Saving Capitalism? The Price could be Democracy.

Here's my piece over the Weekend in "The New Statesman". I'll be expanding further on it's themes anon...

Right now everyone seems to be getting terribly excited about saving capitalism. Which is fair enough, in the face of global meltdown.

However it seems to me that the price of saving capitalism is increasingly likely to be ‘democracy’. Which would be a shame as I’m a big fan of democracy. On the whole, I think it’s a good thing.

“What insight” I hear you cry, “what understanding of the basic tenets of human rights’.

No? Well, consider this.

Let’s start with Occupy London (or Wall Street, Oakland, Tunbridge Wells, wherever). Apart from the fact that some folk think they make the place look a bit untidy, the main issue people have with the Occupy crowd is ‘that they don’t have any answers’.

They have a list of things they don’t want – but not a list of things they do.

And I say, so what? What’s wrong with just asking the questions? The Occupy folk aren’t standing for elected office, nor claiming to be able to solve the problems of the global economy. The finest economic minds in the world plus George Osborne haven’t cracked that one. So it seems a bit unreasonable to expect some bloke in a tent who just thinks that taxpayers money shouldn’t be shuffled through to bankers in the form of bonuses, to then have all the answers to the greatest economic crisis since the 1930’s. If it was that easy, we’d all just pop into Millets and seek the opinion of the man on the till.

We’ll ask the questions. It’s the job of our elected elders and betters to answer them.

And now it would also seem we’re not allowed to mark our representatives homework either. Hence every democratically elected politician in the world goes white as a sheet at the thought of asking the Greek people if they’re happy with the deal done on their behalf.

Funnily enough, I’m not a huge fan of referendums at the drop of a hat. I rather like Edmund Burke’s view of democracy: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion’.

But there’s a time and a place for everything. And when years of extreme austerity measures stretch out before a population, pensions are slashed, public spending is squeezed, every ministry has an independent ‘observer’, installed from Brussels, and none of it ever featured in any sort of manifesto proposal – well, asking the people if they are up for it doesn’t seem so bad? Does it?

So, we seem to be in a world where asking questions without knowing the answers, or questioning the answers you’ve been given, is seen as a thoroughly bad thing. Which to me is an affront to democracy.

Still, at least no-one’s raising the spectre of war or postulating about the chances of a military coup to force things through.

Oh? Lordy.