Autocratic Asphyxiation: Or, the Myth of Democracy in the United Kingdom

 by Roland Hulme

The United Kingdom is no longer a democracy.

The Houses of Parliament

Some wag in Westminster recently came up with a chipper scheme to let the subjects of Great Britain let the government know what they wanted them to do.

Instead of forcing their Members of Parliament through the indignity of actually talking to them directly, voters can now join Facebook style 'groups' to sign online 'ePetitions' en masse.

Tellingly, 40 of these ePetitions call for the British government to reintroduce capital punishment. What's interesting about this is the fact that we will never see Parliament address this.

Why? Because no politician in Britain would ever want the reintroduction of capital punishment. Not so much for the moral implications - the question of whether or not society has the right to command life or death - but more because it's astonishingly politically inconvenient.

For a start, it would mean expulsion from the European Union - for which banning capital punishment is a requirement of membership. Next would come the wail of self-righteous anger from The Guardian. Then the sophomoric social commentary from the BBC. It would, quite frankly, be absurdly tedious. What elected representative would ever want to go through that rigamarole?

So they don't. They carry on as normal, with utter disregard for what the people of Britain - who they claim to represent - actually want. Which, in turn, reveals the real situation of politics in Britain - one in which the notion of democracy is nothing but a sham.

We really should just accept that the British government isn't run by elected representatives any more, but an interchangeable "political class" who thrive on the apathy of a poorly informed electorate.

They direct the county in any which way they please - in this respect, closer and closer towards a monolithic confederacy of European states - and even the greatest political upheaval in decades (the MP expenses scandal which bid adieu to eighteen years of Labor rule) failed to produce any tangible change in the way things work in Westminster.

But hey, the real issue is that I don't know if I have a problem with that!

I'm actually more sympathetic to the parasites in Parliament than the taxi drivers and landlords tut-tutting to their customers about how they should "string 'em up." I'm no fan of the death penalty.

But that being said, maybe we should introduce some sort of bill into the Houses of Parliament that at least acknowledges the fact that Britain is no longer a democracy - a name change, perhaps -  that informs the average voter that they no longer have a voice amongst those who make the decisions in Parliament.