Tag: dictatorship

News in Briefs 24/06/12

Greek elections bringing about pretty much the same stuff as before, education changes, coalition splits, more chuntering from Ed Miliband, and a Syrian Civil War that people have stopped caring about. It’s been a busy week so it’s time to get started. Although I hope this column won’t include most of that stuff, if I’m lucky!

Political Oops of the Week

Away from Syria and the same old stuff from the Eurozone, we now move to Egypt once again. It’s been a long time since much of relevance happened in Egypt, but after the military rulers dissolved the entire parliament last weekend things started to move forward again. So this week they then introduced new powers for themselves. To put it simply, they can now control the budget, implement new legislation (as governed by themselves), and the president now doesn’t really exist in any real capacity despite the fact the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood won fair and square.

This pretty much reminds me of how most dictatorships are created. The military tends to always back a dictator and this is how they do it. The only difference is that the military happens to have a ruler from its own brotherhood, as opposed to an outsider leading it.

Dictatorship

On the plus side, at least that bed-ridden bastard Mubarak is about to go to the great hospital bed on Satan’s right nipple.

The Painful…

This was quite a recent YouGov poll conducted in the US. It basically said that 63% of all high level Republicans still believe that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) when they invaded it in 2003. This was compared to 15% of Democrats. So you’re telling me that the most powerful country in the Western world should be governed by a party like the Republicans who have a majority of people that believe that WMDs existed in Iraq in 2003? And this is despite the fact that solid evidence consisting of first-hand accounts are arguing for the opposite.

I don’t like to believe that all Americans are complete and utter morons, but the politicians certainly are. Not only do they operate a system that favours only the multi-millionaires, due to the lack of any controls on campaign spending, but it’s an example that a lot of rich people really do live sheltered lives. I hope for the sake of the entire Western world that Obama receives a second term in the White House. But the problem is I honestly do think that he will get voted out, and we will all be left regretting that.

Republicans

…And the Pointless

Zimbabwean MPs have decided to undergo circumcision as part of a campaign to reduce the prevalence of AIDS in the country. In 2009 Unicef reported that around 14% of the adult population had either HIV or full-blown AIDS. I can understand that the National Trust says that you can reduce AIDS by up to 60% by getting circumcised. However, what gets me is how we prevent the same problem in the West. We don’t mutilate our own cocks in order to prevent it. It just seems to be extreme and unnecessary. Surely a better idea to reduce those Unicef statistics would be to just use a little common sense and just stop having so much sex with strangers? Those statistics will go down by themselves if people just use a little responsibility and common sense.

Oh wait, common sense is in short supply these days isn’t it?

The So Outrageous that it’s Borderline Hilarious

Jimmy Carr is the subject of this section this week as his story really is fitting. Let’s look at the facts. Jimmy Carr utilises a legal yet slightly unethical loophole to bring his tax bill down to single figures, when realistically it should be nearer 50%. For those who don’t understand how he did this, I’ll explain the general process. This scheme, which many figures like the members of Take That are using, is all about creating an off-shore company. The way it works is that they send the money to the company and they then have it loaned back to them immediately. When it comes to loans there’s no tax attached to them so he’s essentially getting the same amount of money without paying any tax at all.

Jimmy Carr
What, me, stealing? No, it must be some other guy called Jimmy Carr.

So this week he apologised. I watched his shows and he did get heckled quite a bit, but the most surprising thing is that he was actually being cheered for everything despite the fact that what he did was still blatantly wrong. He never had to pay back any of this money and now the matter is supposedly closed.

It really does amaze me how fickle some people are. We’ll complain about bankers and multinational companies doing this sort of thing for hours and hours on end, but when Jimmy Carr does it then all it takes is a crap apology and that’s the end of the matter. Come on!

Anyway, maybe next week won’t be as bleak and irritating after all…

Why Britain is Not a Democracy

Democracy is viewed by many people as a positive political system. Many also believe that Britain upholds our democracy. But what exactly is democracy? And is Britain really up to the high standards that democracy demands?

Democracy is most commonly seen as a government in which the people have the supreme power. This is usually applied through their elected agents, otherwise known as MPs, under a free electoral system. But this definition is vague and questionable, despite being highly praised with positive connotations. Indeed, it has been speculated that democracy is not bound to any one definition. This was pointed out by George Orwell, who was quoted as saying, “The defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.”

It can even be argued that ‘democracy’ is just used in place of ‘free’ when describing a country’s status; countries which aren’t free are ‘undemocratic’, although ‘undemocratic’ is vague in itself as something which is undemocratic could simply be another political system. The question of whether these ‘undemocratic’ countries have a fair political system never comes into play. After all, how could it possibly be fair when it’s not democratic?

This stems from the idea that democracy is having a vote, not whether your vote makes a difference. In other words, an elected dictatorship. Walter Winchell agreed with this, saying, “too many people expect wonders from democracy, when the most wonderful thing of all is just having it”. If holding elections were what constituted a working democracy, then Britain would be just that. But this can be compared to China’s political system in which there are eight parties (other than the CPC) that you can vote for but, essentially, they all stand for the same points.

But if democracy is more about the freedom of the people and whether their vote matters at all in the long-run, then it can be argued that the UK is falling below the democratic standards with almost four in ten voters choosing to abstain as they feel they don’t have a say.

Democracies, in theory at least, should have parties which represent groups of people who stand for different ideas. At the moment, there exists only the three main parties; the Labour party, the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats. If you were to vote for any of the smaller, more obscure parties, it’s highly likely that nothing will come of your vote.

We will forget for a moment what each of the leaders of these three parties say what they stand for and instead look at what they have actually stood for. The Liberal Democrats, during the 2010 elections, promised that they would scrap University fees across Britain. In fact, that was one of their biggest points on their manifesto. But they didn’t do that. They did the opposite and agreed with the Conservative policy of raising tuition fees. Another example would be the Conservative cuts to public spending. This is an expected Conservative move (they have done so on numerous occasions during past recessions, including the Wall Street Crash) but Ed Balls, Shadow Chancellor, stated, “We cannot make any commitments now that the next labour government will reverse rises or spending cuts.” Ed Miliband, leader for the Labour Party, agreed, saying the Labour government would continue to make cuts. Elections which lack any competing agenda are pointless.

Leading on from this is one of the biggest moves from the coalition government when they first came into power in 2010. They set up the Your Freedom website in the hopes that people would vote on controversial topics and hear what they wanted directly, rather than through their elected agents. But this proved to be useless as the public decided they wanted a review of the smoking ban and were ignored entirely. The Coalition stated they “had no plans” to review it.

If there is no real difference between the ideologies of the main political parties, no difference as to what party you vote for, can Britain really call itself a democracy?