There was one piece of good news this week. The practical, no-nonsense folk in Manchester told the government where they could stick their road-charging proposals by voting overwhelmingly against any congestion payments in the city.
One million people voted on plans for Britain's biggest congestion zone covering about 80 square miles, and four out of five gave a resounding "No" to paying to use roads they already own. The referendum, costing an astonishing £34 million, dealt a huge blow to Labour's ambition of extending charging across the country.
The verdict has cast doubt on plans for similar zones in six other areas. Durham, the West Midlands, Tyne and Wear, Shrewsbury, Bristol and Cambridgeshire were also given Government funding in 2005 to look at charging.
Manchester businessman Trevor Jones, 53, said "The really infuriating thing about this fiasco is it has cost the taxpayer £34 million paid to fat cats and consultants who have frittered it away. This money could have been spent tackling congestion."
Motorist Josh Lennon, 44, put it more succinctly: "Turkeys don't vote for Christmas".
Reactions from the supporters of road-charging, an uneasy and unlikely alliance of vengeful tree-huggers, left-wing know-alls and fat-cat bureaucrats on the make, were predictable. Sir Richard Leese, leader of Manchester City Council, said "I am very disappointed. We have lost the opportunity to get the changes in public transport we need. The issues have not gone away. We still have issues of congestion, poor air quality and poor public transport."
Tony Bosworth, of Friends of the Earth, made a similarly dishonest statement: "Greater Manchester has missed the opportunity to develop a clean, fast and efficient transport network" - in other words, claiming that road charging was the only way to modernise public transport, which is ridiculous and untrue. The best way to modernise public transport is to buy new stuff, simple as that. What these two should have said was "Manchester needs new buses and trams but we're too mean and feckless to pay for them so we'll pick on motorists - no one's on their side - and make them foot the bill".
Well sadly, Messrs.Bosworth and Leese, somebody was on the motorists' side, and the good people of Manchester could see through your persiflage.
However - and this is our reason for writing about it - we all know full well that this vote won't be the end of it. Once politicians and campaigners have decided they want something, they won't let a little thing like the wishes of the public get in the way. These congestion charges will come, one way or the other, despite the fact that the majority of the population are deeply opposed because they are fully aware that they paid for the bloody roads in the first place, and shouldn't be made to pay a second time to use them. They also know that all this fuss about pollution and CO2 is a lot of rot because the air is a damn sight cleaner now than it was forty years ago, and that CO2 does not contribute to climate change but is in fact a beneficial and necessary substance which was far more abundant in the past than it is now.
Still and all, the people of Manchester will lose in the end. Just as the people of Ireland will lose. They thought they'd rejected the Lisbon treaty in their referendum, but that's not good enough for the politicians: as Bertolt Brecht said, "When government doesn't agree with the people, it's time to change the people", and when the people make the wrong choices they must just be forced to choose and choose again until they damn well get it right.
As Minette Marrin wrote in the Times this week …
The apparatchiks of the European Union establishment have one thing, at least, in common with serial rapists. They cannot accept that no means no.
Last week the Brussels nomenklatura once again proved that it won't accept a no, this time from the electorate of Ireland. In June the Irish voters firmly said no to the European constitution, or rather the Lisbon treaty, or whatever obfuscation the Europhiles dreamed up to bamboozle us. The Irish were not bamboozled; they didn't want the EU constitution. But no is not acceptable.
So last week Brian Cowen, the taoiseach and Europhile, reassured European leaders that he wouldn't take no for an answer from his people. He has promised to make them vote again on the matter. Dick Roche, his European affairs minister, then opined, in the majesty of his democratic office: "From a constitutional point of view, there's no other choice than a second referendum."
What can he mean? The truth is the precise opposite. Such deliberate untruth, backing Mr Cowen's promise to ignore his people's vote, gives new vigour to the phrase barefaced effrontery. Against such wilful, shameless betrayal of the democratic process it is useless to protest; democracy is being undermined by democratically elected governments that don't understand a constitutional no and smile benignly, or self-importantly, at our helpless rage. Cowen and Roche should not be singled out for their effrontery. Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European commission, is guilty of it too. Last week he brought out his weary charm on BBC television to ask, "Who are we to stop the Irish having a second referendum?" European leaders, far from stopping a second referendum in Ireland, have put huge pressure on its prime minister to have one or do something - anything - to deliver up an Irish yes. Barroso must have known this; his question was shamefully misleading. Yet he actually said after last week's Brussels summit meeting that "Europe has passed its credibility test". The truth, once again, is the opposite. With its demand for an Irish yes, the EU has passed another incredibility test, in the manner of a deluded rapist.
Our own Gordon Brown, and Tony Blair before him, specialises in shameless, undemocratic effrontery, not least about the EU. Everyone knows Labour promised at the 2005 general election to hold a referendum on the proposed EU constitution. Everyone knows Blair and Brown broke that promise. Brown then sneakily signed the Lisbon treaty, knowing full well that most British voters would have said no. But Brown wasn't having no. He wasn't having democracy.
Brown does not restrict his astonishing effrontery to matters European. One of my favourite examples was his claim, many times repeated, that he had inherited "a broken economy" from the Conservatives. He must have known that the opposite was true, but he kept saying it.
I particularly enjoyed the way he and his ministers until recently went about intoning that Britain is one of the best-placed nations in the rich world to withstand the global crisis, since Britain is not overborrowed like other leading countries. The truth is the opposite. Clearly, they think they can get away with it. Perhaps they think we won't notice or won't care. Historians may say 'twas ever thus: all politicians lie.
I am not so sure. In my adult life I think there has been a growth in barefaced lies and deception in public office, along with a loss of respect for due process and respect for the freedoms of others. Maybe that's just because, with the information revolution, we know so much more about what public men and women get up to. Or perhaps there has been a real change.
It's an odd coincidence that while democracy and meritocracy have truly spread in the past 50 years, while all sorts of institutions and activities have been opened up to people who used never to get a look-in, political democracy seems to be coming under increasing threat.
Yes, "democracy". It didn't last long, did it? I imagine most people would say that we only achieved true democracy in 1928 when the vote was extended to women and working-class men. Now, just one person's lifetime later, how many of us still really believe that we live in a democracy, or that our votes mean anything? Since the Second World War there has never been a British government which was not opposed by a majority of the electorate (don't take our word for it, check it out on the net) and now, as Minette Marrin has explained, politicians are abandoning even the pretence that they are enacting the will of anyone but themselves.
Abraham Lincoln defined democracy as "Government of the people, by the people, for the people". He was, apparently, quite serious.
The About Economics website is not so naïve …
Democracy is literally "rule by the people". This is a dictionary definition and is not considered sharp enough for academic use. Schumpeter (1942) contrasts these two definitions below and regards only the second one as useful and plausible enough to work with:
"The eighteenth-century philosophy of democracy may be couched in the following definition: the democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions which realizes the common good by making the people itself decide issues through the election of individuals who are to assemble in order to carry out its will."
The following definition is preferred for its clarity but has a modern feel that is at some distance from the original dictionary definition. Political representation is assumed to be necessary here.
"The democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote." More clearly: the democratic method is one in which people campaign competitively for the people's votes to achieve the power to make public decisions. This definition is the sharpest.
Or they could have said "one in which people campaign competitively to achieve the power to make public decisions, feather their own nests and retire with seats on several boards". That'd be sharper still.
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