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Reading a discussion on an Irish Catholic website recently I was struck by the fact that many people have given up on the whole concept of democracy itself. It seems many people feel that the seeds of the current destruction of Western societies, by mass immigration etc as even Trump is saying openly is happening in Europe, was inevitable in democratic systems. I guess at heart some people are of the view that the average citizen is too ill-educated or unintelligent or too selfish, for democracy to work.
Anyway I thought it might be interesting to throw out the opposite view, to see what people think. After all some type of democracy has worked in this country from about the 13th century and it hasn’t always been bad. So just to argue the point, I respectfully submit that in some respects our problem right now is a lack of democracy, at least in its wider sense, for example:
– Vote Fraud. I think this is very widespread all across the West and currently I am even wondering about the 2018 abortion vote in Ireland. Somebody asked a Californian person recently why they keep electing people like Gavin Newsom considering how bad things have got there, and he simply said ‘we don’t!’, its all vote fraud.
If you think about it for a minute, the fact that the powers that be have to use vote fraud so much tells its own story, if the corrupt elements were so happy with democracy they wouldn’t need to go down that road?
– Deep State. The new element of the ‘deep state’, which actually runs countries like Ireland and it ignores elected representatives.
This writer’s grandfather, a keen observer of politics all his life, was telling me that the advent of labour permanently employed by County Councils was a new thing in his day, I think about the 1930s. In otherwords before that, anybody employed by a Local Authority did so by contract from the Council, and these contracts were always by open competition, almost always advertised in the local media, there was no such thing as people permanently employed here, or at least only a tiny number. Now if you look around you in Ireland almost everything happens at the instruction of the ‘deep state’ both locally and nationally, people permanently employed, and usually the general public are the last to know what is happening, as in fact so are their public representatives. Even Liz Truss is openly saying that about being Prime Minister in the UK, she said the UK is been run by a secret unelected oligarchy that even as PM she had no say over.
So in that sense maybe again its the absence of democracy that is the problem?
– Corrupted by being paid by the state. Traditionally it was always understood that for democracy to work, the elected public representatives would have to be that, genuinely trying to represent the people who elected them, and any outside payments or allegiances could compromise that. For example, obviously if public representatives were secretly getting funds from an outside power then democracy is hardly going to work.
But, again traditionally, it was understood that that ‘outside party’ interfering here, could be the central state. In otherwords the traditional understanding of democracy is that it is the public representatives who are, if you like, representing the people against the corrupt power, or the potentially corrupt power, of the central state. As part of this it was always understood that public representatives could not receive money from the state, because that would obviously corrupt this role.
Yes that is the case, in the traditional model of democracy as understood in Britain and Ireland for centuries, elected public representatives could not receive money from the state. They were traditionally unpaid and if they did propose to receive money from the central state, for example being proposed as government ministers, then they had to resign their seats and go up for election again because the electorate needed to know they were being ‘corrupted’ this way and had to give a special consent for this to happen.
Now they get fortunes of money in wages and expenses of various types (for example Robert Troy, who is a young TD in fact and did not draw some huge Ministerial salary for a long time, nonetheless has managed to own 11 properties seemingly based on his TDs salary and expenses) from the central state and, you would have to say, he who pays the piper calls the tune, they act as spokesmen for the deep state far more than they do as representatives of the people in opposition to the state.
So again if we actually had real democracy here, as traditionally understood anyway, it might in fact work a bit better?
Just a few thoughts anyway...
by Brian Nugent http://www.orwellianireland.com .
Anyway I thought it might be interesting to throw out the opposite view, to see what people think. After all some type of democracy has worked in this country from about the 13th century and it hasn’t always been bad. So just to argue the point, I respectfully submit that in some respects our problem right now is a lack of democracy, at least in its wider sense, for example:
– Vote Fraud. I think this is very widespread all across the West and currently I am even wondering about the 2018 abortion vote in Ireland. Somebody asked a Californian person recently why they keep electing people like Gavin Newsom considering how bad things have got there, and he simply said ‘we don’t!’, its all vote fraud.
If you think about it for a minute, the fact that the powers that be have to use vote fraud so much tells its own story, if the corrupt elements were so happy with democracy they wouldn’t need to go down that road?
– Deep State. The new element of the ‘deep state’, which actually runs countries like Ireland and it ignores elected representatives.
This writer’s grandfather, a keen observer of politics all his life, was telling me that the advent of labour permanently employed by County Councils was a new thing in his day, I think about the 1930s. In otherwords before that, anybody employed by a Local Authority did so by contract from the Council, and these contracts were always by open competition, almost always advertised in the local media, there was no such thing as people permanently employed here, or at least only a tiny number. Now if you look around you in Ireland almost everything happens at the instruction of the ‘deep state’ both locally and nationally, people permanently employed, and usually the general public are the last to know what is happening, as in fact so are their public representatives. Even Liz Truss is openly saying that about being Prime Minister in the UK, she said the UK is been run by a secret unelected oligarchy that even as PM she had no say over.
So in that sense maybe again its the absence of democracy that is the problem?
– Corrupted by being paid by the state. Traditionally it was always understood that for democracy to work, the elected public representatives would have to be that, genuinely trying to represent the people who elected them, and any outside payments or allegiances could compromise that. For example, obviously if public representatives were secretly getting funds from an outside power then democracy is hardly going to work.
But, again traditionally, it was understood that that ‘outside party’ interfering here, could be the central state. In otherwords the traditional understanding of democracy is that it is the public representatives who are, if you like, representing the people against the corrupt power, or the potentially corrupt power, of the central state. As part of this it was always understood that public representatives could not receive money from the state, because that would obviously corrupt this role.
Yes that is the case, in the traditional model of democracy as understood in Britain and Ireland for centuries, elected public representatives could not receive money from the state. They were traditionally unpaid and if they did propose to receive money from the central state, for example being proposed as government ministers, then they had to resign their seats and go up for election again because the electorate needed to know they were being ‘corrupted’ this way and had to give a special consent for this to happen.
Now they get fortunes of money in wages and expenses of various types (for example Robert Troy, who is a young TD in fact and did not draw some huge Ministerial salary for a long time, nonetheless has managed to own 11 properties seemingly based on his TDs salary and expenses) from the central state and, you would have to say, he who pays the piper calls the tune, they act as spokesmen for the deep state far more than they do as representatives of the people in opposition to the state.
So again if we actually had real democracy here, as traditionally understood anyway, it might in fact work a bit better?
Just a few thoughts anyway...
by Brian Nugent http://www.orwellianireland.com .
