Quote:
Originally Posted by Jaymoss
Maybe there should be a referendum. Seeing as parliament is there to do the will of the people maybe it is time to see what the will actually is
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Referendums seem to work wonderfully in Switzerland, mind you in Switzerland they don’t even have a president as we would understand it - there’s a committee of 7 and one of them is chosen to be president for 12 months at a time. While doing the job they gain no more executive power than any of the other six. Distribution of power is embedded in their culture from the top to the bottom.
Here, we elect MPs based on their political philosophy and affiliation more than we do their exact policy platform; even the manifesto at election time is a broad programme for 5 years and we happily vote for the one that fits our outlook best, even if we don’t agree with all of it.
Referendums are alien to our way of thinking. They polarise us in ways our political discourse is ill-equipped to handle. Neither the Scottish independence referendum nor the Brexit referendum really settled the issue for large numbers of those on the losing side. For better or worse, we have a system of representative democracy and we have little choice but to lean into that.
For the same reason, whether it’s a king, or a figurehead like the president of Ireland or Germany, I think we need to stick with a system of government that is tied to Parliament. I don’t much like the idea of that much executive power resting in the hands of one person, and given how poorly we as a nation deal with polarised politics, we of all people don’t need an executive president who is also supposed to be the head of state and symbol of national unity, but who is unlikely ever to have the support of much more than half the electorate.
At present, while he’s not as popular as his mother, Charles , or rather, the institution of the monarchy embodied in him, still has approval ratings any elected president would die for. If that changes substantially, over the long run, then some process might need to be devised to decide whether to change it. But given our recent history with referendums, an all-or-nothing vote on abolishing the king would be a very dangerous prospect.