It's the quality of people.
Our institutions are reliable. Our parliament, judiciary, civil
services, while weakened by decades of under-funding, remain
essentially sound and held together by great hard working people with
a deep ethic of civic duty. Our electorate are pretty well educated,
active and dutiful. Our elections are fair and well attended. We have
a multi-chamber carefully segmented government with plenty of checks
and balances to steer a path between conservative and progressive
courses.
On the face of it we should have a model democracy and a prosperous
nation.
But "politics" in the UK is a seedy, corrupt selection mechanism to
find the worst possible human specimens and put them in power. It
rewards childish, irresponsible, petulant, mean-spirited, greedy and
corrupt little bullies who are vain, shallow, dishonest, weak-minded,
cavalier and self-obsessed. And I'm being charitable here.
The era of the statesman is over. No matter how excellent our systems
are they cannot function if staffed by incompetent hooligans.
A massive improvement to British politics could be made simply by
selecting the cabinet and prime minister randomly from the population
and then voting only on policies.
Our institutions are reliable. Our parliament, judiciary, civil services, while weakened by decades of under-funding, remain essentially sound and held together by great hard working people with a deep ethic of civic duty. Our electorate are pretty well educated, active and dutiful. Our elections are fair and well attended. We have a multi-chamber carefully segmented government with plenty of checks and balances to steer a path between conservative and progressive courses.
On the face of it we should have a model democracy and a prosperous nation.
But "politics" in the UK is a seedy, corrupt selection mechanism to find the worst possible human specimens and put them in power. It rewards childish, irresponsible, petulant, mean-spirited, greedy and corrupt little bullies who are vain, shallow, dishonest, weak-minded, cavalier and self-obsessed. And I'm being charitable here.
The era of the statesman is over. No matter how excellent our systems are they cannot function if staffed by incompetent hooligans.
A massive improvement to British politics could be made simply by selecting the cabinet and prime minister randomly from the population and then voting only on policies.