Steven Primrose-Smith calls himself The UniCyclist as he pedals 31,000 kilometres around 50 European cities while studying for two OU degrees with little more than a solar-powered laptop and a tent. From Belarus he sent Society Matters this exclusive post on dictatorship and democracy.
It's taken for granted that democracy is the most desirable political option available. Although Britain pretends otherwise, it doesn't actually have a democracy. It has representative democracy and this falls a long way short. Ask anyone who voted for the LibDems to scrap tuition fees, only to discover later that they helped push through a threefold fee increase.
A true democracy, where the population has a say on every issue, as in ancient Athens, is now a real possibility. If we combine Estonia's ability to have an e-election with your typical Saturday night X-Factor voting system, it's feasible. But no politician is going to suggest this because, first, it would reduce their own power but, more important, they don't trust us. And with good reason.
The problem is that a lot of us don't know what we're talking about. Even when we do, we vote, as you might expect, for what's in our personal interests rather than what would be best for humankind. Representative democracy gets around the issue of our political ignorance but not our selfishness.
Recently I was in Belarus, famously Europe's last dictatorship, and it occurred to me that there are certain problems coming our way that democracy won't be able to solve but a dictatorship, in theory, could. Let's put aside the fact that Belarus's regime is a brutal and selfish system that looks out for Luckashenko and his cronies and think about what could be achieved if a dictatorship were benign.
In a democracy, the managed decline cannot happen. Imagine a politician saying, “Vote for me! I'm going to make you and all your friends much worse off.” Another party would jump in, pretend the collapse wasn't happening and steal the votes. In a democracy, parties have to keep everyone sweet. In a dictatorship, a single party could force through necessary decisions without the worry of being voted out.
Freedom is very important to me and, if history is any judge, a dictatorship is always more about lining the pockets of those in power than creating a better world. So what is needed is a non-democratic system – one where the current regime cannot be voted out – but where no single party has ultimate power. Impossible?
The current political system in Britain is adversarial. The three main parties fear each other and future upstarts. Each party must always offer an immediate good deal rather than the better option for everyone in the long run. I have a suggestion. The three parties could come together and determine which issues were so important that on these they cannot be divided, such as working towards the best possible managed decline rather than impossible perpetual growth. All other policies, however, would be decided by the party in power. Despite modest gains in local elections by Greens and UKIP, there still seems little alternative to the Big Three, a democratic tyranny (the word 'tyranny' wasn't originally negative) with, yes, less democracy than we currently have but without actually having a dictatorship.
Perhaps we wouldn't notice much difference. Since 1855, no party has ruled Britain other than the Conservatives, Labour or Liberals, or their predecessors. But within this new system, difficult, long term decisions could be made and adhered to with The Big Three working together rather than against each other. An improvement or a dictatorship under a different name?
Steven Primrose-Smith 10 July 2013
You can access Steven's regular OU blog here or visit his website.
The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.
Cartoon by Gary Edwards