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the Johnstone's View Index
Johnstone's View 4th January
2008
With the Scottish Parliament in recess for
the past two weeks there is little for me to report from
Holyrood so you may excuse me for taking a more
philosophical approach on this occasion.
The arrival of the Scottish parliament in
1999 did not attract universal popularity and I should know
since I had voted against it myself, believing that the
answer to Scotland's problems was not necessarily, still
more politicians. In a democracy we cannot always expect to
get our own way all of the time and the primary duty of a
politician within a democratic system is to find ways to
balance individual priorities.
We in this country, the United Kingdom that
is, have learned to value our democracy given that for most
of us, our right to participate was hard won over many
generations. In many countries it took a full-scale
revolution to win the right to vote in elections but in
Britain, like most things, it evolved gradually over a
period of time into the universal franchise we have today.
I still meet many people, particularly
women, who are only too aware of the sacrifices which were
made in securing their right to participate in elections and
who see it as their moral duty to exercise that right
regardless of the sometimes considerable hardships this may
impose on them.
With the assassination of Benazir Bhutto
during the election campaign in Pakistan still clearly in
our minds, we should remember that the democratic system we
enjoy still remains a distant ambition in many countries
around the world and that we have a duty to foster its
development where ever we can. As a measure of the success
of this policy, we need look no further than the countries
of Eastern Europe which changed from totalitarian soviet
puppet governments to fully fledged democracy and European
Union membership in less than twenty years.
I am sure I am not the only one who is
saddened by the fact that, while democracy is claiming its
greatest successes across the world, here in this country it
is actually coming under increasing threat.
The most immediate threat to our democracy
is apathy. It is increasingly obvious that the number of
people who can actually be ‘bothered’ to go and vote on an
election day is becoming progressively smaller over time.
This has resulted in a stream of ideas from government and
others to get more of us to vote. This has given us
streamlining of electoral registration, simplified rules for
postal votes and a multitude of confusing new electoral
systems.
This has led to multiple appearances by some
individuals on the electoral register, a significant number
of corruption cases where the postal vote system has been
abused and, at the last Scottish election, hundreds of
thousands of people being so confused by the new voting
systems that they were too scared to go a polling place and
hundreds of thousands more who did make the effort, having
their votes discarded without being counted.
The second great threat to our democracy is
the rise of the single-issue pressure group. Political
parties exist to balance priorities and find ways for
competing ideas to co-exist peacefully. This happens
between political parties as we all know, but also within
these political parties where policy priorities ebb and flow
like tides over the years. Not so the single issue pressure
group.
These groups can take many different forms,
from the RSPB for example, who have more paid up members
than all Britain's political parties put together, to local
groups set up to oppose housing developments, by-passes or
wind farms. These groups all have a role and in fact, are
extremely useful to politicians like myself by keeping us
informed of local or national opinion. Where many fail
however, is when they begin to believe that there is no role
in the decision making process for those with whom they
disagree, therefore bringing the whole political system into
disrepute.
The third great threat to our democratic
values is fundamentalism. This is characterised by groups or
individuals who live their lives by a clearly defined and
sometimes simplistic set of principals, nothing wrong with
that, but are then openly intolerant of anyone who does not
share these principals. Regardless of whether the motivation
is cultural, religious, ecological or some other principal,
the rule of law applies equally to every one of us and we do
not have the right to break it simply because we disagree
with it.
Democracy is imperfect but it is so much
better than the alternatives. We need more people to express
their opinions through the democratic process. The so-called
‘silent majority’ have been quiet for too long.
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