Institutionalised Cruelty as a policy platform - a brief history.

Me too.  UK Government "crackdown on benefits fraud" my arse..

Institutionalised Cruelty as a policy platform has a history...... read all about it.

BENEFITS REFORM - What price preventable harm: social policies designed to

disregard human need?

Here's a history of the introduction of the system that led to Work Capability Assessments, Benefits Sanctions and so much else along those lines... I have posted here a section, the introduction, to *peak your interest, dear reader. 

*(A dear reader pointed out my spelling error, I used the incorrect word. I ought to have used 'pique' - thank you Bernie Hastie on Facebook...) 

I offer this in the hope you will read the paper. I'm afraid it will infuriate and inform in equal measure. Knowledge is powerful, because understanding the evidence makes for better decision making, and also assists in firming resistance to ill-informed policy.

This is critically important information and all to often left out of even the liberal press in their ruminations on this subject of 'benefits reforms'. 

To tell the truth so that the population can understand what is being done matters. 

Reading Mo Stewart's Paper will, I believe,  inform and infuriate in equal measure. I know. I have just repeated myself.

It is shameful the 'news media' refuse this rather straight forward task so often. 

https://citizen-network.org/uploads/attachment/746/what-price-preventable-harm.pdf

Mo Stewart

The Centre for Welfare Reform, England

Abstract

"Historically, the UK welfare system was designed to protect those in greatest need, which provided the necessary financial and psychological security for the unemployed and especially for the chronically ill and disabled community who are unfit to work. 

This paper identifies how social policy reforms based on fiscal priorities have had the opposite effect, creating a crisis for disability benefit claimants. Conducted over a period of ten years, the Preventable Harm Project demonstrates the negative impact of the adoption of American social and labour market policies, and the often fatal human consequences of the removal of medical opinion from disability benefit assessments. 

I argue that the adoption of the Work Capability Assessment for the restriction of disability benefit(s) has created preventable harm for those in greatest need, and this article identifies the negative influences impacting on UK social policy reforms to the detriment of the chronically ill and disabled community.

Key words: preventable harm, work capability assessment

Introduction

The past financial and psychological security provided by state financial support for the long-term chronically ill and disabled community was destined to end with the adoption of neoliberal politics, which is an ideology that supports free market competition with an emphasis on minimal state intervention in all aspects of social affairs. 

Neoliberal ideology has swept the globe and has impacted on all countries in the Organisation For Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), who are influential in the social policy reforms of all OECD member countries (OECD, 2003; Soldatic & Grover, 2012; Stafford et al, 2019). Margaret Thatcher was the first elected neoliberal politician in the UK and in 1982, during her first term in office as Prime Minister, Thatcher identified her political ambition to remove the UK’s welfare support system, including the National Health Service (NHS), in favour of the adoption of the American welfare system using private health insurance (Travis, 2016).

Every successive neoliberal government since Thatcher adopted social policy reforms to work towards this political ambition. In doing so, the past psychological security provided by the UK welfare state was removed, and every effort was made to ensure that access to state financial support would be made as difficult as possible when moving from a welfare state to a market state. 

Commonly known as ‘welfare reforms’ the combination of social policy reforms, together with the adoption of increasingly punitive conditionality using financial sanctions (Dwyer, 2018), increased the prevalence of psychological distress identified within the disabled community (Patrick, 2012). The Preventable Harm Project (the Project) was created to offer a critical reflection of published research papers and key policy documents in this area of social policy reforms.

Preventable harm: the creation of a social policy crisis

The Project identified the adoption of a ‘non-medical’ functional assessment model, known as the Work Capability Assessment (WCA), which disregards medical opinion when used to assess claimants of disability benefit (Stewart, 2018) . 

The WCA was introduced in 2008 to restrict access to the new Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) disability benefit, by tightening the benefit gateway in order to reduce the costs of the social policy budget (DWP, 2006); as recommended by government commissioned research (Waddell & Aylward, 2005) which was funded by the American corporate sponsors UnumProvident Insurance (Cover, 2004).

Introduced on an exclusive fiscal basis, with a dangerous disregard for health and wellbeing (Barr et al, 2016), this flawed method of assessment guaranteed that disability benefit claimants would learn to live in fear of the WCA (Garthwaite, 2014), which became a matter of life or death for many of those in greatest need. 

The use of harsh sanctions by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) for often minor misdemeanors associated with the WCA is linked to a disturbing number of chronically ill and disabled benefit claimants attempting suicide (Mills, 2017; Barr et al 2016), and others have starved to death in C21st UK when they were sanctioned with all benefit income removed, identified as being ‘killed by the state’ (Elward, 2016: 30)."

~

https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/58235/1/1351_Shakespeare.pdf - a more detailed paper on the Waddell & Aylward, 2005 model. The devastation that the implementation of the BPS model as interpreted by Waddel and Aylward is an immense unspeakable horror story. Millions of lives have been adversely impacted, just to 'save a few bob'...

~

In essence the voices of the vulnerable, their interior sense of what they are going through, are key to designing healthy policy. Always ask the locals, they know their territory really well. 

Meeting the unmet needs of the vulnerable (we are all vulnerable) is an essential element of healthy policy, in as much healthy policy seeks always to avoid avoidable harms. 

I think it is not so much to ask for, when we consider Governance of our society. The improved outcomes for all of us are what I describe as the profit of healthy policy. Rather than wealth extracted from privatisation of health care, we ought to mandate the profit as being the outcomes for the whole population. 

Clean water is the profit denied when water utilities refuse to invest, and their negligence leads to raw sewage being free, from the rivers to the sea, as CEOs take their bonus's and the shareholders celebrate with glee.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."

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The Problem of Adversarial Politics.

The Problem of Adversarial Politics - Bullying as a modus operandi.

a brief overview

Adversarial dynamics and struggles for power tend towards bullying as an underlay for the flooring of 'debate' - the point is to win, rather than to arrive at an accurate understanding that informs and reassures all involved.

"In good conversation, there is neither victor nor vanquished - there is only better informed and reassured participants."

quote from Tim Field.

https://www3.gmu.edu/programs/icar/ijps/vol1_1/Burton.htm

"The party political system is historically adversarial. It evolved out of past feudal landlord and commoner confrontations. 

It became even more politically divisive with industrialization. 

It retained consensus support and remained viable as long as its authorities were in effective control.

The hierarchie's political adversaries and grass roots activists could be criminalised and exiled. Poverty and poverty based crime could be contained by criminalising the impoverished, building more jails and by 'transportation' of the convicted poor and many more impoverished people as indentured workers to build colonies on foreign lands, at the expense of the native peoples.

But with communications that help to establish a separate culture for the under privileged, and with the availability of weapons, effective control of the alienated became ever more difficult.

With economic growth in industrialisation and their democracies there has evolved a dominant middle class. Its members have no desire to be caught in the cross fire of any historical we-they confrontation. 

The press, radio and television and, more recently, social media have brought to its attention the absurdities of party political debate as a decision making process. 

Furthermore, the members of the dominant `capital' and `labour' parties are now seen to be in conflict largely for personal career reasons, not because of policy differences. 

There is a growing consensus that the problems civilization face must be tackled by less adversarial processes in which analysis and reason prevail."

Political Grooming and 'wedge' politics are designed to exacerbate the adversarial dynamics.

Use of dehumanising language targeted the perceived adversaries and marginalised groups within society is evident everywhere.

The 10 stages of Genocide - Sprouts Schools

The term 'sheeple' is a good example of that process, in that it inspires a sense of superiority among those who would use the term to describe others, who are deemed inferior.

We are all familiar with political and vernacular use of the words animal, cockroach, rat, vermin, monster, ape, snake, infestation, parasite, alien, savage and 'hate marches' as weapons. 

The lack of humane understanding, the lack of empathy and the reliance on incomplete or inaccurate 'information' bias and curated bigotry are all stimulated by the term 'sheeple'.

This is one example familiar to me within my own situation and I cite it here because so many among my contemporaries, left and right, feel it is fine to use that term. I have always been appalled by that term.

I find that when I challenge it, I experience push back, dismissal and derision and an unwillingness to explore the meaning of use of such terms.

'Sheeple' is no less dehumanising than 'towel heads' or 'faggots' or 'dykes' or any number of similar terms.

Debate or Discourse?

Adversarial dynamics and struggles for power tend towards bullying as a underlay for the flooring of 'debate' - the point is to win, rather than to arrive at an accurate understanding that informs and reassures all involved.

"In good conversation, there is neither victor nor vanquished - there is only better informed and reassured participants."

How bullying works: projection and scapegoating.

Written by Kitty S Jones

https://politicsandinsights.org/2015/01/22/how-bullying-works-projection-and-scapegoating/

"Very few people, when put to the test, have the integrity and moral courage to stand up against bullying, harassment, abuse, threats and corruption. The targets of adult bullying are selected often because they DO have the moral courage to challenge; many people will pass by on the other side.

A target of adult bullying is most often chosen because of their strength, not their weakness. Research shows that targets of bullying tend to have highly developed empathy, and sensitivity for others, a high degree of perceptiveness, high moral values, a well-developed integrity, a strong sense of fair play and reasonableness, a low propensity to violence, a reluctance to pursue grievance, disciplinary or legal action, a strong forgiving streak and a mature understanding of the need to resolve conflict with dialogue. 

Often, targets of bullying are independent, self-reliant and “different” in some way. Weak people often disingenuously confuse these hallmarks of character with weakness.

Bullies aim to inflict psychological injury more often than physical injury. Their main aim is to control, discredit, isolate and eliminate their target.

The word “victim” also allows disingenuous people to tap into and stimulate other people’s misconceptions and prejudices of victimhood which include the inference that the person was somehow complicit in the abuse. (See just-world fallacy and victim-blame narrative). 

I use the word “target”, which is also accurate because bullying involves the intentional singling out of a person or group for abuse.

Bullies, who have no integrity, are vindictive, aggressive, demanding, and regularly violate others’ boundaries; displaying aggression does not respect peoples’ rights, and a bully’s “requests” come with a negative consequence if the course of action demanded by the bully is declined. 

A bully’s bad behaviour is entirely his or her responsibility, they intend to cause their targets harm, to undermine them and damage them socially, emotionally, psychologically and sometimes, physically. And they often do."

Corbyn - making an example

Jeremy Corbyn and the false anti-Semitism, ‘friend of terrorists’, ‘communist spy’, ‘protest politician’ and ‘he’s unelectable’ charges laid against him present a recent and very well documented example of this dreadful behavioural dynamic. It’s sole purpose was to prevent a genuinely honest politician with a track record for integrity, honesty, empathy and a good understanding of the issues facing the body politic and society at large from gaining the position of Prime Minister, with  a majority in the House of Commons.

That bullying campaign was perpetrated within the Labour Party by a group who were aligned with Blairism (and its wars) and this was replicated throughout the News Media and online, through social media micro targeting campaigns, funded and supported by those concerned with Wealth Extraction and their power to protect Wealth Extraction from accountability for the avoidable harms it refuses, repeatedly, to avoid. 

Healthy Governance - avoiding avoidable harms.

The function of a healthy governance system is to maintain and support the population in living well and at peace.

Part of that process is the deployment collective resources to avoid avoidable harm and to prevent preventable harms.

There are harms that cannot be avoided and there are harms that can be avoided.

War can be avoided. War can be prevented. 

However as we see, again and again War is not avoided and we know too well that within war the murder of civilians and the destruction of civil infrastructure which form the essentials for ‘living well’  - schools, health care facilities, housing, roads, utilities - which are the basic human right of a civilian population caught in the crossfire of warfare - tends not to be avoided, more often than not by conscious choice.  The destruction is intentional, not accidental.

Collateral Damage :  A euphemism designed to throw a veil over the realities of warfare.

We cannot stop a violent hurricane from causing destruction - we can however build infrastructure designed to withstand the impact of such natural catastrophes. We could deploy resources to protecting the affected people’s welfare, supporting them in the recovery process. 

Resilience

Rather than raw personal human resilience,  we could choose to build in resilience as an infrastructure policy and thus offer more effective and efficient support for the people made vulnerable by the storm.

Likewise, regards Climate Disruption, we cannot stop the process underway because it is the result of a few centuries of build up of Carbon Dioxide and other pollutants into the atmosphere that will take centuries to reverse. We can reduce or stop further pollution yet the effect of such action will take decades to be felt.

What we can do is design resilience into infrastructure, social care, wealth sharing, aid systems and so on to offer best support and protection of the people made most vulnerable by Climate Disruption - that would be a matter of avoiding avoidable harms in the near, medium and long term.

Bullying in politics is lethal.

Bullying in politics undermines all these objectives and more by at attacking the proponents of equitable industrial, social and economic policy as a method of defending the status quo, a status quo born of adversarial violence as described in the beginning of this piece.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."

This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.

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'Upstarts' in the Labour Party?

                       "we don't like honest people being honest about our behaviour"


'New upstarts'? was what one pundit Mefia commentator said of the Momentum group within the Labour Party.

People who he suggests are intent on taking over and destroying the Labour Party from within, a surge of insurgents, an anti-demcoratic horde of ranting idealists, who will NEVER gain power, and will condemn Labour to infinite futility. That's the general mainstream view, the 'public opinion' as manufactured by the Moguls of Mordor and Murdoch.

So let me tell you who I think some of those people are...

A generation of people who were 14 -16 or so when the adults, their parents, teachers, mentors, celebrities etc allowed the British Government to invade Iraq. And their parents, mentors and communities.

They are in their late 20s now, fully adult and effing furious with our generation, their parents and grand parents, who failed to stop that invasion, (largely because we were fixated on home ownership and wealth 'creation' which drove inequity ever deeper in the UK) when the evidence at the time was clear.

A general strike would have been enough to bring the British State involvement in Iraq to a halt. It was mooted at the time but dismissed without a rational debate.

We marched, and then went home....

No WMD, Regime Change 100% illegal, War of Aggression 100% Illegal, no association with 9/11 and a country that had been bombed for more than a decade vs the mightiest military on Earth..... all this info was easily available on line at the time. To those who made the effort.

Those ADULTS that did not seek out that information, but relied upon 'opinion' have by default enabled that War Crime and appear to be wholly unwilling to confront that and have left a mess that the children of 2003 and their contemporaries in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and elsewhere are all too aware of - that is how these 'upstarts' see matters and they are correct.

They see the previous generations are too timid to call out the bullies, the bullying system.

It's also valid to point out that mere opinion is not the same as evidence or data.... and thus mere opinion is not sufficient when making decisions that affect other peoples lives so deeply, so harmfully.

Neither is religious belief, right wing or left wing ideological bias.

All of these are inadequate to the task of genuine democracy, which is the administration of our shared resource, taxation, for the equal benefit of all people in our society.

You would not accept a brain surgeon operating on the basis of 'opinion' - you would want data, evidence, precedence and insurance... and absolutely due diligence and duty of care....

Most of what is published as fact in mainstream media is mere opinion. Donald Trump's ascendancy is a direct result of submission to mere opinion. Likewise Hilary Clinton's nomination by the Democrats, who were proven to have acted amorally and possibly illegally in their fight back against the people who lifted Sanders...... Brexit was another victory of opinion over evidence.

It's immature to base decision making that affects peoples lives on mere opinion, and it is also careless, irresponsible and feeble.

If I was in my 20's or 30's now I'd be utterly, utterly disgusted at my parents generation. And terrified of the future they have bequeathed me and my contemporaries.

'New upstarts. - HOW DARE YOU!

Most people I know in their teens, 20's and 30's see clearly that the old system of Governance is corrupted, it is a bully system and they fear for their futures as people of good heart (above and beyond home ownership and jobs...) and they are furious, frustrated, appalled and deeply saddened by the way the previous generations of people with such privilege have failed to honour their children's futures....

And you ain't seen nothing yet. These are not young 'idealists' - they live with the reality in a way previous generations do not.... connected, international, global, tolerant, caring, compassionate and robust in their thinking, superbly well informed.

And active.

Get behind them adults, get behind them and support your future grand children's futures.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

*If you like this post, if you found the themes resonant, if you agree in part, would you be kind enough to let others know about it? I would really appreciate that. You could drop a comment too, if you felt the urge. Or not. I will moderate contributions, and block any that are abusive. For obvious reasons. Thank you for reading.

The Established Power Base, Corbyn and You!

 The Established Power base is not simply trying to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn, it is trying to undermine YOUR participation in political decision making - your awareness and awakening is what they fear more than anything else on this Earth.

Jeremy Corbyn merely represents that desire to participate in ways that promote honesty, fairness and justice as THE STANDARD in ALL political decision making and State Governance.

Jeremy Corbyn has repeatedly stated that the grass roots should be directly involved in policy formulation and the research/exploration that supports healthy policy formulation.

O'Donnell has stated clearly that 'recall' ought to operate at every level of electable public office, as a means to provide direct oversight and control to the grass roots.

These ideas were first laid out in some detail in The Power Inquiry​ 2006.

Ideas which David Cameron and Ed Milliband praised and then dismissed as 'impractical' without saying why he believed them to be impractical.

We know why.

The greatest threat to the Established power base is not violence from 'terrorists' - it is the emergence of a grass roots actively committed to that equal participation and oversight of Government, a grass roots that is organising as I write.

From the removal of the Independent Living Fund to arming Saudi head chopping, crucifying Regime, from the dropping of clean energy to the expansion and promotion of Fracking, from the refusal to prosecute known predatory child abusers (in all main parties, and the Churches) to 'protect the state' to imposing intense examination upon primary school children, secondary school children, and ensuring University students emerge from Study in debt, all this in order to put them (and their teachers) under chronic stress.... these are all standard patterns of how Established Power operates to preserve it's position, enhance and project it's power into our lives.

If you are going to take on the system, it's best you know what you are dealing with. Be fearless, be honest, be a mature adult.

We ALL share a responsibility as adults, to each other and to all the children.... that responsibility is inherent, innate, fundamental to our healthy biology. Take it up.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."

This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.

Thank you for reading this blog.

https://patreon.com/corneilius - donations gratefully received

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Post Election 2015, and the challenges we face, the work we must do.

The Problem

The 'problem' is way more than the actions of one man, or one party or even of the power elites.

We are in a social system that has all the symptoms, relationships, politics and denials of an abuse family dynamic, a system of power that is psychologically dysfunctional and profoundly unhealthy that is pretending the family is ok.

We are in a social system that is driven by unresolved past trauma, that re-inflicts that trauma repeatedly, quite often intentionally ( The Shock Doctrine)in the institutional desire to maintain Power over people.

We are all affected by this, through social, religious and ideological conditioning, through trauma inflicted by Power, through the disruption of natural bonding and learning processes that embed empathy and autonomy, gratitude and pleasure, and the desire to nurture all for all, which are all markers of optimal human biological health.

The resolution is not and never will systemic reform; it must be both personal and communal, and it must be a recognition of and a healing of the old wounds, the suppressed pain, the almost rampant rage and anger of which we see plenty of in movies, novels, violence. This must lead towards kinder social and institutional behaviours ....

Viva Le resolution. The old revolution concept is inadequate to the task ahead of us.

The Vision

I want to see a psycho-social healing movement that is practical that addresses the social trauma and conditioning that is inter-generational, and that feeds the urge to Power over others.

I want to see a societal model that nurtures people as persons, that articulates empathy and love, that is robust in dealing with abusers, that seeks to prevent more harm emerging, that can respect the older cultures and back of conquest of their lands for 'exploitation' and 'development' and observe and learn from them.

They have been around for a lot longer than this system has existed,and have many examples of living close to the biological optimal human health state.

The old sordid politics of the struggle for Power over the people, rather than power shared with the people*,  to nurture ALL the people as healthy loving persons by right or left is inadequate to this task.

Hatred and fear are inadequate to this task..

* (which was the primary mode of human society for the majority of our existence as a species, in spite of what most are led to think, based on the indoctrination typical of ideological compulsion schooling and mono-theistic power religions that claim to to have the 'right way' for all human beings)

I want to see a society that heals the old wounds, rather than a social institutional system that seeks to capitalise on them.



Rage or Outrage!

If we think our anger, rage and despair is going to resolve or improve matters, we are truly participating the continuation of the problem rather than the resolution of it.

Those emotions are the tip of the iceberg, and can so easily be manipulated by those who are powerful, who are abusive, who are predatory.

Those emotions are flags, calling attention to deeper feelings, to the pain, the wounding.

Harness the anger, examine the deeper feelings, resolve the matter within ourselves.

Then we can begin the work. That is the beginning of the work

The Work

"It is a failure across the progressive left in England to articulate a distinct plan that is anti-austerity, anti-cuts and anti-poverty "

I would add that there is not an adequate articulation across the so-called progressive left , of what the Community Voluntary Sector brings : empathy, care, attention to detail in meeting vulnerable peoples needs, self governance, maturation, healing; there is not enough articulation of what constitutes a healthy humane being, and there is almost no articulation of what social conditioning is, how effective it is, how it is effected.

Without these, railing against injustice has no traction.

There is also the matter of education systems, and mainstream media systems that ignore,suppress or mis-report on what is being learned in the fields of Anthropology, Neuroscience, Child Development, Trauma and Recovery studies, Biology and History as well as healthy technologies that nurture the world around us.

Plans are merely concepts, if they are not backed by the actual psychological progression I am writing about.

And for Labour the removal of the Party Whip system and a dedicated assault on that Institution in all other politcial groupings where it exists would indicate that psychological progression.

And this is where the Green party is genuinely different - I see that in Caroline Lucas, and the fact that the Green Party has rejected the concept of the Party Whip in it's entirety ... we cannot accept any practice that amounts to bullying or coercion, when it comes to decisin making processes on matters that affect our lives and the lives of others.

I see that there is a growing recognition of all of the above, every day, and am I no longer dismayed or hopeless. That is not to say I am not appalled at what goes on in politics. I am.

I have gotten over that expectation of an instant change, an easy win. I understand how deep the conditioning goes, how personal it is, and how difficult the resolution of that is as well as what helps the process of healing. I am learning to only point out the escape route rather than damn the conditioned for being conditioned. Could I damn my younger self for being conditioned, frightened, confused?

So we need to ask ourselves what we are FOR, we need to examine our conditioning, and we need to stand for that healing above all else, in the face of what ever comes... the worst outcome is we grow as people, the best outcome is we build a base of psychologically healthy solidarity as each generation passes, and in time, Society will reflect that.

Viva La Resoultion!

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

UK Local and European Elections, the reality of The Vote exposed.

The vast majority of people in the Western style democracies are unaware that they have been purposefully infantalised and that voting on it's own, as it is currently set up is an immature form of democracy.

I was unaware of this myself for many years. I don't 'blame' the people who have been conditioned, nor do I feel any anger or frustration towards those of us whose conditioning has been so intense, because it is so ubiquitous. It permeates education, it is promoted through media, left and right, it's part of marketing's purpose through 'aspirational marketing'. Infants, children, teens, young adults, young parents and elders are all targets of the conditioning processes.

I say this because I see that the power disparity between and infant and an adult, the child and a teacher, the bully and the bullied, the 'doctor and the patient', is mirrored by the current power disparity between any individual adult or grass roots collective and The State... all too often Government ministers insist on telling us what is good for us without meaningfully including us, our stated concerns and useful insight in the discourse on what is or is not 'good for us'. They rule, we obey. Thus we the people are maintained in an infantile state.
 
Mature Democracy requires that the individual citizen is directly involved in the decision making processes over all matters that affect his or her life, and that he or she works with the community, to participate in the implementation of any policies that emerge from such discourse.

This is a matter of maturity and of personal and collective responsibility. The fact that so few people even get to the level of acknowledging this simple point reveals the utility of State Education as it exists for the preservation of Political Power to Rule Over the People.

There is NO mature democracy anywhere on Earth at this time.

The power disparity between and infant and an adult is mirrored by the current power disparity between an adult and The political and economic State... a healthy adult will care for the child, allow the child to explore and discover and articulate who she or he is and will nurture the child for the child's outcomes rather than the parents desired outcomes. A healthy parent will foster empathy and autonomy in the child.

Classical and modern politics did, and does none of this, and most often does the opposite, with dreadful results for those who have to endure: be they people conned into taking on mortgages which turn homes into investments and profits for developers, be they people whose land and water is poisoned by fracking or mining or other 'resource development', or parents who are under stress and being regulated rather than supported by Social Services, be they elders divorced from the extended family, placed in 'care homes', cared for by poorly paid, badly trained workers, care homes which are run as profit centers for private enterprise, be they civilians caught in the cross fire of 'just wars' (Iraq, Afghanistan) and civil wars where proxies are trained, funded and let loose (Syria, Libya and Africa and South America in the second half of the 20th Century), be they children diagnosed with ADHD and coerced to take 'medications' to 'manage' their symptoms, be they Survivors of institutional abuse, ranging from asylums to Guantanamo Bay... So many people whose lives are blighted by the actions of the State.

There's more I could lay out here... the point is made.

It's a feeble argument to lay those adverse outcomes against the more positive outcomes of State action as a balance sheet, for that argument demeans those who suffer and minimise the meaning of their lived experience...

As far as I am aware, the only document coming anywhere near describing the practical steps towards a mature democracy, one in which all citizens participate as equals, where responsibility of power is vested in the grass roots, where active power - that is the power to act- is devolved to the community is The Power Inquiry 2006.

You won't have heard of it because all the political parties feel threatened by it's insight into how power operates and what is needed to devolve that power from those who currently hold it,and all too often abuse it, to the grass roots where transparency can function effectively as a restraint on power accumulation and deepen accountability.

http://www.jrrt.org.uk/publications/power-people-independent-inquiry-britains-democracy-full-report

It's a .pdf, and so worth reading and studying...

And yes, by all means, do vote for the greens, or independents or others if it means something, even as a protest vote.

But do not expect that your vote is an exercise in meaningful Participative Democracy. It's not.

I urge my readers to familiarize themselves with The Power Inquiry document as a starting point in their own explorations of how democracy in the UK might be deepened, strengthened and nurtured!

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe