Category Archives: Democracy

For Populism. Against Centrism. A big thesis made in seventeen short points.

Please tell me which of these arguments do you disagree with?

1) Democracy is where the best-achievable consensus among the populace get the governance that they actually want to have over a period of time.

2) Electoral politics (with a few caveats in a good representative democracy) is where we all get the government that that the voters (often a minority) *say* they want on one particular day. It’s not exactly the same thing as “democracy”.

Read more.

Save Democracy – Abolish Voting – on The Remainiacs podcast

Another referendum will never work, they’re an unfit tool for democracy.

My latest, in The Independent today.

Tidying up

Now that my book has definitely been completed, this is probably the last time that these books will be in one place, so I thought I’d get a pic for posterity.

It’s not the definitive pile and others have already been scattered around the house, but it’s a representative cross-section.

Its been a very satisfying, if occasionally lonely and patience-straining process.

Using these titles is not necessarily an endorsement of their contents -particularly the Arriaga book…

bookbinding

Final script sent to print

Yesterday, in what was a big milestone for me, I handed in the final copy of the text of my book, which is provisionally titled ‘Save Democracy – Abolish Voting’.

It will be published at some point over the next month or so (date tbc) by The Democratic Society. It’s their first publication in a series entitled “Ideas of Democracy”, and I hope, the first of many.

In advance of the launch (you will be able to buy it in print or as an e-book), I’ll be posting a few samples here, but in the meantime, here’s the draft blurb from the back cover to give you a flavour of what to expect:

draft book blurb

Picture Credit – featured image: Bookbinding – from here.

Neither neoliberalism nor Putin. Democracy has a bigger problem.

This is a short post that is intended to introduce a theme. I won’t develop it too much here (though I’ve filled it with links to posts that I, and others, have written that flesh out specific parts of the argument). I will be publishing something a lot more substantial on this shortly.

We are going through a period of political polarisation at the moment. The organised left may think that this is a good thing, but I have argued previously that this is a game that we are always going to lose at.

Read more…

Putin didn’t steal much. We just left the doors open and went on holiday.

I’ve just published this:

“There is a direct link between [the failure of representative democracy] and the degree to which plebiscitary democracy is seen as being an acceptable option. The popularity of referendums is a symptom more than it is the cause of our current problems.”

It’s here: