Wouldn't that be nice? In Britain we have a system where each town or district, called a 'constituency' has the right to send a representative to speak in Parliament on behalf of the local people. At least that's the theory. In practice, parliamentary seats have always been stitched up among a limited number of political parties and members of parliament (MPs) tend to represent their parties before their constituents. Similar things happen in other countries.
Political parties are rather like trade unions that MPs join, so as to gang up against their constituents. You have probably never thought about it that way before but I invite you to do so now.
We are all familiar with one party systems, the old USSR, North Korea and Communist China for example, where people can vote for any candidate they choose so long as he or she stands for the sole ruling Communist Party. Such countries call themselves 'democracies' although they don't seem very democratic to you and me.
Make it a two party state and you have doubled the choice and doubled the level of democracy. Make it a four party state and democracy doubles once again. Carrying this on to its logical conclusion, image a country that has the same number of parties as it has MPs. Then each MP would be independent and free to represent his or her constituents. You would have a very democratic system indeed.
But can we devise a system that is even more democratic than that? I think that, with the aid of modern technology, we can.
Every day in Britain, and around the world, millions of safe, secure chip and pin financial transactions take place. A few go wrong but only a miniscule percentage. Let's apply the same technology to our democratic process. Let's give every registered voter a chip and pin type poling card and let's put voting machines in every public building, Then everybody who chose to could vote in every debate in the House of Commons. There would need to be a delay of a couple of days after the debate before the vote to give people time to follow it on TV and to do their own research.
Of course most people would not have the time or the interest to participate in every vote. That's fine. That's what we have MPs for. Each MP would be able to cast as many votes as they have registered voters in their constituency LESS the number who chose to vote for themselves in that particular debate. Its child's play to write computer code to calculate that. Most 15 year olds could do it.
Just think about it, instead of being fobbed off with a token vote every five years or so, you could vote in every parliamentary debate that you had an interest in. Now that's what I call democracy.
There would have to be a couple of conditions. People would have to agree to stand by the democratic will of the people. There could be no demands for a second vote if the result doesn't go your way. If we could do that we would just go around in circles for ever. Just follow the debate, vote, then move on to the next issue.
No votes for prison inmates. Follow that to its logical conclusion and you could imagine some future where there would be enough inmates that they could vote to make their crime legal or vote to close all prisons. That would just be absurd.
And thirdly, and most controversially, no votes for first generation immigrants. Let people be free to live in any country they choose, where the laws and customs are to their liking, but don't let them move to a place where the laws and customs are not to their liking and then start making changes. That would just be crazy. If they don't like the way we do thing here, why come?
We really must stop bickering among ourselves. Its not the ordinary people who are to blame, left, right, centre, we are all on the same side. If there is an enemy it is the ruling classes, the ones who pretend there are different political parties in order to divide us and rule us.
Anarchists sometimes accuse me of being a statist when I mention the benefits of national governments but that's not the case at all. I long for the time when we can do away with all governments and all borders, but we are not there yet. In the meantime I would much rather have lots of small independent nations, each with its own government, than one totally out of control, totalitarian world government. I am sure you will agree that that would be a disaster, but that would be the inevitable result were we to just scrap our borders before we had made the necessary preparations as described in the pages of my book. We can get there, we will get there, but we have to be smart.
We will still need governments for a few more years but we must never let our politicians have too much power. Remember our history. Remember how Hitler's strong government told the people what they were and were not allowed to say and what they were and were not allowed to think.
We must never again let any government become more powerful than the people.
We must never again allow any government to do our thinking for us or tell us what we may or may not say or think. We must reject political correctness and the increasingly totalitarian EU superstate at all costs. Keep nations small and independent, small enough to have real democracies where the ordinary people make the important decisions.
The voice of the people must be heard over the voices of politicians and the establishment. It makes no difference which party is in office. What matters is how much control over our lives we give away to politicians and how much we keep for ourselves.
They will tell us that can't work, that we are too stupid to think for ourselves, or the real beauty, the absolute peach, which goes something like this -
politicians lie to us so only they can recognise their own lies, so best let them make all our decisions for us.
Excuse me. Are you really saying that dishonest politicians should make our decisions for us because politicians are dishonest ?
Isn't that like chasing a burglar down the street, carrying your family jewels in your hand, shouting "excuse me mate, I think you forgot these".
Wouldn't it be better to stop them from lying to us in the first place ? How's this for an idea - how about when we catch the bastards lying to us, we stop voting for them ? Surely lying politicians are a reason to take power away from them, not give them more. Lying politicians and the lying media barons they are in cahoots with are the problem, not the solution.
Will you stand with us and help bring us one step closer to utopia? I hope that you will.
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