Tuesday January 20th was Democracy Day on the BBC across radio, TV and online, looking at democracy past, present, and future. The idea behind this was that 2015 marks the 750th anniversary of the first parliament of elected representatives at Westminster and it also sees the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta. In conjunction with the BBC’s event a research paper for the BBC’s Democracy day was produced by The Economist Intelligence Unit.

This paper attempts to set out what needs to be done with a view to negating the ever widening gap between politicians and the people they govern. It makes some important points (page 28: the UK political market is falling; it is out of sync; the system is not working) without any attempt to suggest possible cures to the faults it identifies. The gravest error the paper makes is that it never defines what is democracy and like so many assumes that representative democracy is the only form available. (Intelligence Unit? Really?)

Presumably by coincidence, two articles appeared on January 21st, one by Rafael Behr (Guardian) and the other by Paul Collier (Financial Times); both of whom also take it for granted that representative democracy is the only form available. Behr is of the opinion that while the next parliament is likely to be fractious and unmanageable.,that doesn’t worry him as much as the prospect of a campaign that works as a catalyst for all the forces of fragmentation and volatility. He is also of the opinion that Westminster is not a rancid den of corruption, nor a conspiracy against decent people; that Parliament is flawed but not wicked.

Collier on the other hand, plays a ‘suppose’ game resulting in him believing that the status quo is indefensible; that in forging a new constitutional settlement, the key is to match power to identity; that political authority should be distributed to geographic entities in correspondence to the strength of people’s attachment to them – the result of which is the creation of an English parliament, incorporating a federal system, to redress the obvious imbalances that devolution ‘a la political class’ have caused.

Readers who do refer to the three links above will all realise that the commonality between them is blinkered thought, encapsulating an inability to think ‘outside the box’. When will anyone in the media take the obvious step of considering all the forms of democracy, apply them to the United Kingdom and consider which, if any, would solve the problems about that which they write?

Hell, if amateurs can do it and arrive at a solution, why not professionals?

Afterthought: In selecting The Economist, Rafael Behr and Paul Collier for criticism it would be criminal to not mention this person who, bearing in mind Behr’s closing comment to his article, one might be forgiven thinking she really is from another planet.