Governments tend to democratise only that which they can win, this is not a quote, it is my opinion from observations I have made, I will explain what I mean by way of a few examples for you to consider…

Wind farms are voted on – a wind farm location can be blocked by local residents groups (and has been successfully) on the grounds that they will spoil the landscape. Fracking is not voted on, protesting this can get you arrested, fracking is presented as a necessary endeavour, we simply need the energy, and you have no choice….

You cannot directly vote on how your taxes, or the money raised by your government on your behalf through the trading of commons assets, is spent – you can vote into power a government based on their promises, but you are rarely allowed to vote directly on any individual issue. Brexit was a disaster for David Cameron, he resigned because he gave the voter a choice and they didn’t pick the outcome that he had promised to his fellows. It’s fair to speculate that if he had believed that the result would have been LEAVE he would not have gone ahead with the referendum in the first place……

Scottish independence – looked like it would be a close run thing with the YES voters slightly outnumbering the NO voters, right up until the end. Fearing that the voter was going to vote the WRONG way, the commons engaged the Governor of the Bank of England (an unelected position) to speak on the economic ramifications of an independent Scotland. He created the fear of rising prices if YES. What he should have done was to explain that this was merely an informed, yet biased, speculation, and that in a truly free market (what we were, and are ever, led to believe we’re in) it should make no difference at all, since Scotland would not be moving geographically, so would not have incurred a higher logistic cost to be out of the union unless that situation was artificially created by border related legislation. Scotland, having an independent chancellor could have actually mitigated such issues through subsidies and trade might have actually increased… who knows?… The UK government didn’t, and neither did Mr Carney….

You don’t get to choose what anybody who works for you does (public services), but you instead get to choose who chooses – police forces are slowly ceding control of roads, traffic accidents and even criminal incidents, security of public spaces and surveillance, to private companies. You don’t have a choice in this… you do get to vote from a limited array of hand-picked commissioners as to who oversees the police’s shrinking remit…..

Shifting electoral boundaries – this was not voted on and will result in a government manipulating the vote for their own purposes by creating or destroying strongholds. Since Britain is not proportionally represented (constituency voting) this is a dastardly tactic to bolster a majority that may not actually be defined by the largest number of voters…..

Political power is not really always at the mercy of democracy, in fact it rarely is. Voting becomes a granted privilege when, and only when, it suits the powerful to allow it, based on their summation of what the result will be before-the-fact. Governments, and the people who really control them, do not take such chances (apart from when David Cameron did).

Paul S Wilson