The Power Inquiry was an evasion of the real problem

Submitted by Robin P Clarke on 01st March 2006

Tags:

The Power Inquiry was just another irrelevant distraction. It asked the wrong question, sought solutions to the wrong problem. The burning problem is not that people are not sufficiently engaged in politics. The real burning problem is that the decisions made by the mass-elected regimes are most of the time criminally abysmal, causing problems rather than helping to solve them. In short the problem is that mass elections give us not democracy, but criminalocracy instead. Loads of countries have varieties of mass-electoral systems and yet in all cases they produce criminalocracy. The worst people rise to the top like a scum. The concept of criminalocracy is not some contentious speculation, but rather a summary of a huge pile of clear facts, such as anyone who has had significant involvement in campaigning will have caught at least partial sight of. But the Power Inquiry could not admit that fact that the establishment is a pack of criminals, headed by the arch-criminals Blair and Brown. Thats because the Inquiry themselves are too much part of that establishment (theres no neat egg-yolk/white boundary to it). The overthrow of a corrupt system cannot come from within the corrupt establishment, rather it can only come from alienated outsiders working from the ground up. And crucial innovations rarely originate from committees or teams, but instead from individuals working independently. Besides the criminals in Downing Street, there is an equally corrupt media from which just a handful of notable journalists try to speak out but not too loudly (else they would be chopped off). Sites such as openDemocracy go some way to redress the balance but they too get substantially sucked into the vortex of conformity. The reforms proposed by the Power Inquiry are pretty useless because they dont tackle that central problem of the wrong people getting selected and then inspired by the wrong motives. I myself have been studying this very problem for over thirty years. During that time I have not been making a racket because I did not have any great fully-worked-out solutions to offer. But more recently I have at last arrived at a practical solution to the decadence of electoral politics, and designed an organisation to implement it. As part of that preparation I wrote a book about the project. It is called The Future is Here! A practical handbook of solving the key crisis of our times. But unfortunately I had barely finished that book when I was struck down with two severe personal problems, namely mercury poisoning from my teeth, and an innovative conspiracy of harassment by the housing co-op I am a tenant member of. And I have been finding it very difficult to make progress against these two personal problems. So for the past year I have been unable to work on the RDP project, and that situation continues for now (this posting being a rare exception). But meanwhile you can at least read the book I have written. It is not the way the project was intended to be marketed (by word of mouth instead), but it is better than nothing. You can find the handbook here: http://www.lulu.com/content/140930 . You can download a free e-book of the whole book from the preview link, but it would be better to get the glamorous printed copy to save your eyes and so that you can pass it on to your enemies. Robin P Clarke

1109 reads

Robin P Clarke

1 March 2006 - 8:10pm

Reply to John Jackson Shortly after my own posting above, a leading article by John Jackson has appeared here also in critical response to the Power Inquiry. John’s main thesis appears to be that “a process embracing genuine popular participation from the outset is much more important than the end result.” Depending on exactly what he means, I consider that to be a somewhat sound notion, or alternatively a fundamentally misguided notion. Certainly, any new system would need to be approved by the people (insofar as “the people” can produce a unified voice), rather than just ratified by a parliament bizarrely travelling through a moment of self-contempt. What is fundamentally misguided is a notion that the very system of democracy itself should be designed from scratch by some process of participation of the people (even if we ignore the insoluble question of how that designing process is itself designed). People rightly do not reckon themselves competent to design their own houses, cars, computers, legal contracts, etc. The design of a satisfactory democratic system is, if anything even more challenging than those examples. Many clever people, George Washington for example, have striven to achieve that objective and yet have failed disastrously. Instead, what is needed is for well-elaborated proposals to be put forward by experts in designing of political systems. And then the people can more or less decide whether to accept or reject this or that proposed design, subject perhaps to a bit of tweaking of details. I myself have been in the business of working on designing satisfactory democratic systems since 1974. In that year, a UK general election gave Labour more seats even though the Tories had more votes. In response to that I designed a proportional representation system that weighted all the votes sufficiently to adjust the ratios of seats to match the ratios of votes. That system was vastly superior to anything considered decades later by the Jenkins Commission. And yet meanwhile I had rejected my own idea and moved on, to the understanding that the problem was of much more than mere proportionality of votes. In 1978 I was invited to join the Ecology Party (now Green Party) but rejected it because it would firstly have its clothes stolen by the other parties, and even if it ever got into power it would just become corrupted like the others. And indeed that is what happened; decades later there’s been no Green Government anywhere and even the Greens in Germany have compromised themselves. So many people, so much cleverer than me, spent those decades making a big noise in those blind alleyways! The solution which I eventually arrived at, referenced in my first posting here, is therefore designed by someone who can reasonably claim to have a substantial level of expertise in designing of realistic systems. And, And!, it features that necessary call to the people themselves to accept the RDP’s proposed design and thereby throw out the criminals rather than beg them to disempower themselves themselves. www.lulu.com/content/140930 www.futurewise.info Robin P Clarke