The new force

For too long we have teated democracy as a done deal - in the West. It's never been more than a 'work-in-progress'. New and better ways to facilitate the involvement of the people in self-government should regularly be investigated if there is respect for the welfare of the people. The convictions and certainties of ideologues must never claim a greater importance, although they usually do.
For one hundred and fifty years we have seen the benefit to the people of the secret ballot employed for elections, with gross practices sharply reined in. Now we have the opportunity, with electronics, to similarly clean up the gross abuse of democratic practice in our parliaments. With electronic voting, decisions can now be made with electronic speed where they count most importantly in the affairs of the nation.
So, not only will the speed remove all excuse from those who want to use their personal power to control the affairs of the nation, but the secrecy of voting will finally remove the power they have, through the open vote, to control our representatives.
So the 'new force' is in fact an old force, but modern electronics now makes possible that which could only apply to elections for the last 150 years. We have now been dithering for far too long with the urgent need for the power of the ballot to restore the power and the glory of the people to our parliaments. That will be a return to a real Periclean democracy - where 'the decisions are made by the many rather than the few'.
We need to urgently reorganise the decision-making processes of government on such democratic lines; with the ballot operating in our parliaments to ovecome the political dominance of ideology and minority powers which destroys representation, frustrates policies of sanity and justice, substituting wild schemes (like war in Iraq) which resolve nothing, and create fresh dangers rather than securing us from the threatening traumas of the future.
There is no doubt that the people are more capable of exercising the care and wisdom that are needed for the best approach to the deep problems of the future. The powers of those so convinced of their own perfect wisdom and unwilling to forgo personal power in favour of real democracy can be thwarted by the ballot in parliament for the election of members of the executive. Government power belongs to parliament - not to the executive, whose place is to carry out the wishes of a freely voting parliament.
The best years for democracy, and the people of the world lie ahead. But without this revolutionary reform the years ahead can only be full of gloom. Population growth and the wildly out of control exhaustion of world resources make that clear.