A modest proposal to help democracy

Anyone who insists that no help is needed obviously hasn’t been following the news.

Forget about another lost decade. After Labour’s first month in office, Britain is on track to give a whole new meaning to what Gertrude Stein once called ‘the lost generation’.

The economic, social and cultural damage done already or confidently predictable in the near future will take many years to remedy even if a sage government takes over at the next election. Yet, as things stand, the odds against such a government ever turning up are prohibitive.

Eagle-eyed observers can’t help noticing that our liberal democracy consistently raises nonentities to power. This is a serious matter: the first requirement for any political system should be that it elevate to government those fit to govern.

Brilliant statesmen can paper over the cracks in any system, while incompetent ones are guaranteed to turn such cracks into gaping holes with jagged edges. Casting a panoramic glance over our political scene, I can see no candidates for the former role.

My heartfelt belief is that any system that continues to malfunction with predictable regularity suffers from wide-ranging structural defects. However, proposing a complete overhaul of democracy is what a friend of mine unkindly calls ‘mental masturbation’.

An eminently practical man, he refuses to speculate about impractical ideas, however attractive they may sound. If it can’t be done, it shouldn’t be discussed, he says.

I’m not so sure about that. It’s useful to start out by establishing an ideal and then deciding how much of it is attainable. Proceeding strictly from immediate expediency loses sight of any perspective, eventually leading to untreatable myopia.

But fine, I resign. Let’s not even consider any sweeping changes. But may I please suggest a minor tweak? Surely there’s no harm in that?

If you’ll forgive a little pun, nowadays an opposition party climbing the greasy pole to power always lies in wait. Our Labour government illustrates this statement by practising electoral mendacity on a level never seen before, certainly not in my lifetime.

One lie is currently in the news, for Labour clearly had no intention to keep its promise of no new taxes for ‘the working people’. Thus, just five months ago, Rachel Reeves, then Shadow Chancellor, promised “no additional tax rises”, other than those already announced.

When she removed the Shadow from her title, however, she announced massive tax hikes sucking an extra £40 billion out of the economy and hurting everyone working in the private sector. One gets a distinct impression that in Labour’s taxonomy only members of publicly financed nomenklatura qualify as working people.

Now, as any regular reader of this space will confirm, all that was predictable. Even someone with my modest grasp of politics and economics knew that Starmer, Reeves et al. were lying through their teeth. They planned to go the whole socialist hog from day one, and only kept that aim under wraps for tactical reasons.

By then the Tories had got up everyone’s nose so much that Labour might have been elected even without their massive campaign of bare-faced lying. However, they’d certainly not have won by a landslide enabling them to wreck Britain at their leisure with no meaningful opposition anywhere in sight.

So how come the electorate didn’t see through that transparent tissue of lies? I could answer that question, but not with the brevity this format requires. Let’s just state the obvious fact that our gullible voters evidently aren’t equipped to tell the truthful wheat from the mendacious chaff.

They are always ready to swallow any lie hook, line and stinker, and Labour’s lies do reek to high heaven. (My propensity for feeble puns is a form of Tourette’s, doctor, and there’s nothing I can do about it.) Britons clearly can’t protect themselves against false promises made to dupe them into voting a certain way.

Now, if they can’t protect themselves against the system, the system must be changed to protect them anyway. That can be done by making specific campaign promises legally binding for at least the first half of the upcoming term in government. If the victorious party then proceeds to break them, the election results must be annulled, and a new election called.

By specific promises I don’t mean generalised waffle about a better, fairer Britain, yet again making British nativity the winning ticket in the lottery of life. Such claims are too vague to be enforceable, which is true everywhere, not only in Britain. (MAGA is an example of such nebulous sloganeering.)

But if a party makes concrete promises, such as not to raise the minimum wage, nor to increase the tax burden on small businesses, it must be held to them legally. Failure to honour such promises must incur a hefty fine and an electoral re-run.

If the electorate still chooses to vote the same way, so be it. But at least the people will be voting in the knowledge of what kind of government their choice ushers in.

As it is, something odd is going on. A politician may be drummed out of his chosen profession for telling fibs about such relatively trivial misdeeds as conducting an ill-advised extramarital affair, taking money for posing some questions in Parliament, making shady investments, safeguarding the minor interests of a country other than his own.

But he suffers no consequences whatsoever for lying his way into power, betraying the confidence of millions of people, and hurting them the way he intended all along but kept that intention under wraps. Micro-corruption is a sacking offence, while macro-corruption is a legitimate way of doing politics.

Yet I fail to see any valid moral difference between knowingly making false electoral promises and stuffing the ballot boxes. In either case, political power isn’t so much won as stolen, which compromises the whole system so much as to make it inoperable. A stolen election isn’t substantially different from a coup d’état.

My pragmatic friend will probably regard any mention of enforceable morality in politics as a sign of onanistic mental propensities. However, I’ll argue that in this case I’m the one who is being pragmatic.

It takes moral censorship to punish immoral politics – and to protect the people from the dire consequences of broken promises. Alas, we’ve been served yet another proof that the people are incapable of protecting themselves. This means our democracy is in urgent need of help, and my modest proposal is a way to start.