An oligarchy of elected experts is precisely what representative democracy is. Giving every decision directly to the voters is not something you see in any democracy today. We elect people to make these decisions on our behalf.
Hopefully experts in lawmaking. Of course you’re right that we as an electorate do terrible job of electing good lawmakers, but that’s on us, not the lawmakers. You’re absolutely right that this system sucks because of this. In fact, it’s the worst system of government in the world, except for all the others.
Why do people keep repeating this lie; there is no Brexit disaster. Life goes on as normal in post Brexit Britain; lockdowns did way more harm than Brexit and we've mostly recovered from those. The rest of the EU seems to be suffering more economically than Britain. We're selling more into the EU than when we were in the EU, have many trade agreements with US states and other countries, were ahead of the EU with Covid vaccines and first to support the Ukraine.
He listed a series of facts. You are living in that Britain even if you don't realize or accept it. The different Britain you believe you inhabit may exist only in your mind.
Sure, counterpoint to freedom is that you can make a mistake. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't have that freedom.
The Brexit referendum was organized (and supported) by the conservative government, which wanted more neoliberalism. It was more of a populist stunt than the expression of the will of the people. That's not true to the spirit of referendums or direct democracy - these should exist to allow people to discuss, raise and vote on issues aside from the government.
That characterisation is imprecise to the point of being misleading; may I tell the story in detail?
I particularly rebut any suggestion that the Tories organised the referendum. That's only true at the most superficial reading. The whole farrago (pun intended) was founded by fringe nutters in the party, offered as a sop by the party leadership, and co-opted and orchestrated by interests inimical to the nation. (There is a case to answer for treason.)
Ever since the first referendum to join the EU in 1975, the anti-Europe faction of the Tory party was muttering in dark corners.
They gathered political strength at the fringe, slowly bolstered by drips of propaganda such as Boris Johnson's baseless claim, as a journalist, that the EU regulated the bendiness of bananas. In 2013, a nameless senior Tory in the orthodoxy coined the phrase "swivel-eyed loons".
Boris Johnson, may he swing, is every bit as much a fabricator as Donald Trump. If truth enters his speech, it's because it got lost.
_Aside: English politics has always been a straight left-right axis, with the left split between Labour and Lib Dems but the right united in the Tories. Labour had always had a strong socially-conservative constituency, but social conservatism has never been a campaign theme, AFAICR, beyond "tough on crime", which is a cheap vote-winner for anyone anywhere. The Labour Party is relatively new, but the Tories and Lib Dems trace their ancestry back to the same Tory-Whig axis that America inherited. Brexit turned that axis into a quadrant, with the LDs united but with the Tories and Labour split._
After they dicked over the plebs with austerity in a recession, the nation was angry with neoliberals, and the anti-EU gang fed on that. Not without reason, given how Greece got the shaft to protect German investors.
Campaigning for an outright majority in 2013, Cameron (a widely-used nickname for Pigfucker) offered the loons a referendum to keep them inside the tent; if the right split, it would have been a huge embarrassment for him. At that point, an anti-EU platform would not have taken many votes, but they would mostly have been Tory votes.
The Tories were already a neoliberal govenment, and they were blithely confident that they would win the referendum - it was a free hit for the loons, which was supposed to shut them up for another decade. Cameron had nothing to gain except silencing an annoying sideshow. He was already five years into an aggressive neoliberal strategy.
He shrugged off the power of bullshit stories such as "bendy bananas" and "Romanian squatters", despite the fact that they were in the Sun (proles), the Mail (proles with pretensions of intelligence), the Spectator (unintelligent toffs), and the Telegraph (obedient middle class). My apologies if you take the Spectator for the cartoons.
Despite their swivelly eyes, the Leave campaign acquired a huge war chest - namely, money from forex speculators and from Russia, which tells you exactly who benefits.
_Aside: London has been a haven for Russian money since glasnost. Russian oligarchs had been funding the Tories for years. Russia had total access to English politics up until the 2022 sanctions. The report from the inquiry into Leave campaign irregularities was suppressed._
The Leave backers brought in Steve Bannon, fresh from Trump's campaign. Bannon is not a great talent, but, in the milieu of English political campaigns, he was ahead of the curve. England was unprepared for bare-faced lies being astroturfed on Facebook.
Meanwhile, Cameron burned his war chest on fucking leaflet drops.
Cameron failed to generate any positive talking points, and expected to win by default. He argued that we'd become poor if we left Europe, which did little to sway working-class voters whom he had spent 6 years impoverishing. This arrogance was reflected by Gove's soundbite "people in this country have had enough of experts".
A new constituency emerged: "gammon", named for their ruddy complexions; choleric boomers, typically educated and middle-class but who long ago waved goodbye to curious intelligence, susceptible to and active on Facebook. These people are not as bad as your American fox news zombies, but of the same ilk - spittle-flecked rants at the breakfast table, "simple common sense", highly emotional yet sublimely certain of their own rationality. These chumps did not have a legitimate grievance against the government or the EU; their apoplexy was inchoate; they were merely channeled by the grifters.
Combine the gammon with the uninformed working class plebs, who bought into the threats of waves of gypsies arriving from Romania and mixed it with baseline sentiment against immigrants from all countries, and also the huge constituency that just wanted to give the arrogant neoliberals a black eye, and you have a win against the odds for Leave.
Excuse my rambling. It's hard to be concise when you're incandescent with fury.
Sounds like Switzerland. I think it works well there. But the Swiss make a virtue of civic duty, and, IIUC, voting is frequent and somewhat compulsory, which I imagine tends to sustain an informed electorate.
If you don't have an informed electorate, then you're in danger of Brexit. I could paste my previous, but let's just say that sheep exist to be fleeced.
I read quite a bit on Swiss democracy and the causality seems to be the other way around than politicians elsewhere always claim. Having lots of referenda on many levels (local, cantonal, federal) increases voter participation and makes people more informed and involved in politics.
I agree - I'd call it a virtuous cycle. Although I suppose there's a time and effort cost.
But I dint see how, e.g. the UK, could get there from here. If we started having six referenda a year, I foresee the electorate largely switching off, leaving only the rabid and the pensioners. They don't need any more influence.
If we campaigned for this change, the campaign won't survive its first day. There's nothing in it for the legacy media, and it's not snappy enough to go viral.
Perhaps if we first moved to coalition-based politics, the way would open to direct democracy? I anyway like coalition-based politics on its own merits, which I hope would be:
- increased voter information and engagement
- moving discourse from identity politics to issues
- reduce the power of media interests
- offer choices between broad manifestos and single-issue campaigns
- enfranchise people not represented by the current dominant parties
- capture voter preferences more accurately
- reduce the cyclical nature of government
- due to which, promote long-term thinking
Germany looks like a happy example; Israel looks like a problematic one. Israel suffers from an intolerant minority; from here, the tail looks to be wagging the dog on all the big issues, which is not a healthy dynamic. I think that's particular to that nation, though.
Coalition politics is still a very tough sell in countries with FPTP. We'd have to start by abolishing that.
Every time I think through a political issue, I arrive at the same conclusion: the most pressing issue for the UK and America is the abolition of FPTP. It's frustrating.
