democracy

On Current Trends, Northern Ireland Will Leave the Union

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I was published in Unherd on the 2021 Northern Ireland Census figures. Demography isn’t destiny but it contributes powerfully to it. This week’s Northern Ireland 2021 Census release, showing Catholics outnumbering Protestants for the first time, does not in itself doom the Union. It should, however, represent a major warning to Unionists on both sides of the … Read more

A Good Week for Democracy Globally

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General Buhari holding a broom “to sweep Nigerian politics clean” at a campign rally. Photo: Heinrich Böll Foundation.
General Buhari holding a broom “to sweep Nigerian politics clean” at a campign rally. Photo: Heinrich Böll Foundation.

This was originally posted to Slugger O’Toole…

There was something discomfiting about the funeral of Lee Kuan Yew. Singapore’s achievements under his rule were extraordinary, but the story presented on his death was a sanitised fable. World leaders queued up to subscribe to the cult of wise old Harry, father of the nation.

Lee wasn’t so benevolent when challenged. Opposition politicians were sued for libel and bankrupted for criticising government policies during election campaigns. When the opposition had the temerity to actually win some seats, the state set out to destroy the new MPs financially and professionally, before gerrymandering them out in the following election.

Ironically, for decades Lee’s PDP would have won every election with an overall majority even under pure PR. He was genuinely loved by the majority of Singaporeans, as the scenes at his funeral showed. That made his suppression of minority opinions all the more distasteful.

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Your Guide to Israel’s General Election

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Originally posted at Slugger O’Toole…

Israel goes to the polls on St Patrick’s Day to elect a new parliament, which in turn will either confirm incumbent Binyamin Netanyahu in office or oust him in favour of the centre-left. The St Patrick’s Day connection? If Netanyahu loses, he will be replaced by a man whose father was born in Belfast’s Clifton Park Avenue and whose grandfather was Chief Rabbi of Ireland.

Polls indicate that it will be a close run thing, with 11 lists, many covering multiple parties, likely to win seats and small shifts in votes making particular coalitions possible or impossible.

Israel is a country that everyone has an opinion on but few have a working knowledge of its politics. So, why not be one of the educated few and show off your expertise the next time you’re involved in an argument in the pub about the Middle East? Crash through the [too long:don’t read] barrier with me as I look at what Israelis are voting on, why they’re voting at all, and take a tour d’horizon of the bewilderingly complex Israeli party system.

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No Simple Answers for Christians in Politics

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I’ve enjoyed the series of posts hosted by Gillan on God and Politics UK, where guest bloggers associated with the three main GB political parties, as well as the Greens and UKIP, say they support their particular party from a Christian perspective. Two final articles are from someone saying he finds it hard to vote, and someone who says voting is a Christian duty.

I was a member of both the Liberal Democrats for many years and was heavily involved in the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland for a long time. I’m not a member of any political party at the moment. Given the events of the past 16 months in Northern Ireland, I doubt I could vote for anyone other than Alliance just now, but I’m living in Wiltshire and I don’t know who to vote for in Great Britain. Not voting at all is certainly an option, although one I’d take only with great reluctance. I might return to how all that fits with being a Christian in a later blog post, but just for now I thought I’d ask a few questions of the philosophy behind the series.

It seems to have been taken as a given by all the posters except Frank Cranmer, who isn’t voting, that it is a good thing that Christians are involved in politics; and that the world would be a better place if more of them were. Indeed, Daniel Stafford argues very directly that Christians should get involved both in the party which most closely reflects their beliefs, and that party’s internal Christian grouping. This view is a common assumption in British Christianity, indeed an unusual case of an assumption that cuts right across Evangelicalism, Roman Catholicism and Liberal Christianity. How valid is it?

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Italy’s Five Star Movement – is this what The End of History looks like?

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Cross-posted at Slugger O’Toole and Lucid Talk…

In 1992, Francis Fukayama predicted in The End of History that the end of the Cold War would impend not only an era of triumphant liberal-democratic capitalism, but one where political evolution had reached its final form. Western democracy, he argued, was the best form of state organisation practically achievable by humans.

The folly of such naïve Western triumphalism, already being challenged by China’s authoritarian wave of economic growth when Fukayama wrote his book, was laid bare by Mohamed Atta and his accomplices on September 11th 2001, before finally being buried by America’s failure to create new orders in Iraq and Afghanistan. But within Western societies, it could be argued to have some grain of truth.

The class-driven politics of the greater part of the 20th Century is dead in nearly every established democracy. The model of working-class left and bourgeois centre-right was in trouble long before the implosion of the Soviet empire. Technological changes and, arguably, the success of European-style welfare states in expanding the middle-class rendered its logic outdated.

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