To be frustrated with representative democracy

[StrongLegs]

I'm getting really frustrated with the way things are being run by politicians and I wondered if it is just me?

Things that frustrate me:

• Failure to tax the big corporations like Facebook, Google and Amazon (I realise that this is a global problem).
• House prices that exclude young people from the housing market
• Climate change
• Underfunding of the NHS
• Underfunding of schools
• Erosion of workers right by zero hours contracts and companies like Uber.
• Westminster government ignoring the devolved nations, even during critical negotiations like Brexit and covid.
• Propping up banks when they were being so stupid in the 90s

but not propping up musicians during the covid period.

• I see greed everywhere, and it frustrates me terribly.

I've been voting to change all this kind of stuff for donkeys' years, but it doesn't seem to make any difference. I just wondered if anybody had any thoughts? I'm happy to hear anything at all.

I don't plan to repond to comments as I know this is a huge and complex topic.

I just would be really interested to hear what others think.

YABU - representative democracy is just fine, and I feel that our politicans represent my views
YANBU - I understand your frustrations and agree either completely, or to some extent.

Please give details. I would really like to know what you think.

@felulageller yes, I think we're just used to FPTP and most people probably didn't think much about it. I just did what my parents said to do.

@fingersfy good point :-)

Was it Winston Churchill who said "democracy is the worse system of government, except for all the other systems of government that have been tried from time to time"? Or words to that effect.

The trouble with democracy is that everyone's vote is equal. Even the people who still won't vote Tory because of Thatcher or think that we should reintroduce slavery.

Scrapping first past the post isn't the solution, because whatever alternative is used (PR, AV etc) the fundamental problem is still the same - every idiot can vote.

I'm not massively in favour of totalitarianism and suspect our current western democracies are generally better than living under a dictatorship. But any attempt to strengthen democracy by limiting the vote to people who have a certain level of intelligence would be doomed to failure, it would be called racist for a start (an accusation which would be racist in itself).

The "choice" is straightforward: a democracy where you are usually left disappointed, or a situation where not everyone gets a say and rules are dictated to them (whether by an individual or a group of people who have the "correct" opinions).

@mustlovegin

You have to accept the views of the majority. Tough if they don't agree with your own

View of majority is not what we have

But people had the chance to vote for PR in 2010/11? And didn't!

Well, they didn't, it was AV and fed with all sorts of lies about what AV would mean/lead to and a referendum set up by the senior coalition partner to be as likely to fail as possible. And with no House of Lords reform.

I'd much prefer a system like Australia - AV in the lower house (so you get a constituency link where the MP actually reflects the preferences of the majority of voters) and proper PR in the upper house, on a regional basis.

It's really interesting that so many people are in favour of a change to FPTP. I completely did not expect that.

"The trouble with democracy is that everyone's vote is equal"

Not in FPTP it isn't. Millions know their vote is a complete waste and it leads to the disaffected apathy of Westminster voters, and (probably directly) the absolutely horse-shit politicians we get as a result.

@mustlovegin

You have to accept the views of the majority. Tough if they don't agree with your own

Unhelpfully reductionist. And not accurate either.

Our governments rarely represent the majority. FPTP and the varying number of voters in each constituency makes it perfectly possible for not only the party in power to have fewer than half of the votes cast but that sometimes another party actually gets more votes. This happened in a number of elections in the 20th century. (And was also the case in the US in 2016 when more votes were cast for Clinton than Trump).

Telling people that a democracy basically means 'suck it up' is a prime example of why we need better politics education.

Thanks @chunderwunder. This really making me feel better about the problem.

It's really been confusing me because I grew up in the north, watching my friends' Dads losing their blue collar jobs under Thatcher, when we seemed to have no control at all over the Westminster government.

At the time, I felt that maybe if I lived in the south, someone would take my vote into account.

However, now I live in the south, in an area with a strong remain + labour vote, and so now, again, it seems that our opinions have no effect at all.

Maybe PR would help a bit?

I'm not sure it's going to happen though is it?

@knittingaddict

Completely new voting system required

I would argue that we need completely new politicians.

Of course but they're just taking advantage of the outdated voting system.

Put a brand-new engine in a decrepit chassis and the wheels will fall off before it can get anywhere.

New system essential. FPTP = Tory shitfest for the foreseeable.

Thinking about praticalities though - are we likely every to get rid of FPTP, and if we can't then what do we do instead?

Practicalities I mean, sorry.

Part of the problem is the way you are seeing this. I'm heavily involved in local politics and governance, and there's fantastic local politicians that are either Labour, LibDem or Conservative. I often think if we could just bunch them up into a party called the "we get shit done" party, and toss out all the dead weight, we might get somewhere.

Another part of the problem is that the electorate expect politicians to solve highly complex problems that, in reality, don't actually have an easy solution. In some cases, there aren't viable democratic solutions government can actually action without stepping over the line into an abuse of human rights.

The issue is that politicians won't admit this. They won't say: "we can fix X without doing Y, and you are not going to accept us doing Y, so we are stuck." This is why you end up with so much tinkering round the edges.

Another issue is that modern government needs radical thinkers to come up with ideas to solve said unretractable problems. But no one likes radical thinkers; they make people nervous.

So we just go round and round with the same types of politicians, and nothing ever changes.

@Packingsoapandwater Yes I see what you mean.

I have noticed that there are really good people in the different parties. After all the wild stuff going on in Westminster over the Brexit debate, I decided to just vote for the best person in our constituency, irrespective of their party affiliation, since parliamentary votes really seemed to matter. I could see that we were going to need smart thinkers if we had more of that kind of problem.

However, then covid came along and parliament essentially seems to have been sidelined in favour of a small group of Conservatives who in the first lockdown were just battling to keep things going, as far as I could see. So that was a really sudden change in how we are governed.

I see what you mean about how some problems are intractable.

I do wonder whether we - the public - need start thinking outside of the box a bit though, because some of the problems are getting really serious.

I mean we need to do something about climate change, and that seems maybe like an opportunity for job creation in the blue collar kinds of jobs that we are currently missing.

I think we also need to do something about redistributive taxation, because the gap between the rich and poor is just getting ridiculous.

I noticed some people trying to game the system recently to vote together with other parties to get the best person in, and avoid FPTP messing things up. I think that's an interesting idea.

I think that there are realistically only so many ways of organising the kind of huge societies that we have now - 65 million people, the same size as the Roman Empire at its height, coincidentally. The idea that you can have democracy in such huge and varied population sizes is very difficult to hold on to. It is in the nature of human institutions to become more and more corrupt, and distant from their founding ideals as wealth grows and hierarchies stretch out. That has already happened to us: it happened back in the 80s when entire ways of life that had held for 200 years were destroyed, with nothing to put in their place except private landlording and the international freedom of capital and money makers. If democracy is what we want, then we need the discipline and organisation back, we need information and the expectation of an educated and informed populace, not one that glues itself to Love Island and social media - one that can understand what the hell the politicians are up to - and more than anything else, the sense of a unified whole. As things stand now, the UK does not have that sense of unified whole - even England does not. There is too much variety, too many different beliefs and customs and expectations, far too much wealth and income inequality. The result is exactly the kind of attitudes ChainJane illustrates. Every year that passes, our culture looks more and more like that Roman Empire, and our 'voting' system, manipulated by media, looks ever more similar to that 'bread and circuses' imperialism, if not outright totalitarianism.

As for climate change getting serious - it got serious a long time ago.

@PickUpAPepper This is great! This is the sort of thing I want to hear.

So do you think we'd get on better if our country was broken down into bits with much much more devolution?

Because that at least is a realistic possibility, the way things are going.

Also @PickUpAPepper how can I learn more about that stuff?

I didn't do history at school because we had to choose between history and geography and I chose geography.

I feel as though I am missing a whole lot of knowledge of economics and apparently now history that is important. As I get older and more able to influence things, it seems as though I ought to know enough about this stuff to shove things in the right direction.

I was just thinking a bit more about what you all said about education and what @PickUpAPepper said about having too many people to govern.

I just recently discovered a twitter feed that shows how many covid cases there are in my local hospital and I actually found it reassuring. I think that having factual information like that really helps to counteract the fear that I feel from the more generic reporting about how everything is terrible.

I wondered if looking for really reliable local reporting is something that I should do? I do know where to find it, because we have one really good local newspaper.

Local information sources are important, and unfortunately increasingly difficult to find. It's part of the death of reporting and newspapers generally. If you've got a good local one, support it. You could walk into a local history library and have a look through some old local newspapers to see the difference in tone and reporting content.

What's "that stuff"? History is a huge topic - the stories of all the people and polities that have ever existed will tend to be. If you're interested in political organisation, the classical Greek world and then the growth of Rome and its transformation into empire might be a good era to look into. The Greek city-states were varied politically. Maybe look up Plato! You'd want the recent history of our own time, and perhaps the Victorians too, perhaps those local newspapers again. Just read around, basically.

There's quite a few beginner books on politics and economics. OUP did a nice series called "a very short introduction" which might be a place to start. There's a Penguin History of Economics too, and a Pelican 'Economics the User's Guide'. The Economist is a well-regarded magazine for regular perusal, although centre-right I would say.

To claim democracy exists we certainly need stronger local government, and to tolerate the occasional conflict with national political aims. There have been different forms in the past. I'm not convinced that the regions and mayors currently being promoted are a good way forward, I think they're still too big and too focused on individuals - celebrity politics.

Thanks @PickUpAPepper, this is great.

I'll start reading our good local newspaper and try the OUP very short introduction book. That will get me off to a good start.

I'm so glad I plucked up the courage to start this thread. It's been brilliant to have such a good discussion about it. Thanks!

Oh my! There are a dizzying array of OUP very short introductions on this subject. I have put lots of them on my amazon wishlist.

For me, it’s the least worse option. Labour appear childish at the moment and unable to have proper views on anything important. Lib Dem’s went down hill a while ago. Whilst I don’t agree with everything the conservatives do, they are the only party I feel confident in right now. I’m also more right of centre in my views and labour are too left for me.

In order for the other parties to catch more of the centre/right of centre population, things like this

I think we also need to do something about redistributive taxation, because the gap between the rich and poor is just getting ridiculous.

Need to be dropped. That’s too far from right wing opinion. I’m all for schemes that help people better themselves and all for affordable options and decent minimum wages, but redistribution of wealth is a step too far for me. I will never vote a party in who have these kinds of policies, and I consider myself fairly central. Central policies need to be pushed more, rather than extreme right or left, to gain the majority.

^ that just shows how far right wing imperialist thinking has taken over our culture. And the damage new labour did. Perhaps people need to think more about what redistribution means - ie public services and the recreation of a ladder of chances to enable people to better themselves, not just hand out money as if it was paper. Conversely, the consequences of continually blocking people from bettering themselves from their own efforts by leveraging pre-existing capital and power.

Other single books you can check out are the famous ‘The Spirit Level’ and ‘Power and Plenty’ by Findlay and o’Rourke, which stresses geography.

The last few years of life in the UK have comletely overhauled my attitude to politics and I know I will never vote again, despite having felt srongly about the importance of doing so all my life. Democracy feels to me like nothing more than legitimised corruption. It is merely a select few elected officials enriching themselves at the expense of the many and maintaining the status quo but without the overt control and violence manifest in dictatorships; here it is much more subtle and handily obfuscated with the collusion of the mass media (particularly social) and lack of quality investigative journalism. I think the illusion that we have choice and control is one (of the many) reasons why people are so angry and this anger is steadily gaining momentum. Accountability and robust opposition are two essential components of a healthy, functioning democracy, both of which are woefully lacking. It is no accident that the public discourse has become so polarised with virtually any topic up for debate splitting into a 'you versus me' camp. Your post speaks to me of wider issues concerning how we organise society in general. I have stopped looking to centralised Government to effect any meaningful change and now look inwards to my local community. I don't recognise any of the so called 'leaders' of any of the parties; they ultimately have no knowledge, interest or care for lives outside of their immediate social orbit. If you think about it, how has the human race, with all its resource and intelligence, allowed the fate of millions and millions of people to fall into the hands of one, single, human being, a human being who is no different to you or me. Such absolute concentration of power is just breathtaking; this is what democracy has delivered us. So no, OP, I don't disagree with you. I think the western liberal democratic model is in crisis, is fracturing and the outcome is not going to be pretty.

If you still support this Government after the way they have handled Brexit negotiations and the Covid pandemic, and in light of their policies in general, you have lost the right to call yourself “right of centre”. This is the hardest right wing government this country has had in generations.

PR is the only way out of this mess. FPTP is not representative democracy. More people voted against the Tories than voted for them. They are a minority party with an overwhelming majority of seats in Parliament. They are turning this country into a totalitarian state and with the majority they now have, everyone is powerless to stop them. They now want to imprisonments journalists if they criticise them.

We are in very scary times and I don’t see any way out currently. The best hope would be a left-wing electoral pact with a single joint manifesto pledge of introducing electoral reform.

recreation of a ladder of chances to enable people to better themselves, not just hand out money as if it was paper.

@PickUpAPepper I’m all for creating fair opportunities for everyone to take if they wish to and want to put the effort in. It’s not fair that the majority of opportunities still exist for those in private education or those who know influential people. But actually when lots of people talk about redistribution of wealth, what they actually mean is taking away assets and wealth from people who happen to have more then them, and given to themselves and I’m not ok with that. Whether that’s what it’s supposed to mean or not, that’s what many people are talking about when they mention it.