Democracy itself, rather than the BNP, is the problem

Let me make no bones about this before I start - I loathe the British National Party. They are the wolves of Nazism in the pseudo-respectable clothing of all the other political psychopaths; trying to be honey tongued while hiding an agenda dripping with hate. I don't believe most of the people who may vote for them in just over a week appreciate their background or would want to see most of their policies even remotely implemented. And they should remember when they stand in the polling booth that it took just four years for the BNP's historical inspiration, the NSDAP, to go from 2% of the vote in general elections to 37% of the vote and catapult Hitler into effective absolute power. The BNP is not the vehicle with which your vote can give the government or the boondoggling and exploiting MPs at Westmonster a wake-up kick in the pants.

But the BNP are merely a symptom of a problem, just as the rise of the NSDAP in Germany was; the problem of a decadent and failing democracy. Both the state of the economy and the expenses issue are other symptoms. Democracy creates the situation in which different groups of people vie with each other to persuade as many as possible of us that they will be able to perform miracles by taking others' property or curtailing their freedoms. And the more that proves not to work the more inured we become to their promises and tribal in our votes.

And yet we hear nonsense such as from Alan Johnson recently about their leaders being the sole messiahs who can run Britain and get her out of her problems, cynically ignoring the part their beloved system has played in causing those problems. As if we are a nation of numbskulls who would collapse without Our Dear Leader. And if we lose patience with their failed promises we drift around looking for some other silver tongued hero, and latch on one we either think is telling it how it is about the others, or baffling us with the science of how they can do better with our money and security.

There has been much talk recently about how the fall from grace of parliament over the expenses issue and so on ought to lead to big constitutional change. That at last there must be an appetite for proportional representation, or of independent scrutiny of this, that or the other. I'm sorry - we elect these people as our representatives. If we trusted them that much with the best part of half our production and property why on earth do they need some higher watchmen to watch over them? The system is clearly broken, and is making the country broken, leading some to make rash decisions that someone new, almost anyone, no matter he be a extremist at heart, could do better than this lot.

PR is no longer enough for me. We are, I believe, at that moment of which David Hume wrote in 1745, where we need discover the system is irretrievably broken and need to decide to do things differently. That democracy itself, at least this electoral democracy of state government, is the thing that has failed. That it gives to much power to too few over too many with too little of a mandate. It is fertile ground for all sorts of corruption and psychopathic nastiness, but only because we grant them this power over us as if we concede we need it. We do not.

I don't think I can be both a Liberal and a Democrat. They are irreconcilable ideas. It is time to abandon the quest to reconcile them.