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What I would like to draw you chaps attention to, is the notion of Democracy.
Do you believe in Democracy, meaning one adult one vote?
In a Democratic country, every person should be able to have a voice.
That does not mean that the essentially uneducated, like myself, know what they are talking about but that peasant, should not be silenced because they are not educated.
If twenty percent of the population are highly educated, you might expect that they hold down important jobs, like in government or the Civil Service but in a Democracy, it should not be the case that only their voices can be heard.
If people that are working class, who have only had a modest education, are not permitted to have a voice, then I would contend that, that Democracy, is a sham.Michael, I regard democracy in Britain as a sham.
As to you not being permitted a voice, you keep saying that net zero is impossible, unnecessary and too expensive. Well, the Leader of the Opposition keeps saying that too, as does Reform, the political party currently highest in the opinion polls, and they both get extensive media coverage. So you personally may only get to say those things here, but you have powerful people projecting the message you want heard. The trouble with this is that all three criticisms are factually false (see below).
There are many ways democracy can be a sham. Everyone can have a vote, but all the political parties with any chance of winning may have nearly identical policies. Or the party that wins may have been lying about the policies it said it would implement; Kier Starmer reversed all of his “Ten Pledges”.
People also need information to decide which way to vote. If the media gives wrong or misleading information, or just doesn’t tell us certain important things, people end up voting against their best interests. The media might also undermine the public’s ability to think critically, making the public vulnerable to claims that sound convincing but which are entirely false.
Millions of British voters want immigration reduced. Immigration doesn’t bother me, but I think those voters are being denied a democratic means of achieving that; in 2019 they voted for Boris Johnson’s administration thinking that “getting Brexit done” would reduce immigration, but the government they’d voted in nearly tripled it. On the other hand, I’m one of millions of voters who want to stop the British government attacking other countries, and we’re denied a democratic means of achieving that; Starmer promised a vote on all foreign wars, but put RAF Akrotiri at the disposal of Israel for its genocide of Palestinians, and let USA refuelling tankers fly from Mildenhall for bombing Iran and Yemen.
And there’s another aspect to all this. Having a voice is one thing, but it’s useless unless people listen. We seem to be in an age where people don’t listen to each other; they all want to be the one talking, even though hardly anyone’s listening.
All of my examples above are drawn from my own experience of sham democracy in Britain; they all apply, the situation is a complete mess.
