Murder, bigotry and genocide.

One of the less pleasant, and one hopes unforeseen, consequences of the result of last week's referendum has been the fact that a certain section of the population feels that they now have a mandate to be openly racist in their behaviour.  This of course is not true, the law has not changed since June 23rd but nevertheless they seem to have come crawling out of the woodwork and from under their stones.  I am not for one moment suggesting that there has been an increase in the number of racists in this country as a result of the out vote, just that people who have been harbouring a silent resentment or worse now feel it is ok to give voice to that.  One of the things which this highlights is how much work is still needed in this area.  It is not enough for David Cameron to say this is not how Britain is.  He is self evidently wrong. There may be time on another day to investigate some of the reasons behind this continuing dislike of foreigners.  Some of it is irrational I am sure: I have worked with several people who I know to be racist for no good reason but who at least had the decency generally to keep their feelings to themselves. In other cases I am certain there are strong socio-economic drivers.

One of the ideas I have espoused since the referendum was called was that of compulsory voting. I won't spend much time now talking about it but it is relevant in that I was hoping to talk, at long last, about the ways in which our democracy could be improved, and that would possibly be one of the strands I might explore. I had hoped to start writing this on Friday night but I got so involved in an online discussion with a female poster, well I assume she's female because she does not provide any details on her profile, but her name is female, about whether socialism and fascism and more specifically Nazism were the same thing.  It all stemmed from a discussion about the wearing of safety pins to show that the wearer is not a racist. This particular person posted a comment which was accompanied by a picture of some Nazi lapel badges.  To be honest I couldn't understand her point but I will quote it here and let you make up your own minds: They will attach the front when they have them back from the print. I suggested that this was a clumsy attempt at humour which I thought had failed  Not so apparently and what ensued was a conversation which lasted over an hour.  It was made more difficult because I frequently had no idea what she was trying to say.  She wrote in a sort of stream of consciousness and appeared to have only a passing acquaintance with punctuation.

I think, having had all night and my walk this morning to work it out, that what was wrong was that she claimed to be a Labour Party member but she had a problem with socialists. She was warning us that if we were socialists then we were in fact Nazis and that normal party members had a duty to point this out.  She even had evidence to back this up.  For a start there was the name on the badges: Nazional Sozialistischer DAP.  Proof if ever it was needed that it was a socialist party.  She backed this up by posting a video by Jonah Goldberg an American conservative who was talking about a book he had written.  It seems his beef is that people keep calling the extreme right in America Nazis and so he goes about proving that The Nazis were in fact socialists, therefore left wing, therefore how could conservative americans be Nazis? 

He says at one point that when students accuse him of being a Nazi he stuns them with the question, 'Except for the murder, bigotry and genocide what is it exactly you don't like about Nazism?'  He then claims they cannot answer and he tells them that in every other respect the Nazis were socialists.

I'm not surprised they find it difficult to answer his question.  Just the words 'Except for the murder, bigotry and genocide,' would be enough to stun me into silence. Is that not enough? However with time to reflect I am now able to add dictatorship, personality cult, tyranny, police state, single party system and no elected legislature just for starters.  In what way this reflects democratic socialism I have no idea. 

I haven't mentioned all this just to make myself feel good.  It goes back to my idea for compulsory voting.  When my wife mentioned the idea to a friend he was less than convinced because he was afraid that if everybody voted then just that would happen: everybody would vote, everybody, even those who didn't have a clue what they were voting for.  What he wanted was more people like him voting.

And therein lies a massive conundrum at the heart of our much vaunted democracy, a democracy we apparently voted to leave the EU in order to preserve.  The Athenian model of democracy on which ours is supposedly based was unrecognisably different.  It was a direct democracy, for a start, which in our case would mean a referendum to pass every single piece of legislation.  Most of the population of Athens was disenfranchised by being female, foreign, slaves or too young. Only adult males who had completed their military training were eligible to take part.  

In creating a representative democracy we needed a way to decide who would represent us and we decided that the best way would be to vote for them.  Despite our apparent pride in our system and bullshit about 'The Mother of Parliaments' which is an oft used and misunderstood phrase, the current system with universal suffrage, albeit only for those over 21, did not emerge until 1928. The fact that a similar system is used in many countries around the world owes much more to the British Empire than it does to any innate superiority of that system. 

We have a an adversarial representative system based on a first-past-the-post election to constituencies which vary massively in size from the Isle of Wight at 111,000 to Arfon with 41,000. We have an unelected upper house of about 780 members (the second largest legislative chamber in the world after the National People's Congress of China) made up of hereditary peers, bishops of the Church of England and appointees.  You couldn't make it up. The whole bloody lot wants tearing down and something better put in its place.  This is something I will return to at some point depending on developments out there in Westminsterland.

I shall be back tomorrow and I leave you with the news that the shadow cabinet are trying to ease Jeremy Corbyn out, apparently.  I hope they've got a plan.  Nobody else seems to.

Love Tim xx