Debilitated democracy

With regard to Korat Chris’s response to my earlier “Democracy failings” letter, I did not venture to suggest that either ballot result was “invalid because an unseen majority didn’t bother to vote”, as he alleges.

The point that I was humbly trying to make was that if we cannot get all of the people to come out and vote, we must accept that elections in their present form simply invite a take-over by a large minority of extremists, and that the result of properly regulated opinion polls (which represent more accurately the opinions of the entire electorate and not just a proportion of disgruntled citizens) are truly more representative of the majority.

Some evidence can be found found in the US result, a tiny majority taken from barely more than half of the population has given us a world leader generally considered to be the politician most likely to start a nuclear war. Incidentally, his Republican predecessor, George W Bush, who generously presented us with the Iraq war and arguably the Syrian imbroglio and much of the current refugee crisis, was elected on almost identical minority numbers — a mere one in four of the US electorate!

As for the UK Brexit result, approximately one in three have supported Brexit. What they have actually voted for is an indefinite period of attempting to unravel 44 years of negotiating hundreds of deals which are already taking most of the government’s attention, amid massive uncertainty for all concerned.

As a UK citizen myself, I believe that we should have left the EU some 20 years ago when the European Court first began overruling decisions made by the highest UK courts, often at great cost to UK taxpayers.

The current issue should have been whether it was realistically and financially possible to actually achieve Brexit, and the general public were not equipped to do that anyway.

As an ex-UK citizen myself, I have to declare that I myself have not cast a vote in my entire life. I simply didn’t bother on the basis that whether or not I voted personally would not affect the result. Since not one of those elections was decided on one vote (of about 40 million), I always felt vindicated.

Unhelpful that this attitude may be, I feel that it probably goes a long way to explain why democracy in it’s present form is proving dysfunctional.