There is very little correlation between the shape of one’s genitals and the sense of one’s politics.

And Hitler.

Well it was thanks to women’s votes that the Tories stayed in power so much during the 20th century. By the same logic that you oppose direct democracy, perhaps you should also oppose votes for women as it tends only to help the “centre-right”!

Did you know direct democracy helped introduce directly elected senators in the US, and minimum wage laws for the first time in several US states, and was used to introduce workday limits against the interests of the then business establishments. At the time that was what the people wanted so I think it can cut both ways. Right now, direct democracy is usually used to effect tax limits but that is probably due to the situation we find where there is a lot of waste in public services. And people tend to vote on them fairly intelligently even the in the US: http://www.iandrinstitute.org/New%20IRI%20Website%20Info/I&R%20Research%20and%20History/I&R%20Studies/Piper%20-%20I&R%20Tax%20Measures%201978%20-%201999%20IRI.pdf

And in Switzerland, it seems that direct democracy is associated with efficiency gains in public services: http://ideas.repec.org/p/ces/ceswps/_1628.html

Is that the argument you’re making? I ask, because you’ve not really made it any more than I’d make the case that you’re a murderer by showing that you have a sharp knife in your kitchen draw.

Well, do you want to reply to my point at 95 or not?

Just so you can get a handle on what I am trying to discuss with you, I would reiterate my first comment on this thread – to summarize – your faith in the political establishment as is, or more generally politicians, is an exact mirror image of my atheism in respect of them and the process they represent.

I would not even be engaging with you if politicians were evidence led administrators, rather than candles in the wind of the popular press. I see merit in what you had to say about auditing the motives of think tanks. On which I stand corrected, and disgusted to discover, are themselves charities.

There is an issue over pressure on politicians to react, to answer the short term media agenda with populist sentiments. In a rather Utopian sense I think that can only be corrected by replacing the media agenda by the sort of agenda we have here. Which is to appeal to an educated electorate, even educate the electorate.

The likes of Unity should be required reading in schools. Not because he is always right, but because he brings evidence to his arguments. Which ought to be the basis for all political debate.

It’s your call.

When you say this:

I’m at a bit of a loss to understand why what I’m arguing for here is understood to be something that will provide a political advantage exclusively to the centre-left. In the UK, and throughout Europe, it has generally benefitted the centre-right rather their leftish rivals.

I don’t actually care who it would favour in the short term, which was your point, no?

In the longer term folk would become more responsible.

On a side note, I once smoked a joint in Switzerland and was horrified that they could have stuck me away for eighteen years.

Now look at them.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7757050.stm

I think we were that advanced before Thatcher. Now look at us, a daft wee backwater.

Compare and contrast.

I’d prefer the Swiss model to the UK model.

And it was the people that decided that.

A little faith in folk would do you good.

As I said, one is something that we can actually make some ground on in the short term, the other is going to take…at the very least…decades of campaigning and action. That isn’t to say we shouldn’t be doing both, but making liberties matters in itself and to democracy, and getting politicians on board with restoring liberties lost is a means towards greasing our progression to democratic reform.

If you are going to stand there and cry that people are trying to get things done before democratic reform then you’re going to be standing there, doing very little, for a long time.

We focus on civil liberties because we believe they are important in their own right, vitally so. And yes, in some cases it is down to the government being overly populist, and we have hardly been slow to point this out, but that is not the only explanation.

There’s always the problem that – when you write one long post like this – the conclusion that you draw from reading the comments is that you should have written another long post in advance of it.

If I’d done that, it would have been a post rejecting every aspect of referendums – their legitimacy, effectiveness, fairness, their usefulness in framing good policy or their ability to show lawmakers what the public actually want. They allow the weak preferences of a majority to over-rule the strong preferences of a minority and give too much weight to cheap, ill-thought opinions. They are usually used to answer a different question to the one that has been asked. They privilege reflexive reactions over considered ones and give an extraordinary amount of power to well-heeled pressure groups and to newspaper proprietors. They are hugely open to manipulation by the people who frame the questions and they have always been an instrument of demagogic politics.

They are plainly and obviously so useless and anti-democratic on so many levels that I’m surprised that anyone advocates them (apart from a handful of right-wingers who are rather keen on empowering well-heeled pressure groups and newspaper proprietors).

I suppose that – if I had to write *another* post preceding this, it would cover a history of populism, it’s tendancy to produce reactionary governments of low quality and the degree to which states always have to abandon populism when it becomes aparent that their survival depends upon it (US ‘America First’ isolationism in the 1930s springs to mind as one example of this).

I’m prefectly prepared to accept that reactionary governments can make good policies and there are plenty examples of right-of-centre governments being produced by the European model of representative democracy.

I’m at a bit of a loss to understand why what I’m arguing for here is understood to be something that will provide a political advantage exclusively to the centre-left. In the UK, and throughout Europe, it has generally benefitted the centre-right rather their leftish rivals.

Regardless, it strikes me as odd is that people either don’t see a sustained assault on our liberties or they don’t see it as a problem, or a problem greater than any other.

That there has been a lack of respect and a sustained assault on our liberties seems unarguable – the evidence is in the legislation, in Hansard, in interviews, speeches, and detentions.

I happen to believe our Government isn’t malign and I don’t see a malign Government getting in power in the foreseeable future. I’m not sure we have a police state by a reasonable definition but we certainly live or are about to live in a surveillance society (one where a large proportion of the population is under pervasive surveillance). This also seems unarguable.

Nevertheless we do have a Government (and executive) that is not only willing to abuse the rules but also to deny responsibility for doing so, to deny doing it, and to deny remedy to those who are harmed by abuse. Such abuse ranges from Parliamentary machinations to legal processes… and more. And they are supported in this by a large number of people, among them many elected representatives. The evidence is for this is in Hansard and judgements and in the media.

To argue that these abuses are a failure of other people, by people outside that Government and its supporters, without which it would be unable to act in those ways, seems a bit absurd, particularly when people outside Government haven’t actually called for many those assaults and abuses to take place. Paul for instance links to a survey that suggests the public is largely uncomfortable with the idea that their emails and telephone calls will be monitored as a matter of course (as opposed to when an individual is suspected of being involved in criminality). Yet this is going to happen because the Labour Government laundered this policy via the EU (EU Data Retention Directive), possibly because it felt it couldn’t get this through the UK Parliament (indeed there was a struggle to get it through the European Parliament).

To argue that such problems can be fixed by improving the quality of our representative democracy neglects the issue that what also needs fixing is the quality of our representatives and their ability to do harm.

Actually, what you _really_ can’t have is a system that, if 99% of the people wanted that, could stop them.

“intellectually bankrupt” is a phrase stupid people on CiF use to sound smart but is generally left out of intelligent argument.

A little rich, I feel, considering the original post contained such phrases as “half arsed” “demagogic right-wing” and “poisonously illiberal” but I accept your criticism.

Regarding your point on local democracy, I entirely agree that you cannot use referenda to create all policies, set budgets etc but the malaise in local democracy is largely caused by the dominance of the political parties in the councils. This creates a collection of elected dictatorships up and down the country and results in some appalling decision making- often caused by party officials trying to apply national party policy to a local issue.

My preference would be to see party politics removed from local democracy and have all candidates stand as independents and then to ask them to think independently when elected. I would also like to see directly elected key officials- Mayor and Chief Constable. This would create some direct local accountability. (The CC might stop to ponder before implementing his ACPO created policy to think about the effect on his popularity).

Finally, I would like to use referenda used to make decisions on major decisions relating to policy or expenditure (see recent Manchester congestion charging). Whilst you are correct that it is a no-brainer to respond to “would you like to pay less Council Tax” it would be interesting to see the response to the following questions-

Do you wish to see your CT used to continue to subsidise public libraries/swimming pools/arts centres/museums?

In many cases, I suspect you might not like the answers you would get to such questions but you have to agree that the process would be be more democratic than the current arrangement.

On the one hand, you’re saying that we (that is, the liberal left, broadly defined) should be more concerned with promoting democracy than with promoting liberty. I think you’re saying this on the assumption that liberty will be a natural consequence of better democracy (again, following your definition of what constitutes “better” democracy), although I could be wrong about that. And if that is what you’re saying, I’m yet to be convinced that it’s true.

On the other hand, when opposing referendums, you’re doing so on the basis that they will produce “authoritarian” outcomes (and I’m not disagreeing here). So if the problem with referendums is that they would be insufficiently liberal, does that not imply that liberty does indeed trump democracy in the way that you say it does not? Would referendums be OK if we had a strong liberal constitution that could not be overturned by referendum, thus preventing people from voting for truly awful consequences?

In trying to fashion a working liberal democratic system, there are always going to be some liberties that are absolute. We cannot have a system that allows 99% of the people to vote to enslave a tiny minority. Therefore there are situations in which liberty trumps democracy. I’m tempted to suggest that part of our problem is a lack of such limits on what governments can do, particular as their claims of a popular mandate are often flimsy at best. Now, my desire to limit government focuses on some very narrow areas – I’m not talking about limiting the government’s ability to fund and run public services, or to pursue social policy, although I think it would occasionally be wise to be a bit more considered in how these goals are pursued, so there is no reason for a social democrat to fear such restrictions (and, in my view, plenty of reasons to welcome them).

I would like to see some firmer rules set down about what relationship the citizens have with the government, with more power and rights for citizens. Once that’s established, I think that a lot of the calls for referendums will actually dissipate; if people feel more empowered in their daily lives, they won’t be at all interested in some snake-oil salesman’s promise of a referendum on their council tax (which, by the way, represents a tiny portion of the total tax many people pay anyway!). I think what’s driving this is the palpable sense that the government is explicitly in the business of trying to manipulate and monitor the behaviour of the citizens in a way that people are uncomfortable with, and the Tory proposals are a trick designed to make us think that, if we only had referendums, we’d be much more in control.

On that basis, can you not see a reason to get behind a campaign to guarantee and promote people’s sense of their own liberty and security from potentially (and, at this stage, mostly only potentially) dangerous government actions? Wouldn’t that be a useful first step in rebuilding trust between the electorate and the government?

I’m aware that there are plenty of people, such as yourself, who really dislike the CoML. I don’t entirely blame you, as there are some people involved that I’m not thrilled about either. But when you oppose it, and defend (albeit in a slightly ironic way) the present government, I think you’re undermining yourselves. The government has to show willingness to trust the people with more liberty if it wants to be trusted itself. Ironically, I think that’s a prerequesite for the achievement of any of the goals you set out.

Of course it’s a means, everything is a means, all of which go towards both enhancing our liberty and our democracy.