Britain’s contempt for its politicians is driving us towards Russian-style ‘democracy’ |
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Yes, he lost. But the extraordinary thing is that 49 per cent of Venezuelans wanted to place Hugo Chavez at the head of a Caligulan tyranny, with arbitrary powers and a lifetime freehold on the presidency.
Nor is it just Venezuela. Chavez is being mimicked around the region, directly in Bolivia and Ecuador (whose caudillos have, like him, dissolved their parliaments, sacked their supreme courts and summoned constituent assemblies to 'refound' their republics), and indirectly across South America, all of which, except Colombia, is now in the hands of the demagogic Left.
How quickly, and how enthusiastically, a nation can turn its back on parliamentary rule. A similar thing is happening in Russia, whose people have just opted, by two to one, for Putin's authoritarianism rather than open democracy.
For many Russians, democracy |
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| The way people talk about British MPs is starting to remind me of Venezuela or Russia in the 1990s |
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had its chance in the 1990s, and resulted in the chaos and cronyism of Yeltsin's katastroika. Similarly, most South Americans are not voting for their autocrats but against the parliamentary oligarchies of the 1990s. The caudillos are not so much anti-democratic as anti-parliamentary: Bonapartists, relying on periodic direct mandates from their electorate, and personifying their people's scorn for party politicians.
You don't think a similar thing could happen in Britain? I wonder. The way people talk about MPs is starting to remind me of Venezuela or Russia in the 1990s: 'they're all the same', 'they're in it for themselves', 'nothing ever changes'. Such is the automatic assumption of guilt that poor Harriet Harman is accused of sleaze for funding her campaign for Labour's deputy leadership with her own mortgage.
We are, of course, a long way from the point reached by the South Americans. But the early indicators - from plummeting turnout rates to the automatic approval of any 'non-politician' brought into government - are there. Don't imagine that we're immune.
FIRST POSTED DECEMBER 6, 2007
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