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Friday, January 15, 2010

It's not really democracy, is it?

The government doesn't do what the majority want, by a long way. Since the general public are pretty thick (according to official government statistics, not just my opinion), that's probably a good thing. But we ought to change our mental model and stop thinking of ourselves as a democracy anyway.

It is a sad fact of British elections that the event is decided by about 100,000 swing voters in swing seats. The election campaign which ‘started’ this week showed the same safety-first formula: all parties battling for the 1 per cent which their computers tell them hold the key to power.

[From A golden age for fascism | The Spectator]

This really bothers me. It means that I know deep down that it doesn't really matter what I think about the great issues of the day, because my vote is almost worthless. Woking is a safe Tory seat, with a majority of several thousand, so my vote is irrelevant here. But it's also true that it doesn't matter what most other people think either. Those 100,000 swing voters are sick of Marxist clown Gordon Brown so will vote for Eton Dave, and none of them will really care what manifesto promises either side makes or what policies they will adopt. It's a sick society.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

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