Were the prospect of a national government led by Boris Johnson and leaned on by Nigel Farage not blood-chilling enough, the referendum campaign produced opinion poll outcomes to freeze the bones. I don’t mean those underlining how misinformed voters are about EU migration or the reach of EU law, perturbing though they were. I mean the one that found that 46% of those wanting to leave the EU thought the authorities would probably rig the result of Thursday’s vote, and that more than a quarter of them believed MI5 would be involved in the fix. [...]
Whatever else stems from the referendum ballot, the need to rebuild faith in political institutions has been starkly reconfirmed. Faith flows from confidence that the processes and servants of democracy are honest, accessible, transparent and able to get things done. Can devolving power to cities and their surrounding regions and putting it in the hands of highly visible, directly-elected mayors help to improve that flow? [...]
Though dismayed by the insular Vote Leave mentality, Barber thinks he knows why people succumb to it. “The nation state is too large for meaningful participation of citizens,” he told Prospect magazine three years ago. As for the EU: “Citizens simply don’t feel that it is about citizenship. It’s about the euro, maybe about economics or trade, but it’s not about democracy.” And, at the same time: “It’s too small, too limited and territorial to be able to encompass the global scale of the challenges we face.”
No comments:
Post a Comment