The Wardman Wire

The attitude of politicians today to democracy can so well be summed up by the cartoon below, by Peter Brookes in the Times.

All for democracy - except where it might adversely affect them and what they want. Screw the people! Democracy is for the politicians!

There are two main areas in which democracy is taking a battering at the moment - Zimbabwe and the European Union. Neither of which are exactly strangers to this.

The difference between the two is as much as anything all in the appearance: Mugabe deploys violence and force in order to ensure that he stays in power; the European Union bureaucracy deploys “diplomacy”. Both ignore what we the people - the ones from whom they are supposed to draw their power through the support of - want.

Zimbabwe

The people of Zimbabwe want the MDC to control the parliament and Morgan Tsvangirai as President. Yet Mugabe declares that he will “go to war” before he would let Tsvangirai take over as President.

So he simply doesn’t care what the result of the presidential run-off would have been, had their actually been an opposition candidate. He doesn’t care about democracy, just about having power. Even the UN have declared that any Zimbabwean poll cannot be free and fair.

In the end, there is nothing that we can do about Zimbabwean democracy. Only the other African leaders can stop Mugabe and free the people of Zimbabwe from tyranny. Just calling for the poll to be delayed is not good enough by a very very long shot. The very principles of democracy need to be re-established.

European Union

Then we come to the European Union. This body suffers a democratic deficit nigh on as large as Zimbabwes, with the elected element having so very little power indeed. They are going to continue ratifying the Lisbon Treaty, despite it having been rejected by the Irish people.

The only people who got to vote on the Lisbon Treaty voted against it. Whilst every other country decided to press ahead and not bother asking their electorate what they thought but ratify it by parliament instead, Ireland asked the people. And they said no. Yet the EU don’t and won’t accept “no” for an answer, and appear to expect the referendum to be held again, like they did with Nice. If they do, they will destroy any claim that they ever had to being democratic.

In the UK, ratification was successfully stalled through legal action by Stuart Wheller who said that we the people had a “legitimate expectation” to be able to vote on Lisbon. But that has been lost - but hope still rests on an appeal, however slim that chance may be.

The EU is no a democratic institution. As the famous statment goes, it would not meet it’s own democratic criteria to join itself. And that goes quite some way to demonstrate the doublethink that surrounds and permeates it.

Conclusion

Democracy today is not democracy as it should be. It doesn’t meet the ideological requirements of democracy or even the practical requirements in Zimbabwe and the EU. The cry of “democracy!” spills from the mouths of all politicians, yet few ever actually do anythign about the issues in their own backyards. It is always someone else who is lacking in it; never themselves.

I am the first to admit that democracy is unlikely to be perfect in every, or indeed any, case. But these two examples are some of the worst in the world today - dictatorship under the banner of democracy.