Tony Blair's biggest legacy was to take power out of Parliament and spread it wafer-thin over a byzantine network of quangos, courts, public sector bodies and Whitehall bureaucracies to ensure that no matter who you vote for, nothing ever changes.
This was the Brexiteers' biggest folly, I think. They blamed the EU for the fact that power had become completely unaccountable to the public. But the call was coming from inside the house: in theory we reclaimed our sovereignty, in practice your vote still doesn't matter and your opinion still isn't wanted.
Now the same crowd is turning their attention to the ECHR. It won't help.
I don't think remaining in the EU would have helped matters considering they are enacting their own spooky internet/tech legislation. I don't know enough about the ECHR to comment.
I think it is a combination of many things. To make meaningful change each one of these entities (quangos) will have to be examined, reformed or reviewed.
I am not sure it is even possible for that to happen without a collapse and/or crisis at this point.
I listened to a podcast with Dominic Cummings last night and he is of the opinion that the UK government is extremely weak at the moment and if there was another black swan event that they would crumble. I don't know if that is true, but it seems plausible.
The frustration I've had in the US, and I known has been felt by friends from the UK, is that no matter who you vote for or what they promise it seems you always get more of the same.
I think you'd be surprised how large the public support for these initiatives actually is. E.g. few on HN would guess it aligned with what the public wanted, yet it's hard to find a poll saying that's the case. And I don't just mean "of sleazily worded polls", even when the poll explicitly calls out the privacy concerns or other side effects more want to try the law than not.
In a first-past-the-post electoral system (UK, USA), it always degenerates into 2 parties, which over time becomes entrenched and diverge from popular opinion.
A proportionally representative system in IMO better from this perspective.
Much of the issue with western democracies is that people assume consistently within their politicians.
A pro surveillance party should also address crime. If someone sees crime as a big issue then they will be for the surveillance.
Unfortunately what actually happens is that the surveillance is used to track anti government sentiment, while the crime is not any more prioritised than before the surveillance.
But we know from comparative study of representative democracy that it does work, and it doesn't have to be "misrepresenting", and the reason certain representative democracies do a bad job of representation boils down to features o their electoral structures that produce results that are both poorly representative in the immediate term, and which also narrow the space of ideas and debate in the longer term.
> There isn't a one size fits all party.
Seems to be a non-sequitur, there isn't a one-size fits all policy, either.
It worked until the people who manipulated elections worked out how to manipulate elections and started forming parties. Breaking it down to policy level makes it far harder to manipulate an election.
A good example is the UK Labour party. People want the social side of their policies but not the surveillance. They could have voted for the social policies and against the surveillance. But no we have to eat the surveillance if we want the social policies.
