Referendums call

I’m sorry that reader Keith Howell (Letters, 5 May) thinks referendums should be only as a last resort: he should spend more time in Switzerland – a far more successful country than Scotland – and see what a great success are their frequent plebiscites.

It is a political fact that parliaments stuffed with “elected representatives” exist for only two reasons: 1) that until the invention of the internet there was no way to inform and consult with all of the people for all of the time, and 2) that we, the people, being less educated and informed than a selfdefined elite political class are not to be entrusted with directly running our own and national affairs.

Things have changed. An unelected elite of 1,000 hasbeens is now ready, willing and able to frustrate the informed and democratically expressed will of the majority of voters, while some 630-odd (some very odd) party hacks daily prove they couldn’t run a something in a somewhere.

The days of our wishes being filtered and reshaped through the net of that well-described oxymoron known a “representative democracy” are drawing to a close. And the sooner the better.

As long ago as 2,300 years back, Aristotle observed that one sign of a true democracy is the absence of the need for beggars.

Well, we have beggars aplenty, whether we want them or not, so that’s a good a reason as any to bypass parliaments which enable beggary and listen instead to the largely ignored wisdom of crowds. Informed referendums are the future.

TIM FLINN Garvald, East Lothian