Quote of the day 5th May 2019

"What this boils down to is whether you believe in democracy or not. The referendum revealed that an awful lot of our political classes don’t. In their hearts, they don’t like the messy, decentralised process of trial and error known as voting. They believe that a sufficiently clever or righteous person can, like a priest or a technocrat, work out the right course of action and deliver it, if only they weren’t stopped by silly, emotional, racist electorates. Diversity, for these believers, is a cosmetic quality that should be displayed, rather than a substantive one that involves argument and affects decisions."

"This is why the second referendum zealots think so little of the risk their scheme poses to British political cohesion. They cannot see that a second vote, especially if Remain wins, would confirm every suspicion and conspiracy theory that voters have about the corruption of the political classes. They think there is nothing to lose by reversing the referendum result because they do not really understand the spirit of democracy – the notion that legitimacy comes from mass participation and the periodic, total dispersal of power away from rulers, rather than from the immediate utility of the outcome it produces."

"The question is whether you think democratic decisions are valid because they are democratic or whether you believe they are valid only if they produce the “right” outcome." 

(Juliet Samuel, from an article in the Telegraph.)

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