DOESN’T your headline “Badenoch: I’d ‘reprogramme’ devolution as Tory leader” raise serious questions about the UK’s ‘democracy’ and even whether it exists at all (Thursday, October, 3)?
Badenoch isn’t saying she would lead debate and persuade citizens to support her aims to rewind devolution, water down the Human Rights Act or even leave the European Convention of Human Rights, all of which would centralise power on a governing bureaucracy that we know full well is a failed political project.
No, Badenoch is really informing us that our democracy is an illusion. We get to elect representatives to sit in parliament, but that’s all we get. In another five years we get to pass a degree of judgement on those representatives and vote again. Any difference we make is deemed our democracy. But it ends there.
Because in those intervening five years, with the help of the party whip system, those representatives are effectively impotent on our behalf. They are coerced to shift the small amount of power we gave them up the tree to those elected by their party to lead and become the pinnacle of power. We are then ignored and subjected to autocratic dictatorial command. This is what the Badenochs and their ilk assume as their absolute right.
So, if she happened to be in that position, Badenoch would assume her “right” to run the country her way. No need to refer back to the electorate, or even her party. She would assume the power to shape the country in her image, her views; her way or the highway.
How can this effective electoral dictatorship in any way possibly be deemed democracy? Isn’t the term “democracy” then just bandied about to prop up the illusion of an absent reality?
The situation is worsened, playing in to the hands of our autocratic party leaders, when we have the governing party receive fewer votes than in the last election they lost, yet achieving an overwhelming majority of seats in parliament. With the party’s Stepford MPs willingly acceding power to the party mandarins, the dictatorship is complete.
Now in power, with Starmer the elected dictator, we understand how Labour’s election campaign, with its policy vacuum, obfuscation and lies, has become a classic political “Bobby Ewing” moment. It’s like Labour woke up on the morning after the election and the campaign was a dream, nothing stated during the campaign or in their manifesto was any longer relevant or binding, allowing Labour to continue the Tory mantra policies Starmer and Reeves had clearly always intended to pursue anyway. Reeves’s long-term desire to remove the Winter Fuel Payment, despite Starmer just months previously hypocritically decrying the Tories if they did the very same, is a case in point.
UK democracy is an illusion propped up by a mainstream media serving it and concealing the truth. It’s a notion that obscures the fractured political abyss the Union should have avoided. The UK has never matured and modernised to make democracy a reality; it remains a corrupted, feudalistic-based model floundering on its historic pinnacle of privilege and economic advantage of the few and mass impoverishment of the rest of us.
Within the UK Union there’s no prospect of Scotland ever being anything other than an exploited colony denied its right to stop the bus and get off. To leave and build a real democracy with a written constitution where everyone knows what the rules are. Where citizens understand what the state will do for them, and what their obligations are in return. Where those who govern are truly accountable and the majority will decide the direction of policy and law, through debate and consensus across the whole electorate and not just the few who control the legislature and are persuaded by lobbyists pursuing narrow vested interest.
None of this can or will ever happen as long as we remain a colony under the yoke of Westminster control.
It’s time.
Jim Taylor
Scotland
IN a United Kingdom where several recent governments have taken power on the strength of gaining the franchise of less than a third of those entitled to vote it should come as no surprise that the words “democracy” and “hypocrisy” don’t just rhyme, they are for some synonyms!
It follows that news that the new commander in chief of those champions of democracy, the Scottish Tories, is intent on suppressing freedom of speech and blocking the debate of independence in the Scottish Parliament.
They obviously cannot succeed in this aim, but what does it tell you about a party with 7000 members, which had the support of 13% of the electorate in 2021, that they inform us they will dictate the agenda?
The word “arrogant” doesn’t even begin to describe them!
Les Hunter
Lanark
I LISTENED to John McTernan, a former Labour Party political adviser to Tony Blair, as he was wheeled out to defend Sir Keir Starmer on Thursday morning’s Good Morning Scotland. He focused his defence initially on the gift of a box in Arsenal Stadium. The reason given is for the security of himself and his son.
Presumably the box has been made bullet- and bomb-proof as befits the Prime Minister of the UK.
Mr McTernan stated that any person or party ignoring public opinion did so at their peril, and that the public will see changes in the future. Latterly, he pivoted to avoid answering a question regarding other “freebies” received by Sir Keir and other ministers, by saying that in future the public will decide.
More of the “jam tomorrow” messaging, deflecting from the public disgust at Free Gear Keir – and others, by the way.
Alistair Ballantyne
Angus
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