Photos And Sham Solutions

Catching Up On Photos

I haven't been showing many photos lately but I have been taking them so I thought I'd catch up. The first of those below is of friends Steve and Jo receiving their French citizenship in the Prefecture in Valence. The second is of one of my attempts to capture the blue of the sky here, at the boules courts in Buis. It doesn't fully capture the intensity of the blue but shows someof the gradations of shades. The third is of my back garden right now. 

Sham Solutions; The Inherent Conflict In Democracy.

Most countries have problems of one sort or another and Britain has as many or more than the rest. So what are, or may be, the solutions? How do you find them? It sounds simple; rack your brains (and most countries have a fair percentage of very good ones) and look at what solutions other countries have found. It has been baffling to me why the UK hasn't found better solutions to many of its problems, better solutions that friend Steve and I even with our political differences, often find. But I realise that I have been naive; it isn't at all that simple.

From the electorate's point of view the problem is simple to state, even if individual solutions may differ widely. It's much more complex from the politician's point of view. There there is not just the problem itself, there are also the Party line and Whips, convictions and the desire to be re-elected.

Citizens within a country may feel they have a big problem, be concerned about the effectiveness/efficiency of their education systems, their healthcare systems, their (personal) security systems or whatever; a single, perhaps difficult problem but not one difficult to define. But they will need a political solution. Over to the politicians then.

Their big problem, whatever issue the electorate raises with them, is how to get re-elected. So their obvious solution is not necessarily to solve the problem that the electorate has raised but they must appear to have addressed it. Illusion is all, from their perspective. If they can successfully provide the illusion they don't need to address the problem at all. Which is easier?

Democracy, to the slight extent that it has succeeded in the world, has depended on two essentials; education of the electorate and the existence of independent sources of information available to the educated public. Only these can constrain any politician whose major concern is to retain position and power (by no means all politicians). The health of any democracy depends on the respect accorded by politicians, of whatever persuasion, to these two essentials. Subvert them, downgrade education and spread false information and the real victims are not just the electorate, fooled into accepting lies and fantasies and unable to discern them, but the very democracy itself.