One of those times we agree with George Monbiot

As ever, it’s only the diagnosis, not the solution:

The primaries won’t deliver a perfect system. We’ll still be stuck with a centralised and coercive politics, unmatched to the needs of the complex system we call society, based on the illegitimate concepts of presumed consent and remote decision-making. We will properly reclaim that power only when our representative politics are accompanied by participatory and deliberative decision-making.

George is talking about how the people who might get voted in as MPs are chosen. We are - as is our wont - rather more radical. Make who is the MP irrelevant to those areas of life.

We agree entirely that there are vast areas of life that simply shouldn’t be subject to presumed consent and remote decision-making. We agree that those vast areas of life should be dealt with in a participatory and deliberative fashion. Further, locally, by the people directly involved, without imposition by the centre or even the tyranny of the majority.

That means simply not having government, nor the majoritarian tyranny of democracy, involved at all. Just remove government from those areas of life - leave ‘em be for individuals and groups of people as they wish to combine and accumulate to get on with it. Remove, entirely, the power of other people to determine and make it direct decision making by those concerned.

You know, free markets.

Sure, there are some things where that majoritarian imposition is necessary. But the key word there is “some” and the correct definition of that some is “very many fewer than it is currently applied to”.

In a radically free country how we choose the people who might run for the job of getting the bins collected becomes some mild trivia, of interest to the occasional anorak and no more. So, the way to achieve that better politics is to be radically free, no?