Government as we know it is dysfunctional. That’s the baseline, and I’m sorry if that upsets you enough to stop reading, but that is, I believe, a fact. Government is dysfunctional because it pretends to be democratic without truly being democratic. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think there can be a true democracy anymore. There could be, and for a long time there still was true democracy in one of the cantons in Switzerland where they had a “Landsgemeinde”, something like an AGM for the whole canton where every man and woman would flock to and vote on issues by raising their hand; Democracy. But today’s society doesn’t want that. The people want to vote, yes, but after they’ve voted they wan someone else to get on with it. I don’t agree with that attitude, but it’s basically true.
But I don’t think we necessarily need true democracy to have a functional government. What we do need is something that doesn’t turn into a Dictatorship the moment the elections are over. Let me elaborate: from the moment when one of our glorious parties gets elected and starts their term they rule and that’s it for the next five years. Whatever, No. 10 comes up with will have to be agreed by their peers because they’re in the same party. Oh yeah, there’s the houses of commons and lords respectively. But it seems to me they’re only there so they can adapt the Prime Minister’s Opinion and vote in favour of whatever he churns out.
“The Prime Minister’s been working hard to convince the members of parliament that the underlying policy change regarding tuition fees needs to be voted through”. That’s not how it should work! “Convincing representatives of the population” does not equal “representing the opinion of the population”! I mean, that’s why you have the houses of parliament. It’s representatives telling you what the opinions and views of the population they represent are and that means they can tell you to shove it if a particular policy draft does not express the views of the population. Which isn’t the same as: “this representative has just changed his opinion regarding the rise in tuition fees and therefore, so has the population he stands for”!
What I said to my friend Friday yesterday was that democratic government should be a system of peer review! We further our knowledge, our sciences through this system which, while not making it impossible to publish bad science and wrongful theory, at least has the benefit of being independent, unbiased, and above all critically thorough in that all publications need to undergo this procedure. In fact the only exception to this rule are the cosmetic sciences research studies but only because they wouldn’t make it through peer review.
I think this government is flawed in that it has become overprotective of its system. By system I mean, The country, the government, the economy, in fact everything except the people. This government is of the opinion that the people will benefit if the system is upheld. And so they preach to the masses to increase spending in order to feed the economy on the basis of what? That jobs will be preserved? That people have an income? Yeah, great, how much of a commercial company’s annual income is used up in employee’s wages? It’s a fraction! The rest feeds the corporate game of “eat or be eaten”. No, rather than to preach that we should spend, spend, spend and even take out a loan to spend even more, I think this government should realise that the system will recover ONLY if the people benefit. If I don’t know where my next pay check is coming from or when it’s going to come I’m certainly not in a spending mood, and that should be praised as a healthy attitude to money! Only if I save can I have money later on which I can then spend in order to feed the economy. Why would I want to feed the economy if I haven’t got enough money to feed myself? So why then, doesn’t the government preach a healthier spending attitude to its citizens? Because it benefits in turn if the people are in dept and that it the cruellest form of citizen-state dependency. If you keep the people poor to the extent that they owe money to the country (read: the system) they will produce a continuous cycle of spiralling dept and long term loan repayment and this, so the government thinks, will help the economy. But whether it also helps its citizens is highly doubtful. It’s as if the government seems to think that a richer population will be likely to jump ship and leave the country, thereby stopping their contribution to the national economy. Personally I don’t know why they’d want to do that? Maybe it’s because the government keeps screwing with them!
