We're all in this together but not necessarily on the same side.

[danieldwilliam]

Whilst watching the student protests and the subsequent police riots I was thinking about our constitution and how flawed it is.

My view is…

Essentially we are dealing with the fall out of a failed move from an Oligarchy to an Absolutist Monarchy where power is highly centralised. Parliament took on many of the powers of an Absolute Monarch and much of the mind set. Specifically, that people and The People, were up to no good and must be controlled. We have a formal tyranny of Parliament (and have had for centuries). The UK comports itself like a paranoid state where drunken uncouth scum with property and access to acute rented physical violence dominate (usually) property drunken uncouth scum with limited access to home grown violence.

Government must keep control of the streets as an act of will rather than facilitating people being orderly as a natural occurrence.

Government is seen as the legitimisation of the appropriation of goods, property, labour and military effort for the private glory of the Monarch (or His successors in law, Parliament) rather than as a mechanism for their allocation for the public good or in accordance with relative models of fairness.

In this regard we are having the opposite experience to the Late Roman Republic and Early Empire (and the US?)

There has been some movement towards a more democratic structure but essentially, it’s still about them and us. At no point have we as nation-state had a conversation with ourselves about how we should best govern ourselves. Why not? Because the apparatus of government is still designed to wield the absolute power of a monarch. In order to get anywhere near that power you have to think like an absolutist and be prepared to become one.

This works okay when nothing very stressful is happening or when we are all agreed on a course of action but it works less well where there is stressful disagreement.

I'm glad I live in Scotland where we seem to have a more settled view on how we live and work together.  I currently view the English state with great distrust and cynicism and I'm actively contemplating voting for independence if every offered the opportunity.

So, I take an interest in voting reform, because if the bastards doen't work for us, we work for them.
 

Comments

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I’m not sure we gave up the right to exact individual retribution but merely agreed to hold that right in abeyance so long as the duties of the state were properly exercised. The distinction is narrow but important when considering the moral right to civil disobedience.

I’ve always liked the social contract theory but with a few riders.

Any contract made at the wrong end of a gun is non-binding.

How did my great-great-grandfather gain a right to permanently bind me or my daughter.

Therefore a contract made by great-great-grandfather at gun point is non-binding.

So I’m a constitutionalist but I don’t want the constitution to become set in aspic the way the US constitution seems to have become.

For contracting to work there has to be an alternative. Therefore, if I don’t like the deal on offer in the UK I can influence for all by lobbying for it to be changed or for myself by moving to Australia.

So I’m okay with Hobbes till he starts on Absolute Monarchy and non-separation of powers. I fundamentally don’t accept that the price of civil peace is the expectation of some level of abuse of power and I think it naïve to expect that someone who has absolute power will be able to tell when they over stepped the bounds of acceptable behaviour. I am a great bethinker in separation of powers. The exercise of power and constitutions are dynamics processes not steady states. This, not least, because, technology constantly changes the economy wherein conflict, opportunity and power often lie.

Also, I worry about single point of failure with absolutist unitary power structures. For every Louis XIV or Napoleon there is a Nero or Richard the Lion Heart (or Tony Blair).

Have you read Aristotle’s Politics?