As a rule… E
veryone has a set of rules they live by. These can range from the sublime ‘I will always
attempt to do my best at anything I undertake’ to the somewhat more ridiculous ‘toast can only ever be a particular shade of pale golden brown’ or ‘my coffee must be stirred nine times anti-clockwise’. It makes your world run smoothly, along lines that you are happiest with. Once you start dealing with whole bunches of people though, the rules can get a bit more complex, and usually compromises have to be struck. And when it comes to the set of rules you need to run a country, well, that’s a whole new kettle of fish. And as a result, over the many centuries of man roaming the earth, sticking flags in random bits of ground and naming the vicinity after himself/the landscape/his goldfish, lots of different sets of rules have generated, to greater or lesser degrees of success. Take monarchy for instance, being ruled
(i.e. having the rules set) by a King or Queen, usually for the life of the individual, and with the title passing along the family line. At present, it’s quite a cute and cuddly idea, full of pageantry and heritage and other showy stuff that drags in the tourists. The monarch has very little real power. It wasn’t always that way of course. The crowned heads of Europe spent centuries running about, raising armies and arguing with each other over their random bits of ground with flags in. In this country this was reined in by the Magna Carta and Cromwell’s Parliament, while the French took our Lord Protector’s idea of lopping the head off the king and ran with it, taking out most of the country’s aristocracy at the same time as seeing off Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette. Foolishly, they abolished the monarchy entirely, while in England, with a view to the future tourist trade, we brought it back. So we have Buckingham Palace and Kate Middle- ton while they have to make do with Disneyland Paris and an actress dressed as ‘Elsa’ from ‘Frozen’. Hmmm.
There’s autocracy. Which is like a king
or queen but without the crown. Or the sense of responsibility. In other words, a dictatorship. There have been a few of these, to greater or lesser levels of success, depending entirely on how you rate success. Fidel Castro of Cuba, who came in as a revolutionary leader to overthrow the oppressive existing (and US-backed) dictator Fulgencio Batista, ended up a dictator himself. And he must have regretted not taking out a copyright on his mate Che Guevara’s image, which has adorned the walls and t-shirts of students for half a century.
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Then of course we have democracy. It’s a Classical Greek term meaning ‘rule by the commoners’ and was originally about a jury of men, both rich and poor, selecting political representatives. Nowadays it’s more popularly thought as being the ‘rule by the majority’. And it’s awfully popular. In fact only four countries in the world will actually put their hands up and admit that they’re not actually democratic, and they’re Saudi Arabia, Vatican City, Brunei and Myanmar/Burma. Fair play to those four. It shows at least a certain level of self-aware- ness. Because, let’s face it, there’s a lot of those countries waving their ‘democratic’ membership cards who really aren’t fooling anyone. Anyone fancy standing against North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un in the next Pyongyang South by-election?
But even in countries that seemingly
espouse democracy and all it stands for, you have to wonder if the concept hasn’t been warped a bit. I mean, isn’t it obvious that if you have a single question to answer, and more vote for one way than the other, then the majority wins. That’s how the recent referendum worked for instance. But in the United States Presidential Election last November the greatest number of votes, 65,853,625 to be precise, went to…Hilary Clinton. Donald Trump won the election despite polling nearly 3 million votes less. And he’s not the first President to do so. In this country, at the last election, the Conservatives won with 11,334,576 voting for them across the whole of the UK. The Labour Party raised 9,347,304 votes, the Lib-Dems 2,415,862 and the SNP 1,454,436. Yet because of the system we employ, the Lib-Dems, who polled somewhere between a quarter and a fifth of the winners total votes got just 8 seats. And the SNP, who polled a million voters less than the Lib-Dems, got 56. So perhaps always counting the number of times you brush your teeth, or ensuring your socks are in colour order in the appropriate drawer makes sense. Because I’m pretty certain the other rules don’t… Paul M Ford writes for GrayDorian, the Writing Bureau
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