| (disclaimer: I wasn't one of the downvoters) My take was that Cummings saw Farage as a useful way to draw in the anti-immigrant crowd whilst being able to wash Vote Leave's hands of hints/accusations of racism? Interesting to see the video with Deutsch there; I wasn't aware he had publicised opinions on this. Seems like you could summarise his argument as saying that adversarial political systems are more democratic and more effective than consensus-based political systems. It seems quite odd to me in the same way that some of his work in physics is. He's taken a principle of Popper's ("Democracy is measured by how easy it is to remove a policy or government") as a seemingly absolute axiom and spread it quite thinly to the extent that FPTP is seen as more democratic simply because policies get added and removed more frequently. I can see how this attitude links in with Cummings' obsession with effectiveness. Although FPTP probably does make it easier for some policies to be repealed, I think it makes it a lot harder for some policies to be introduced. It results in a kind of "package-deal" politics in which you can often only effectively vote for a certain policy when it's bundled up with a load of other policies which you may or may not like. Take for example cannabis decriminalisation, which over half of the UK support and most of the rest don't have any strong opinion over. The two main parties havenever paid it any attention as they see it risky, therefore it's never seriously discussed. My previous reading about institutional differences between the UK and the EU had left me with the impression that the EU is significantly more "democratic" in the sense that the broad spread of people's attitudes and opinions is being represented and percolated up to the legislative processes. For example, although the EU Commission isn't directly elected, it is at least selected by heads of state and approved by Parliament members, is renewed every 5 years and can be scuppered in a vote of no confidence. Parliament members are by and large voted in in a proportional way, which I see as generally a positive thing. By contrast the HoL - although it does not propose legislation - wields a certain amount of influence over how legislation is passed, is effectively unelected, and many members are there for life. There's also the fact that the EU as a political body appears to be more of a self-modifying organism than the UK's political body. For example, recent years/decades have seen significantly more power being vested in the EU Parliament. This may be to do with how young the EU is - it's still working on its method of government. With Brexit looking quite inevitable now, it will be interesting to compare the ongoing performance of the UK and set it against that of the EU. |
I don't agree that Cummings was happy to let Farage bring in the anti-immigrant votes. They maintain that Farage/Banks cost them votes overall because they turned off a lot of swing voters whereas people who were very concerned about immigration were going to vote Leave anyway.
You make a good point about marginal policies like cannabis decriminalisation (something I support too) not making progress under FPTP, I think the UK system certainly has its downsides too.
Re democracy, you may be right that the EU is more democratic in terms of how the cross section of concerns are mushed together. The fundamental issue is error correction though, the EU is unresponsive in the face of problems when it might require them to row back on the idea of deeper and deeper integration across Europe. They keep on pushing the same path, even when it appears to be causing damage (e.g. Greece). The empirical evidence on political forecasting suggests that everyone, including those at the top of institutions, is frequently wrong in the medium/long term and I think the EU will keep compounding errors. Of course, this is itself a forecast and it's possible that the EU will seriously reform and we would have been better off inside after all, I assign low probability to this though.
Yes I agree the HoL is very flawed too.