There’s a lot to agree with in Kenan Malik’s short essay on how ‘Liberalism is suffering but democracy is doing just fine’. However, I believe that he is making a couple of very important mistakes here.
Author Archives: Paul Evans
Fake news, and confiscating megaphones
There are two kinds of ‘fake news’ – we should be more tolerant of the one that seems to annoy us a lot, and we should be more worried about the one that we’ve always accepted.
https://twitter.com/Paul0Evans1/status/809767785303834624
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:
https://twitter.com/Paul0Evans1/status/809049015870521344
What if we all had real direct, equal control over our government?
I’d like you to tell me if I’ve missed any snags in this fictional and imaginary scenario?
Labour will split with a whimper, not a bang.
A large portion of the people who were in the Labour Party will not be in it shortly.
Some will just leave and drift out of direct participation in political parties.
Some may join the Lib-Dems.
Some MPs may resign the whip and form a new group in parliament?—one which may even mutate into a political party with an infrastructure of its own. If this happens, it’s possible that it would reach some kind of accommodation with the Lib-Dems. This would be an SDP MkII without the fanfare. Or the big hitters.
Who knows?
Read the whole thing here.
The Democratic Reformation (isn’t going to end soon)
It is time to start taking this democratic reformation seriously and understanding it as a permanent feature of our politics. It is also time to look for alternatives to the crude versions of direct democracy that political entrepreneurs are foolishly offering.
You say you like democracy, but you don’t really, do you?
…maybe we need to find a new word for the things that we keep referring to as ‘democracy’. They usually look a lot more like ‘politics’ to me, and politics has been around for thousands of years in which ‘democracy’ was a dirty word.
Maybe its time that we stopped hiding behind the pretence that ‘democracy’ is a contested word and started deciding whether we really want to live in one or not?
Scuttling HMS Keir Hardie
Labour MPs will have to make a calculation; They either accept defeat and walk away, handing all of the assets and the incumbency to their biggest political rivals, or they may decide that they’re not leaving without the sort of fight that will make the surviving party useless to anyone who wanted to use it once they have gone.
On mandated MPs
In this post, from 2007, I forecast that New Labour were in danger of begetting the current catastrophe. The article also predicted that the Lib-Dems would probably not go into coalition with Labour (and why), and readers may want to note the identity of the nightmare ‘back seat driver‘ that a mandated parliamentary party would be forced to take direction from….
https://twitter.com/paul0evans1/status/752074496694247424
A pitch to the centre-left
If I could make a pitch to the whole of the centre-left on what I believe its future direction should be, this would be it.
We must rebuild democracy for the 21st century. Here's how we do it. https://t.co/hGIoUJ31KF pic.twitter.com/BtBIDfTFYu
— littleatoms (@littleatoms) July 7, 2016