Is Democracy a good thing? Part 2

After an inexcusable period of absence I return to my assault on democracy, with the assertion that the most democratic systems are often…..well….the most undemocratic

Take the hereditary principle- power passed on through family and birthright. Few would argue that this stands as one of the most undemocratic systems. Much of the history of democracy has been the overthrow of this principle: The French revolution overthrew the monarchy and aristocracy in favour of popular/assembly rule; The English civil war arose from Parliament refusing to recognise Charles I’s divine right to the throne; the American revolution and resulting independence defeated the same principle.

Yet consider this: When looking at Europe, what do the UK, Holland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway have in common? In the context of this discussion, they all still have hereditary monarchies, however the actual answer to the question is more profound: All of these countries have remained free from tyranny and dictatorship throughout their early modern history, whereas those that have ABOLISHED the hereditary principle in favour of a more ‘democratic’ system- France, Germany, Russia, Italy- have all fallen prey to absolutism, dictatorship and tyranny. (Spain of course was a dictatorship under Franco and then restored the monarchy for precisely the reasons we are discussing). This a startling thought, yet unquestionably backed up by historical fact……democratic systems produce undemocratic results.

Why is this? Well a country needs a head of state, and the reality is that a head of state without political affiliation (as a monarch usually is), with a neutrality undelivered by more progressive systems, actually guarantees fairer governance. Two examples further prove this- our own House of Lords being the first. When Blair came to power the House of Lords was descried: A bunch of gin-slinging aristocrats, who were there through hereditary right rather than being elected, and then spent the afternoons falling asleep in the pews. However the House of Lords has, over the post-war period, been one of our best checks against undemocratic action and bad governance. It is because of the Lords that we don’t have the death penalty in this country. Literally countless times they have thrown back legislation to the commons, and often blocked autocratic measures. They are particularly good at sensing when the government is rushing through legislation solely based on the opinion polls. This is because they have a largely unaffiliated viewpoint- they are free to make judgements largely without political colour……or they used to be. Enter Tony Blair, who on wave of ‘modernity’ and ‘cool Britannia’ mounts a huge campaign to rid the Lords of hereditary peers. To be replaced by what? You guessed it- Blair has appointed more peers than any other post war prime minister (all of them Labour, of course). So our quaint but democratic institution has been replaced by cronyism, mirroring exactly the experience of those European countries. Quad Erat Demonstandum.

France is the other case. France has just had one of the largest turn outs to a general election in modern times (largely because the candidates put on a great scrap). But the French people are very politically acute, and when you look below the surface (as they do far more than us Brits) the flaws in the system are interesting. France is a hugely bureaucratic state- created originally by Napolean, enshrined by the third republic, and then modified by De Gaulle. This enormous bureaucratic engine has created distance and distrust in the people- Jaques Chirac’s party and past have been under intense scrutiny for apparently huge corruption. Most of the senior politicians in France have passed through the Ecole Nationale de Administration- an elite political finishing school in Paris. Known as the ENArques- this elite political clique have a startling habit of running the country without reference to the people. The bureaucratic state allows them to pass legislation easily without checks and balances. Think about how controversial nuclear power and the nuclear question was in the UK in the 80s- by contrast, France passed most of its nuclear power resolutions easily and without fuss (talk to any Greenpeace member about the French government….). Yet the point is, the French people are comparatively uninvolved in the discussion. The power of the ENArques had led many French people to believe that power is permanently in the hands of les Autres (the others). However the French people react to this in their own unique way- they don’t hesitate to ignore or take direct action over laws they don’t believe in- hence lorry blockades at Calais, and a host of other protests (mobs took to the streets on the night of Sarkozy’s election). The lessons are clear- bad democracy leads to bad laws which the people ignore or subvert. As Blaise Pascal, the great French Glass Bead Game player said in the 17th century- as soon as people start evaluating whether laws are good or bad there is a problem; they must have the confidence to believe the law is the law.

The reality is that all powerful institutions have their ‘ENArques’ and are prone to corruption. As Hermann Hesse observes in the Glass Bead Game-‘all countries and systems have their aristocracies’, meaning that power is always unfairly balanced towards a few. The challenge, as Churchill once observed, is to find the ‘least worst system’, and it so happens that the most seemingly-undemocratic, can deliver the least-worst results.