Save democracy! Vote for my None of the Below Party
DID democracy die the other night when Donald Trump and Joe Biden scuffled, snarled and shouted over each other, showing utter contempt for anyone intelligent who was watching? People who loathe freedom, such as the Chinese Politburo in Peking, must have rejoiced at this spectacle of incoherence and crudity.
But there’s no point in us feeling superior to those raucous Americans. Our own political debates are as mindless in their own way, and our elections decided not by reasoned discussion but by unchecked bending of the spending rules, by unscrupulous hidden persuaders.
If this was the end of democracy, it hasn’t lasted long. Full democracy only arrived in the USA in 1913 when they first started electing the Senate. It finally came to Britain in 1948 when they abolished the University seats in Parliament which gave graduates extra votes.
I’d say it has not been much of a success, launching an era when people were repeatedly bribed with their own money, by increasingly cynical political careerists. And since the advertising men got involved in the 1950s, slippery manipulators have taken over. Image, not truth, has been at the centre of every major campaign.
ALL very well, until the image turns out to be false and the promises undeliverable or untrue. It doesn’t matter that Harold Wilson preferred cigars to a pipe and brandy to beer. It did matter that his supposedly mainstream 1964-70 Government launched a series of searing, painful and often mistaken changes in our society which had never been put before the people, and whose real nature had been concealed.
Left-wingers might make similar charges against Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher, as neither of them were what they appeared to be. But to this day, few people have grasped the enormous revolutionary programme of the 1997 Blair Government.
Blair, a former student Trotskyist (a fact which was dishonestly concealed at the time and for years afterwards) was in fact a fervent social radical. What Wilson had begun – revolutions in family life, crime and punishment, education and welfare – Blair finished. He also browbeat the Tories into going along with it all and leaving it untouched.
This is why you never get what you want when you vote. The debate is elsewhere. You are just required to endorse it by voting for it. Your vote, in the modern age, gives legitimacy to the powerful. They will spend a lot of money to get that vote, but it is a false bargain. They do not really care what you want, but they have got a lot better at pretending that they do.
To me, it has been obvious for years that we should stop playing this game. The greatest power we have is to refuse to vote for people who insult us. My simple proposal is that the words ‘None Of The Below’ should appear at the top of every ballot paper. In all seats where ‘None Of The Below’ tops the poll, all the losing parties and candidates should be prevented from standing in the rerun which would then be held a month later.
In the interval, new political formations which truly reflect the divisions in our society should select candidates who are quite free from the careerism, conformism and inexperience of life which seem to be the main qualifications for MPs in these times.
After the spineless confirmation of the scandalous Coronavirus Act last week – in which almost all MPs declared that they do not care about the country or the livelihoods and freedom of the people – can you think of a better idea? Begone, all of you, and let us have done with you.