OK, Russell, so if you don’t like representative democracy, what’s your alternative? Anarchy? Fascism? Monarchical absolutism? An Islamic Caliphate? Because you can’t have a functioning democracy without politicians; and politicians, in every parliament, tend to group themselves officially or unofficially into parties.
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Samizdata quote of the dayDecember 14th, 2014 |
 37 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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If he’d asked me, I’d have advocated not democracy, but Meridism. This is where all who want to be citizens of their local government would first do some community service (militia, fire-service, road patrol,etc.), and then be assigned a month in which 1/12th of the citizens would BE the government for their local shire/canton/county. Time-share government, with states and nations becoming conference of governments for resolving disputes, etc.
If this system was adopted, no need for parties to exist.
Disallowing parties is removing the right of free association, a far greater evil.
Allowing parties to dissolve themselves, because they are no longer needed, would not be. If you have Democracies, something like parties occurs (even within Parties, when they are called factions). Another way around it would be for politicians to be selected randomly, like in Lotto. Party affiliations would not matter then.
Actually, Nick, it’s my view that random selection could be a viable basis for replacement of the House of Lords.
Every 5 years, select a voter at random from the voter’s list. Voter could decline appointment, but no status qualifications (except maybe severe lack of mental capacity). Pay them an MP’s salary for 5 years. Call it the National Forum, or something similar. House of Commons to function much as present; National Forum could not initiate legislation, but could require amendments or veto it. (And no ministerial appointments.)
Maybe additionally a Legislation Review Board to identify technical flaws in legislation, and flag up unintended consequences.
It’s the only genuine way to provide a chamber independent of the party political system.
@Nick
That sounds a bit like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withering_away_of_the_state
I agree with the point Daniel is making, but his argument is weak.
Daniel Hannan is sufficiently astute to understand that politicians tend to group themselves into parties – officially or unofficially.
He is insufficiently astute to understand the below quotation, which helps explain why he was under the impression that his question could possibly be rhetorical. The answer to his query, of course, is divine-right, absolute hereditary monarchy.
People get the government they deserve. The UK has an awful government – far worse than even Samizdata folks realize. And the people deserve even worse than what they get now. And the people will get what they deserve in good time.
http://maistre.uni.cx:8000/sovereignty.html
If there must be political parties, support the party of principles I.e. the Libertarian Party .
Hannan is of course correct, but the worst thing you can do is allow parties, as distinct from their members, to gain formal control by according them recognition and privilege from the state, and exclude others from participating in politics. This is what Britain has done progressively since 1997, nationalising politics:
Registration of Political Parties Act 1998
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/48/contents
Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/41/contents
Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act 2014
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2014/4/contents/enacted
Some of the changes proposed by Hannan and Carswell in their The Plan are calculated to increase the influence of parties as well, by making more opportunities for policy to be determined by popular voting.
Bit of a straw man argument here?
Hannan does not mention direct democracy, which, many have argued, has been (re)enabled by modern technology (the Internet, social media etc.).
Should not parties that are criminal organisations be banned? The Labour Party springs to mind, having expressly set out to nationalise the means of production, and also having broken the Geneva Conventions during the 1992 UK General Election by abusing the Red Cross symbol for political ends.
Jeff, this is a bit of a problem if you Re a skilled professional and your career relies upon keeping those skills updated. After five years you leave Parliament and find yourself practically unemployable, having taken a pay cut for five years as well.
Not a problem if the nominated individual can decline the appointment. I would also wonder if there might be a lucrative post-senatorial career for many on the speaking circuit etc.
I don’t like Nick’s idea at all. Running a grocery store serves the community just as much as being a fireman. If Nick’s qualification is simply to do with doing community services without pay, then it sounds like a recipe for government by activist. I’d rather have government by grocers.
Democracy is vastly overrated.
Whatever system is put in place any new law that a) prohibits something that was previously permissible, b) increases the punishment for certain behaviour, c) increases the tax rate for any individual/group, d) centralises any decision making process ought to be put to a referendum. When a referendum is not put in place all current taxation is declared void.
It won’t solve all the problems, but should solve many of them.
Nope. We have political parties, but the vast majority of sitting members of the House of Keys are independent of any political party or affiliation and proud of that fact (1 Labour and 3 Liberals with the remaining 20 independents).
But, John Galt, if they wanted to form associations among themselves, it would be immoral to prevent them.
“Starship Troopers” Mr Gray?
Not such a far fetched idea. For example Aristotle (in “The Politics”) reports that in those times (before Carthage went over to a mercenary army) those who had not served in the military were not allowed to vote.
Still to answer’s Daniel H’s question directly….
He misses a few points.
Firstly he confuses majority consent with individual consent, a mistake that goes back to John Locke.
Gough (a perfectly respectable Oxford academic) pointed out that it had been a commonplace in Medieval thought that individual consent and majority consent were not the same thing – and that close attention to the text supports the case that Locke was deliberately fudging the difference between the two.
Also the consent of politicians (representatives) is not the same thing as the consent of the voters.
British policy on a whole range of matters (immigration, the death penalty, homosexuality, racial matters….) has, at least since the 1960s, shown utter contempt for majority consent.
The politicians (rightly or wrongly) follow the fashions of university thought – not the opinions of the voters, and voting for a different party does not change this outcome.
So whether democracy (the consent of the majority) is a good idea or a bad one, it should not be with “representative” democracy which is often (normally?) not “representative” at all. This does NOT that the present system is wrong (after all most people have come round to, for example, “socially liberal” polices – after decades of “education” and media conditioning) – it should just not be confused with democracy, whether or not democracy is good or bad.
The Swiss have, to some extent, a system of democracy (although the government influence on the education system and the media, means that referendum campaigns are very one sided indeed), things are very different here.
As for a different system?
What about a constitutional system?
It used to be a common place of British thinking that there were things that Parliament could NOT do.
Chief Justice Sir John Holt (of the “Glorious Revolution” period) did not live to see the “Parliament can do anything it likes” doctrines of Blackstone – and would have called him out to a duel if he had.
Later generations (taught by the followers of Jeremy Bentham) were taught to even regard Blackstone, as a “reactionary”.
“Natural law?”, “natural justice?” – how silly, if Parliament wants to force feed you your own fingers and toes (for “the greatest good of the greatest number” – say they really like watching you being force fed your fingers and toes, and their pleasure outweighs your pain, as there are so many of them) of course that can do it if they want to.
This is not exactly the tradition of the Bill of Rights – at least not the American one.
Why should not a government be strictly limited? Say that word “specifically” had been left in the Tenth Amendment, it was there in the draft, would that have been so terrible?
And why should politicians be a special caste anyway?
Members of Parliament were not paid till 1911 – did Parliament become magically better after it was paid?
Members of the New Mexico (quite a big place) State Legislature are not paid to this day – there is no shortage of people wishing to stand for election. Including people of humble backgrounds.
Members of Parliament only turned up a few hours for a few days till the “reforms” of Pitt the Younger in the late 18th century (with the all night sittings and other things that meant that only lawyers could hold down jobs and still be members of Parliament).
The Texas State Legislature – a place with a population of tens of millions and a huge land area, only meets a few days a year. True they do not have to time to pass many laws – but is that a bad thing? Should laws come like bake bean cans – on a production line? So that the law is radically different from year to year as “the legislature” makes more and more laws?
And Governors of Texas do not have the power to make law by “Executive Orders” or what we British call “Orders in Council” – is this really so terrible?
I think jamess has identified the essential point, which is that whatever the system for electing governors, if you want a liberal democracy, as opposed to just a democracy, you have to make it harder to pass illiberal (inc property thieving) laws than other kinds. Constitutional rights that require supermajorities to amend them are all very well, but they are generally written so vaguely that it’s left for the judiciary to decide “reasonable” exceptions, and the judiciary are seldom reasonable.
So distinguishing laws that restrict liberty, from other laws, and making them harder to pass and easier to repeal sounds like a good plan. I think “easier to repeal” is just as important as “harder to pass” though the Americans for all their constitutional wisdom didn’t think of that one. Maybe you elect the House of Lords every ten years from the over 30s, and you create a Royal Assent Counsellor (to advise HM whether to sign or not) elected annually. That leaves three slightly different elected things required to pass a law. But then you have a rule that any one of them can repeal a liberty-restricting law. That would create a ratchet – you have to line up three lemons to get a new illiberal law, but you only need one lemon to get rid of it.
This is just how much of a twat Russell Brand is:
He plagiarised his “Pound Shop Enoch Powell” jibe from a 1 star review on Amazon of his own book made in November.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A2IVJBVQZZHJNN/ref=pdp_new_read_full_review_link?ie=UTF8&page=1&sort_by=MostRecentReview#RKU0MFG0NZJCN
Something that first occured to me as whimsy, but which I have since begun take seriously: make it legal for private parties to use violence against those who abuse government power, treating the violence as an exercise in self-defense. Properly drafted, an ‘abuse of power’ defense would be no more of an invitation to gratuitous violence than the ‘self-defense’ defense presently is.
The alternative is to continue to rely on government to control abuse of government, and we know how well that works.
PfP: Anything remotely like your proposal would lead to socialist lynch mobs attacking any politician who even mentioned cutting public spending.
Mr Ed: Or the SWP / UAF attacking UKIP rallies.
Wait a minute…..
A very old idea that I still think has some merit is for every statute to have a date before which it has to be renewed or else it expires. That would have the twin benefits of helping to get obsolete laws off the books and giving the legislature something to do other than passing new laws. If we renew the government every few years on the premise that “the people” may have changed their mind about what they want, why not do the same for statues?
Some statues have been passed with such a date built in, but I don’t know of any system under which that is the norm.
Legislatures should be prevented from borrowing to provide largesse.
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy.”
Allegedly Alexander Fraser Tytler
Allow me to suggest government by monarchical unicorn; it’s about as viable a form of government as anything I’ve read here so far.
I’m amused by this website’s nigh-universal acceptance of “the market” (i.e. free market forces, with all the foibles and failures therein), but the total rejection of the concept when applied to democratic politics.
Remember Kim’s Maxim: Communism attempts to suppress human nature, while capitalism merely exacerbates it — and libertarianism tries to ignore it.
Political parties are inevitable — humans are social (i.e. herd) animals — and most attempts to eliminate them end with worse consequences than the evils they started off with.
Kim du Toit,
‘Capitalism’ is subverted by the Top End of Town who don’t tolerate competition and have to be propped up by Socialist Maladministrations protecting the jobs of bludging unionists i.e. Fascism, the highest form of Socialism.
Johnnydub
The phrase “dime store Che Guevara” springs instantly to mind.
Kim,
Surely government by monarchical unicorn is a problem in a society where rape is apparently so prevalent – there would be no virgins around to catch the bloody thing to make decisions…
Hang on, a government that makes no decisions – I think this is probably a good idea after all…
…and then the members of the mob would be sent to prison for murder, if the politician had not in fact abused his power. The measure is no more likely to be a successful defense for unjustified violence than ‘self-defense’ is.
Best takedown of Brand I have seen in a while is at http://blog.squandertwo.net/2014/12/an-open-letter-to-russell-brand.html
In the end, the thing to remember about a person such as Russell Brand is that he committed the vile, if not criminal, act, of leaving an obscene phone message on the voicemail system of actor Andrew Sachs, and did so very publically, on a radio show. The man is an exhibitionist twit, whose desperation to be taken seriously – presumably because his Hollywood career is closed to him, is sad to see.
It is one thing for RB to opine on how shit many current politicians are. But whenever people say that we need to destroy the current system for a better one, I usually notice they go hiding when the rubble gets thrown around. The likely replacement for the flawed system of liberal, corporatist democracy is probably some version of outright authortarianism. I’d like to hope we get a sort of Jeffersonian Republic, but I notice that the Russell Brands of this world don’t seem to be all that well acquainted with their John Lockes, James Madisons or Montesquieus. Mores the pity.
Brand ought to be shot in the rectum.
Um. Says who? You’re not likely to get one designed by politicians I suppose, but that’s hardly the same thing.
You can’t have politicians unless you pay them in this day and age*, so the simple answer is not to pay politicians and let volunteers do the job, putting in the hours around a ‘normal’ job.
* Yes I know MPs used to be unpaid, and paying them lets in the unmonied classes, but paying them creates the class of professional politician. Better that they do a little in their spare time.