Democracy in danger

Democracy in danger

Modern politics is harming voter participation

Democracy used to be said to be government by the people for the people. Now that does not exist. Lies and deceit by political parties, is so common that the people just shrug and say, “they all do it”. There is not even great outrage at the discovery of deliberate deceptions. On the 4th July 2024 in Great Britian, an election was held. The socialist “labour” party won the most seats in Parliament, by a large majority but the voter participation was the lowest for 20 years, it is widely accepted that many votes were cast on the basis of the voter did not want the centre right party, the Conservatives also known as Tories, to continue in power. So labour won because of voter dis-satisfaction with the Tories rather than because they have better policies. This is not good for democracy.

What followed within 3 weeks, was even worse. So many policy promises were just abandoned by the winning party. What they had promised voters just evaporated. The incoming government claimed the previous administration had left the economy in the worst state since the end of WW2 this was an obvious and blatant lie. They claimed they did not know it was so bad, this also a lie. The economy, like most around the world, was not buoyant but everyone knew this. The Labour party knew this before the election campaign started. The effects of global pandemics, wars and economic recession were universally known, nothing hidden. Their first economic action was to claim huge deficits in spending plans, leaving them with less ability to spend than they expected, the second action was to award huge pay rises to state employed workers, The labour party is funded by the trade unions and it is a reasonable assumption that the extra funding to fight the election, was given on an understanding that the incoming Labour government would agree to union demands for better pay. To say you have less money than expected but then to hand out even more, is bordering on absurd, yet the new government just ignored all the protests. The will of the people being subservient to the political reality of demands from the funding group. This is not good for democracy.

The British people voted, by a very slim majority, but with quite a high voter participation, to withdraw from the European Union. This was accepted as indication that the majority did not want to be part of a single Europe wide state, with all the separate nations being absorbed into a single socialist controlled entity. The Labour party did not proclaim they wished to go against this democratically decided withdrawal and yet within days of forming the new government they started plans to seek closer unity with the EU, This is not good for democracy.

The parties fought the election without offering true manifestos of their real intentions, that seems to be a general view. What makes this worse is that however much some parts of the media seek to expose the spin and deceit, the government can just ignore them. If it had been an insurance sales campaign, not a political election, they would be sued for wrongful selling and ordered to pay vast amounts of compensation. The mainstream media, particularly the BBC and the Gurdian newspapers, are so subservient to the left of centre politics that they not only condone but they encourage acceptance of the lies spin and deceits. They depend on state funding, even the Guardian newspapers derive a lot of income form advertising jobs with the BBC and in the public sector, and they have no wish to annoy the government bureaucracy. The state bureaucracy employees know they will have better pay, be pandered to, have less pressure to achieve efficiency, under a socialist government, so they support the new status quo. This is not good for democracy.

The new government claimed, during the election campaign, that they would solve the illegal immigration problems that have caused so much difficulty in last 20 years. Once elected it appeared that their solution was to stop reporting illegal immigration and call the criminals merely irregular immigrants. During the election campaign they said they would solve the problems of prison overcrowding. Once in power it seems the solution is to free the criminals. This is not good for democracy.

What can we do? Action is necessary or democracy will fade away, be replaced by a never-ending cycle of less and less voter participation and less and less democratic control over life. The more that power is obtained by blatant lies, the less voters will bother to get involved. A curse on all your houses, becomes a general feeling. The more people feel ignored, the less inclination by the mass of the people, to actually vote - the worse the resulting government becomes. The imposition of the social experiment of muti-culturalism, on people around the world, was allowed because there were not mass protests against it. There were no political parties brave enough to stand on a basis of integration not multi -culturalism. Yet there is quite a lot of evidence that the majority of indigenous populations welcome integration but did not and do not, want other cultures being imposed on them. This is not good for democracy.

The population of the planet is growing at an unsustainable rate. Climate change is real, it has always been real. No political party is brave enough to say we have to curb population growth and make plans to cope with the inevitable changes in global climate patterns, some places gaining, while others losing. The growth in automation and in Artificial intelligence is going, over the next 50 years, to change the social structures and the lifestyle choices for millions of people yet where are the politicians advocating policies to cope with these? If we are to maintain some sort of democratic governance, we need changes. We need to get voter participation back to around 75% We need to ensure voting is honest, only those with a right to vote do so. We need to adopt technology that allows a person to vote in secret, be automatically verified as the person entitled to vote and have the vote instantly “counted.” We need the much wider use of referendum, even local one for local issues. The real problem is to ensure the mechanisms and technology are genuinely unbiased and totally immune to corrupt manipulation. We then need to curb the power of the parties, may be impose the notion that only a person resident in a constituency for over 5 years may stand for election in that constituency. May be much stricter rules on electoral spending? Such things as changing the minimum age of voters need to be decided by national referendum not by some political party double dealing to gain an advantage for themselves. The education of young people has to include unbiased and equal presentation of all political views, and honest history of governance in countries under the various political viewpoints. Debate and change is needed.