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Thereafter the word existed in its Latin transliteration as democratia but had no real content or application outside scholarly or pious treatises. It took the Antiquity-worshipping Renaissance to rediscover some virtue in the notion of popular political presence, the seventeenth century in England to put republican flesh on that skeleton in the shape of the regicide of 1649. But modern democracy – or rather democracies – owes its origin more specially to the American and French Revolutions and their respective aftermaths. The remarkable Englishman Thomas Paine straddled both Revolutions like a populist colossus and gave in outline both secular reason and uncommon sense to the ideas of representative and even social democracy.
In fits and starts the idea of universal suffrage took hold and gained currency in the UK, alongside and sometimes in formal contradiction of the ideas of parliamentary sovereignty and ‘constitutional’ monarchy. But in 2015, following the Tories’ victory in the May general election, Parliament of its free will set aside its sovereignty in favour of a direct plebiscite – not a first-past-the-post election, and with no campaign manifestos to exert even a minimum constraint on demagogic fantasy. Crucially too there was no education of the voters in the many key differences in both process and outcome between a general election and a referendum. The result? Predictably, an almighty mess. The Athenians, who knew a thing or two about direct democracy and had in place many sorts of measures and resources to counteract such possibly divided and divisive outcomes, could have told us a thing or two and warned us in advance. Brexit wrecks it? Politically speaking, unambiguously – alas - yes.
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