In the UK Far Right parties have consistently attempted to gain power and been consistently ignored by the electorate. The same can be said for Far Left parties. In the post World War II world their particular brand of utopian bullshit has never fallen on especially fertile ground in the West.
Or has it?
The nature of constituency politics as opposed to a proportional representation system ensured that in the 2010 UK General election the British National Party were kept out of Parliament despite winning 569,000 votes or 1.9% of the total. It’s worth bearing in mind that while this wasn’t enough to secure them any seats in the House of Commons the 469,000 votes for the Scottish National Party was enough to secure them six. Similarly UKIP won almost a million votes or 3.1% in 2010 and also gained no seats
Is that fair? Is that democratic?
You can’t really answer those questions until you define what democracy is. Or what it isn’t. I know I’m not bothered by the discrepancy, quite the opposite I would have been extraordinarily concerned had the BNP won even a single seat in Parliament.
But that’s a bit antidemocratic isn’t it? If you’re shaking your head right now and claiming that this is all nonsense you might want to raise your voice and challenge one Jeremy Corbyn who uses the word democratic all the time while running roughshod over the Parliamentary Labour Party. For him democracy is something consisting of many parts, the ones you don’t like you get to ignore entirely. All the while calling yourself more democratic.
An unfortunate quirk of democracy is that it leaves the door open for itself to be destroyed. If it is the will of the people every election is potentially a country’s last. Hitler and Mussolini were both elected to parliament by a populace who bought into their visions for society. More recently Hamas were elected to rule Gaza. In fact history is filled with examples of people giving away their freedom to demagogues.
As in Turkey.
Last night I listened to Jeremy Corbyn witter on about how the Labour Party now has 600,000 members and all I could think about were the Brown Shirts. Democracy at it’s best. More people taking an interest in the Labour Party than ever before etc etc.
Personally I quite like it when things are so good that the question of who runs the country is quite irrelevant.
This makes it clear for me, if there was any doubt before. I’m not really interested in elections. I mean Christ wasn’t it enough to learn from those ridiculous photo ops in Afghanistan? Illiterate people risked death to vote for a choice of candidates they didn’t know none of whom had any control of their country.
I wonder how democratic those poor bastards are feeling right now.
Democracy lies not in the election and certainly not with the whim of the people but with the institutions of a country, with the rights of the individual and the protection of those rights by institutions safeguarded from whichever moron people were stupid enough to follow.
Let’s face it, It takes a certain type of arsehole to believe they’re able to run an entire country, to make life and death decisions on behalf of millions of people. The very best of these people are right up there on the line of being the worst kinds of demagogues and the worst kinds of demagogues always seem to be able to feel out the weaknesses of their countrymen and exploit them to their advantage.
So when people say the will of the people should be respected and that coups aren’t on I say a leader who shits on his own people, on their rights and their freedom is a leader who needs to be deposed. Democratic election be damned!
Long live a free Turkey,
Long live a Trump free USA,
Long live a Corbyn free UK!
