Quote Originally Posted by Burney View Post
Also, I can think of few things more antithetical to the idea of British democratic history than your meek, forelock-tugging acceptance that our ruling classes know what's best for us. Fúck that! Where would democracy be if everyone had always thought like that?
Don't know where you got that idea from, B. I've continually made the case that the radicals of all social classes have had to fight tooth and nail for reform since about the C13th. I'm just saying two things.

1. That I prefer representative democracy to direct democracy - MPs to plebiscites.
2. That for about 2 decades there were a group of us from many European countries who didn't give a flying fück about politics but felt part of one pan-European tribe, who felt we were all members of the same nation, Europe (or European Teknival free raver new age traveller land) and would have loved to have had one country (though with different "states" in the Indian, Aus or US sense) but where we had one govt, one fiscal and monetary system, one foreign policy (domestic policy would work better at state level given the differences between Napoleonic and GB justice for example), one army etc. We didn't think about sovereignty, though that may have had something to do with a lifestyle that us masters of our own (squatted) field where the state and their police stayed outside and we became a self-policing society with no crime and little violence.

I would suggest that it was the very fact that we refused to tug our forelock to anyone that meant we didn't have to worry about things like sovereignty.

Sorry. But do I think the average MP and economics professor had a better understanding of the economic realities Brexit could entail than the average voter? Yes I do.

Do I know what sort of machines the NHS need to fix heart attacks? No. But I expect our experts at the Health Min to, and I expect our MP's select committees to scruntinise their decisions and the MPs and Lords to debate and amend their legislation.

I don't think the decision should be made by a referendum where some voters will believe that shouldn't buy German (even if they happened to be the best) while others would try and stop them being used on foreign patients before British ones.

I fail to see how preferring representative democracy to plebiscites equates with forelock tugging.

Put it this way. So many of my ex-raver mates have so addled their brains with ketamine and so believe they are anarchists that they believe any conspiracy theory bull****. (For example they tell me that the Rothschilds own every national bank in the world, and won't believe me when I tell them that we nationalised ours after the war, or that we set up the BoE 103 years before Nat Rothschild came to GB or that Iran and Iraq are hardly going to let a Jew have the power to switch their money supply off.)

So my glw had been reading their posts pre-Brexit about TTIP and started to worry. So I just said "well write to our MP" {Meg Hillier, Hackney, who's a bloody good constituency MP - chair of the Public Accounts committee now, I think - who'd got written ministerial answers for a few of my questions and been generally very helpful.}

So she did, and got an intelligent reply about they way they and their sister Euro lefty parties would scrutinise it and make sure that we'd get it rejected if it really was gonna **** us over - all we needed was one country out of 28 where the left were in charge and if we weren't all happy, we'd get them to veto it. Put her mind at rest.

Would I rather they were dealing with it than letting my mates vote - people who think the minimum wage must be "neo-liberal" cause Blair done it and everything Blair did was "neo-liberal". You try to show that the state intervening to make sure that workers get a higher wage than the supply and demand equilibrium for the price of labour is the antithesis of "neo-liberalism" and they won't believe you because that doesn't fit with what "Jeremy" says.

If you knew as many fückwits as I do, you'd be wary of letting them have a vote on every single issue.

This is not forelock tugging. We live in a multi-party democracy where we can throw our MPs and govt out. We can choose to vote for the party that seems to closest reflect our views. But we can leave them to deal with the specifics unless we want to take an active interest on a specific issue and hassle them all the time about it.

I don't say that we should accept that the ruling classes know what's best for us. FFS we've had to fight them to come round to our PoV on most major social reform issues. But I'd rather live in a multi-party representative democracy (some form of PR would be nice - eg multi-member constituencies with STV) than allow everyone to have a vote on every issue.

Having MPs has been the British way since 1265, and permanently since 1689. Our MPs cut the head off a king in 1649. We had to go through two elections in 1910 (of MPs, not plebiscites) to get the People's Budget passed and then the Parliament Act to stop the aristocratic ruling class keeping their veto. That is the British way.

Having plebiscites to simply confirm the diktats of the ruling class (as used by Boney and Adolf and attempted and failed by Cameron) is the foreign way.

If we can choose our MPs from a wide selection every 4-5 years what's the problem with letting them spend all the time examining these things while we get off our heads or watch the football?

I fail to see where I'm tugging my forelock.