A DISCUSSION PAPER
Democracy in politics
Historic roots, current expression and what we must do to make government a more democratic institution.
Their rules allow a leader, a Prime minister, with strong internal followers to dictate to the nation and only allow the voters redress for a brief one day every five years.
It is increasingly obvious that UK democracy has stalled.
Other parliamentary factions also ignore the will-of-the-people and under a proper democratic system, both cases would be clearly seen as acts of treason and brought before a court for sentencing.
Leaders and other members of parliament are usurping trusted positions and until voting day, they show a complete lack of respect for the voting public.
There is an urgent need for major change, rules that govern parliament need bringing up to date, service to voters need redefining, internal policing needs restructuring and several other changes are urgently needed.
To progress towards Democracy we need major changes to how governments are formed and we need to change the concept of representing, to one of serving.
Democracy
Contrary to what the old establishment would have you believe, democracy is not an isolated political concept but an outward expression of the developing human brain. In particular, how our personality lobes channel sensory inputs to brain analysing areas and constantly improve how we react to what we feel, see and hear.
Democracy is a term that describes our reducing tolerance of one-sided governments and their one-side law making, it describes how evolution is changing our assessment of history, refining our understanding of the extended environment and of our collective future.
Personality-balance has continually evolved since before Greek city-states introduced their individual forms of early democracy. It has proven a slow process and unfortunately, there are still many in positions of power that remain driven by primitive animal responses of greed, accumulation and exploitation. It appears that evolution is bypassing them and their genetic descendents will probably find it increasingly difficult to survive future isolation.
A view of political evolution
Before medical science intervened, evolution was a relentless improvement of the Human-animal and unsustainable mutations quickly died out. Survival-of-the fittest maintained a strong healthy breeding stock, the genetic-pool remained sound and the Human-animal spread and prospered.
As numbers increased, local resources dwindled, animal instincts prevailed and the strong taking from the weak, gave rise to warlord domination.
Surfs and slaves were made of whole populations, generally forcibly but a few preferred the certainty of knowing what comes next and accepted the dynasties warlords established.
Hierarchies of rank and privilege created a suppressive order but as populations increased, the haves became increasingly visible to the have-not and dissension gave rise to political factions taking control away from warlord descendants.
Political parties formed and dissention reduced but making new and changing existing laws remained the province of those with time and money to pursue their personal aims and when in control, they still generated one-sided laws, just as previous Warlords, Dictators and Kings did.
Towards democracy
In this five hundredth year of supposed democracy, the year 2012, many believe that politicians follow their party agenda and only pretend to listen. They also believe that systems of government are so deeply entrenched as to be permanent and even if they bothered to vote, it would be a waste of their time, as nothing would change.
Consequently, political parties that claim election success rarely represent more than 20% of the adult population. They claim larger numbers but it’s normal for politicians to speak part truths rather than giving the full facts and voting numbers, are often deliberately confused with population numbers.
Following present day elections, when government do change, the process is little more than a bloodless transfer of control from one minority group to another. New legislations swing to an opposite extreme but still have only a passing resemblance to what the majority of people really want to happen.
Under our system of party politics, one-sided legislations are inevitable and forming a truly democratic government proves just as impossible as it was under the restrictive regimes of Dictators and Kings.
To unfreeze democracy, we must not only reduce the one-sidedness of law making, we must also make several other sweeping changes.
Human evolution is relentless and as the brain is exercised more now than in previous generations, lack of British democracy becomes increasingly evident.
The following are seven peaceful actions we can take to bring our parliamentary systems up to date but I’m afraid that without peaceful change, younger and future generations will find other ways to humanise government systems and make them fit for the twenty-first century
We need to
Change the political arena; reverse our false stratification, the hierarchy of politics and society and enable all citizens to have a continuing say.
To
Stop parliament and others from making rules that govern their own conduct and in the short term, have frequently changing, external legal committees constantly monitoring.
To
Change the way parliamentarians think and make legislators more fully accountable to the people rather than to their political parties and we need to make it much easier and faster for the people, to remove them from office.
To
Remove the dominance of wealth and privilege and ensure we have a balance of legislators from every walk-of-life.
To
Make it illegal for any group to dictate who will represent whom and we should try to remove the need for political parties by funding the election of individuals with loyalties only to the people who elect them.
To
Supply funds for non-party individuals to stand for election and for those elected, to serve their communities at all levels, local and national and do so as active monitors with collective powers to change or remove offending systems or managers.
To
Reduce the possibility of national and local dictatorships by making it illegal for anyone to hold political office for more than one term of five years and there must be no political appointments without full parliamentary or national approval.
We will only progress towards real democracy when the antiquated concepts of rank and privilege and minorities dictating to the majority, take their place in history alongside Warlords, Dictators and Kings.
Only then, can we hope to develop a system of government that really does include everyone, a democracy that continues evolving as the Human-animal evolves.
Desmond G. John.
England June 2012
