Reductio ad absurdum

Continuing Brendan O’Neill’s theme about the reduction of politics to the question of how efficiently politicians can tick the ‘democracy’ box, Simon Jenkins picks up on the calls for fewer MPs and councillors:

“The difference is that most democracies have many tiers of ­representation on which voters can vent their rage. The Germans run almost constant election campaigns for someone to something. The French ratio of voters to elected officials is 120:1. In Britain it is more like 2,600:1. The overwhelming majority of Europeans can name their local mayor or another official whom they can hold to account for most of their public services. In Britain the only representative people can begin to name is their MP, and barely half can do that. Britain is democracy-lite.

As a result, MPs carry a hopeless burden of responsibility. They must be national, regional and local representatives, chairmen of planning, social services and education, local health ombudsmen and elected mayors in all but name.”

He continues…

“We might think that the best response to the present crisis is to have more tribunes, unleashed to operate at every tier of government from parliament to parish. Yet both Brown and Cameron want fewer, both fewer MPs and fewer councillors in the form of unitary authorities. They want to take Britain from being the least democratically answerable nation in Europe to being even less so.”