The Demise of Democracy

Isn’t it generally the case that when people vote they don’t really know what they are voting for, because they are voting for something in the future? What information do they have to go on? the press, the media, promises, speculations, predictions. When people voted Lib-Dem in 2010 did they know they would be facilitating a Tory government? Should we rerun that election? The 2015 general election doesn’t count as a rerun of the 2010, those years are lost forever.

I, too, have stayed away from commenting on Brexit, mainly because I don’t live there (don’t want to live there) and I knew from the start it was going to be an enormously complex mess, and I have too many other things to claim my attention. I did, however, get into a bit of a verbal row with a UK anarchist who was aghast that the Leave position had prevailed, way back just after the vote occurred. I challenged her self-proclaimed anarchism if it did not celebrate de-centralization, devolution of the EU political structures. To her credit, that took her aback and she started turning over the matter from a different perspective.

But here is what puzzles me about the whole Brexit thing: What the hell have the government been DOING besides arguing back and forth about whether and when the UK should leave? Although I read about it far more than I would really want to, I don’t hear anyone asking HOW? What are the legal requirements that need to change or be modified? What customs provisions have to change? What structures do they need to set up to maintain international communication and cooperation? In other words, as far as I can tell, no one there is actually discussing HOW to exit the EU, merely prancing about and scoring cheap political shots at their counterparts whenever they can. Certainly the media have given me no conception of any sort of actual plan to effect the exit.

This whole sordid can of worms doesn’t have anything to do with democracy — at least not “democracy” as most people conceive of the term. If one understands that “democracy,” as in the rule of the “People,” only refers to the “People” defined by the ruling elites (as in revolutionary America, where the “People” did not include Natives, blacks, women and non-landholding white males for voting or representation purposes), then one can get closer to understanding what Brexit is all about. When you have both Merkel and Macron warning (last November) of “blinkered nationalism” (thus comparing nationalist citizens to livestock), trumpeting the inevitability of multi-lateralism and globalism, and you can see that Greek citizens are not “People” for the EU, then one can begin to grasp the motivations underlying Brexit.

But no one seems to even bother doing any work to make it happen. From my perspective across the Pond, that looks exactly like modern democracy, with a pretty little bow on the package.

As someone that’s born and bred here on the British Islands, at the time of the referendum I was not convinced that the political class here were anywhere near up to the task of extricating the country from the EU successfully. I remember trying to find out how many bits of legislation would get passed between elections, and the only thing I found was that during the last 2 years of the tory/lib dem coalition they managed to pass around 180 bits of legislation. How these puffed up peacocks that strut around were going to pass all the bits of legislation necessary during the Article 50 process, while at the same time negotiating a new trade deal with the EU, along with the rest of the world, seemed like an unbelievable fiction. Now that we’ve passed brexit day with still no idea of where the politicians are taking us one thought that keeps popping into my head is that a lot of the problems that brexit is going to cause are bureaucratic in nature, and the answer to them will also be bureaucratic. I reckon that this omnishambles that is unfurling in Westminster is a glimpse though of how unprepared our western, industrialised economies are for the financial and environmental problems looming on our global horizon.

They shouldn’t have called a referendum without having some plan on how to leave.

They’ve copied most of the laws into the UK statute books, so after we leave they can be changed by the UK government as required. How and when they come into effect I expect depends on the method of leaving.

But it seems we cannot leave because we are part of the Republic of Ireland.

Agree with Polder and Stone. What they HAVE is Oligarchy. Exclusively. (And the U.S. too) What’s going on has NOTHING to do with anything we’re seeing. They’re fighting in the back channels, but don’t want to admit that because it would show so clearly that they have anything, anything but democracy, even the bad type where 51% choose all.

Reminds me of the U.S. where they complain of ‘capitalism’ now that we basically don’t have any of it at all.

So back to what I was saying, they Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaant a big mess. They waaaaaaaaaaaaant a lot of ruckus and blame. And Polder brings up that maybe they would rather just have status quo but with an internecine war going on, their PRIORITY is to survive among each other, billionaires, power-players, and the people and appearances with the useless, powerless masses are a far distant afterthought.

Because, yes, if there were any good faith they could solve for example, citizenship of minors in a few minutes, even by edict from the queen. Same with EU laws: you just say ‘they exist until we can undo them.’ Bam, done in seconds. They don’t, they won’t: they don’t care.

Excellent point on bureaucracy, which as they say, REALLY runs everything, with includes the Deep State who will just stall and wait all the elected officials out if they feel like it. And they did. Are they not, therefore, one of the largest threats to the nation? As often remarked in history books? Should we not then, fire them all, repeal everything we can find, and push their power down locally as far as we can? Only a thousand local councils CAN, have the bandwidth, to review 80,000 laws in a few years’ time.

“Their entire political class: timid, incompetent, confused, pusillanimous, faint-hearted, indecisive, quarrelsome, weak-willed, irresolute, in over their heads. A laughingstock of the world. Prisoners of a thousand”

We need a poem written of this.

The post-Brexit train wreck is really something that should make you cry in despair. But in case you’d rather laugh, an all-too-true analogy:

Brexit explained.

Five people, A, B, C, D & E, are in a car, driving past Heathrow on the M4.

A [the driver]: "We're about to leave London, and there's a junction ahead. Where do we go next?"
(1/n)

— Kristian Niemietz is an Irish Border Issue denier (@K_Niemietz) March 27, 2019