Democracy ...an insult to the few but felt by the many

I touched lightly on the flaws of democracy on a post during the summer and wanted to write a little more about it. The trouble is such views can sound patronising but democracy can be a very dangerous this with the gullibility of a certain portion of the masses. Plato once famously insisted that the ideal society should be run by philosophers. Just as the master of a ship must be an expert in the craft of navigation, so too the master of the good society must be an expert in the craft of good governance. And just as you shouldn’t allow any old Tom, Dick or Sturgeon to become the master of a ship, so you shouldn’t give them mastery over a society either. That is Plato’s case against democracy. Governance requires experts so step up to the mark Philosophers. It’s of my opinion Brexit result was the consequence of giving too much powers to the wrong sort of people. The reason we have representative democracy rather than direct democracy, is so that the various institutions of government are able to ameliorate (ameliorate …do you like that word? Used my online thesaurus for that one) the fickleness and ignorance of the ordinary voter. “Sometimes he drinks heavily while listening to the flute,” said (well sneered) Plato at this ordinary voter. You could these days say “drinking Tesco wine whilst reading the Daily Mail and watching loose woman on the telly” Asking the opinions of such people is bound to cause trouble. They are not bright enough (sorry, but its true) to know when they are being manipulated (which is so easy now with fake news and all its trimmings) and not expert enough to know what’s best for them so “clever” people should have more of a say than others in how this country is run. My social media “friends” will certainly remember frustrations we shared or pitted against each other during the Scottish indy referendum. John Stuart Mill was another more recent (well….the 1800s recent) philosopher who believed something similar to the great Plato. In 1859 he published his Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform (you can buy this on Amazon but its heavy going and feels dated) , in which he proposed a voting system heavily weighted towards the better educated. “If every ordinary unskilled labourer had one vote … a member of any profession requiring a long, accurate and systematic mental cultivation – a lawyer, a physician or surgeon, a clergyman of any denomination (personally I don’t agree with the Clergy getting any votes), a literary man, an artist, a public functionary … ought to have six, a British Telecom TSO engineer should be at the top of the tree with eight” he wrote (well OK, I added that last part in about a BT engineer, called it a writers liberty but you get the idea). When stated this baldly, it is surely obvious that the desire to maintain so-called political expertise is actually a thinly disguised attempt to entrench the interests of an educated middle class. How we all lambasted these Eton Tories and once thought Labour represented the common man (and the Scottish Nationalists are a party of protest unable to govern, a belief I still hold and feel vindicated upon after 10 years of their (mis)rule). Labour (under Corbyn) for me now, have sold out their “working class values” since they sold their soul in an alliance with The Muslim Brotherhood (victims of taqiyya or just power hungry at any cost?) , they should hang their heads in shame and we should all be protesting because for all democracy’s flaws its better than theocracy which a stealth sharia law implemented would install of these shores….but I am diverging here and have wrote about this on prior posts.