Back in 2007 Douglas Carswell and Daniel Hannan authored a series of papers on direct democracy which were published by the Centre for Policy Studies. One of the series was entitled: Send for the Sheriff (click on 4. Sent for the Sheriff – Douglas Carswell).

What Carswell and Hannan envisaged is not what Cameron has introduced with Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) and I wrote about this here. What Cameron has in effect done is to politicise the police – if we are to have PCCs they cannot and must not be of a party political persuasion, after all the police are supposed to be above party politics; supposed to be completely independent, thus enabling them to enforce the law – and, more importantly, supposed to be answerable to the people who they are meant to serve.

With the latest PCC election in South Yorkshire one can be forgiven for believing that something stinks – here we have a PCC elected under the banner of a political party who had overseen case after case of child abuse and being elected, so it is read, where 80% of the votes cast were postal votes.

When a person can be elected via a system part of which is known to have been abused, then democracy is cheapened; when the electorate can vote for a candidate standing under the banner of a political party which only months previously had been reviled for their failure to protect children in their care, then democracy is cheapened; and when political parties are able to politicise the police , democracy is most definitely cheapened.

When all the foregoing can happen; when a country’s sovereignty can be ceded without the people even understanding what that means, then democracy is not just cheapened – democracy is dead.