainly, but more connected with your lineage. The Irish love affair with the political dynasty should be repugnant to us with our bitter history of landlordism but seems to meet only with bovine acceptance at the ballot box.
What seems to be universally true is the effect of power on people when they are elected. On a scale running from Brian Cowen to Robert Mugabe, those who take power seem to think that when elected the people who put them there matter less and less.
Being elected by popular vote does not in itself confer omniscience but it seems in many cases to bring the elected to believe that they are possessed of such a power. The struggling masses they rule seem to grow less and less important to the political animal the further you get from an election date. They believe they know best for the populations they control and grow angry at any suggestion that their underlings might know better than they do.
Looking around the world at the state of democracy it is difficult not to be reminded of Huxley’s seminal work, Brave New World. In his dystopian nightmare humans are bred centrally to fill their appointed roles in society. Types of people range from the “Alpha-Plus mandarin class to the Epsilon-Minus Semi-Morons”.  Each is designed to be fully content with their role and place within the hierarchical society which indoctrinates all to believe that stability is to be valued above all else.
“Democracies” all over the world seem to run on similar lines with a working class kept poor and uneducated by inequality and a ruling elite who dance jigs for their votes every few years and then play an exaggerated game of pass the parcel with power for the cameras.
I am not advocating an alternative system to democracy but perhaps it is time for some sort of reform. On a local basis our councillors do tremendous work and if more power was devolved to them then we might have a more personalised and effective system of government. Councillors are closer to their constituents and therefore more in tune with them. As it stands we have the power to change the personnel but not the system that breeds them. This has to change and the sooner it does the better for everyone.