Revolutionary demands within an evolutionary timescale.

 After THA'S conception in 2012 it became increasing clear, as the years ticked by, that our revolutionary demands would only come about through an evolutionary process. If we were the subjects of a monarch for 600 odd years and those of our current parliamentary democracy for nearly 400 then the revolutionary changes to our governance, as covered in our six demands, are not going to happen overnight.

As a result, my aim has simply been to keep the pilot light on so that we are there as and when the public wake up, to the reality, that nothing is going to change in the way we are governed without substantial reforms to our parliamentary system.

The trouble is the working public are too comfortable and busy keeping their jobs and maintaining their standard of living to give any thought to the reform of our governance.

However, could this be about to change next year as the double economic hits of Covid-19 and a No Deal TransEnd hit us and the working public come to understand that the blind faith they have placed in their politicians has been misplaced as they realise the full scale of their incompetence.

If the majority don't wake up they will certainly deserve all they get but I fear that the reality is that things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.

 

Democracy is about 'Power' stupid.

Few if any books I’ve read in and around the subject of ‘Democracy’ come to the same conclusions we do which is that unless and until the ‘People’ have real effective 'Power' nothing is going to change.

Take Murray Bookchin for example. In the two books of his I’ve read recently - ‘The Next Revolution’ and  ‘The Ecology of Freedom’, totally some 638 pages between them, he covers his ideas for people’s assemblies in the first and traces the conflicts hierarchical structures bring to society in the second.

His idea for people’s assemblies at local level, at first appear to be a step in the right direction, but it soon becomes clear that they are nothing more than part appointed and part elected talking shops without any permanent power to change things.

Central governments are very good at hanging onto power and over the years have come up a number of ruses to convince the people that they are improving their local democracy from unitary councils, to regionalisation and devolution to name but three Westminster have supported.

However democracy whether national or local only lives up to its name if the people are recognised as sovereign and have the mechanisms to exert their power over their politicians.

Our six demands directly address the issue of who holds the power and one can come up with all the fancy ideas you like, to supposedly improve democracy, but unless the power is held directly by the people then the ideas are all simply window dressing.

Anarchy

Since being involved with THA my reading list has been many and varied in and around the broad topic of democracy and the latest book I've just finished was 'On Anarchism' by Noam Chomsky.

Anarchy is the state of a society being freely constituted without authorities or a governing body. It may also refer to a society or group of people that totally rejects a set hierarchy. The word anarchy was first used in 1539, meaning "an absence of government".

Interestingly Chomsky points out all anarchists are socialists but not all socialists are anarchists!

The trouble for anarchists is that no nation has ever, to the best of my knowledge, been run according to this principle except very briefly in Spain, but then only in some areas, before the communists established their hierarchical controls over them.

Smaller structures like kibbutzes, in Israel especially in the early days, would have passed the test as 'communes' but realistically a nation needs a government.

The BIG issue then is whether the people have any real power over their government and the reality is that over time most, if not all, governments increase their powers and become more isolated from the people they serve.

In Comsky's book I was struck by this passage:-

"New revolutions must dissolve the government altogether or bring it closer to its legitimate institutions...The uprising that ends by strangling or dethroning a sultan is as lawful an act as those by which he disposed, the day before, of the lives and goods of his subject. Force alone maintained him, force alone overthrows him."

It should go without saying, but let me emphasis, that THA is not for strangling anyone or a state of anarchy! What we strongly advocate is peaceful resistance, in line with the thoughts of Gene Sharp, to bring about the reforms to our governance we demand. However, what I do take from the quote above is that it is totally legitimate for a people to take back power from their governments especially when the governments power is being increased, centralised and ultimately abused.

This is the key to THA - to give power back to the people for only by having real power can the people make their politicians their servants and not their masters.