I’ve proudly created a new word today, “Dictocracy”. It sort of describes the current British political system that we refer to as a Democracy whilst to all intents, it functions as a dictatorship.
As everyone knows, we have a General Election coming up and the public at that election will vote. Do we vote to elect a party at a national level? No, we vote to elect a member to parliament from the local constituency in which we live. This in itself is a highly flawed system as there’s a huge imbalance in the number of people within each constituency. To add to the confusion, you are electing an individual to represent your constituency and its needs but the person you elect is, in the most part, told that they must vote in accordance with the views of the party they represent, even if this is in direct conflict with the constituents’ views.
What normally happens at a General Election is that a single party is voted into power with an overall majority. This means they hold more than half of the total seats within The Commons. Take this in combination with the issue in the previous paragraph and in every meaning of the word, we have a dictatorship. We might have elected the party and its leader but from that point on, whatever the party leader wants, they can have by virtue of simply ordering their members to vote in accordance with their wishes on every bill that comes up. He dictates the outcome and that to me makes him a dictator.
In the forthcoming election there is plenty of speculation that no single party will hold a majority within The Commons. Does this make for a democracy? No, what it does is hand power to the third largest party in the event that the first and second parties differ in their views on a subject. If for example, Labour get 300 seats and the Tories also get 300 seats then the Liberal Democrats with about 46 seats would in effect dictate the outcome of any vote. What a horrible mess of a political system we have.
To top it all off, if a hung parliament happens, the incumbent Prime Minister (Gordon Brown) could remain in power, even with no majority at all. So we’d have a Prime Minister who has never been elected by the public and whose party holds no majority in government. We have a Dictocracy!