Doubts About the Value of Democracy

by Peter Hitchens (July 2018)

Structure of Democracy, Maxim Kantor

 

  

 

Before the 1997 handover, authority in Hong Kong lay, ultimately, in London, and was exercised through a civil service and a legal system based upon British law and practice. You might say that the British had democracy at home, but you might equally well have said that the American colonists in 1776, or the Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders who came to develop their own representative institutions, also benefited from British democracy at home.

 

Suddenly, a heretical thought began to form in my mind. Perhaps democracy was not the vital distinction everyone seemed to think it was. Perhaps it was not the same thing as liberty.

 

 

I do not think so. Otto von Bismarck said that if you liked politics or sausages, you would be wise never to watch either of them actually being made. And this is true. I worked for some years in the bowels of the British Parliament and found not a kingdom of the mind, where wise rulers sought the best, but a squalid place of deals and gossip. Most important, the apparent division between the two tribal parties was an illusion. They had far more in common with each other than they liked to let on. And any thoughtful analysis of the election system revealed two crucial things. First, the candidates were selected in safe districts (where one party was almost bound to win, and the other almost bound to lose) by small, secret party committees. Secondly, there was seldom if ever a genuine ideological or political contest. The committee-approved candidates, already in debt to the party leadership, were approved by an electorate which voted purely on tribal lines. Genuine popular revolts against this system were extremely rare, and usually short-lived.

 

 

 

 

The USA also has a third and wholly unelected chamber of government, the Supreme Court, which is in many ways more powerful than either the House, the Senate or the Presidency. Many of the most radical changes in American life, notably the legalising of abortion, have been brought about by this body. I suspect that social liberals would be alarmed at any suggestion that it should be democratically elected. I too would be alarmed. An elected court would be unlikely to contain another Antonin Scalia. Democracy in Britain has, in recent years, abolished unanimous juries, the rule against double jeopardy and the right to silence. It has whittled away at the presumption of innocence, especially in rape cases. On the pretext of countering terror, it has attacked habeas corpus. The Patriot Act has done similar things in the USA. Social media, surely a form of direct democracy, has become a terrifying engine of intolerance and electronic mob rule.

 

 

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The Abolition of Britain, a description of the British moral and cultural revolution.

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