I am very aware of more letters and articles appearing in the Journal recently which raise questions marks about the failures of our political system.

It is clear that increasing numbers of people are frustrated by the lack of focus on meeting the very many needs of people and organisations (looking after people) in contemporary British society. Why don’t those in charge, in control, pay more attention to the decline in resources to address and deal with an abundance of major problems, from health care to housing, to increasing poverty and digging up roads. ‘Why are we not being listened to?’, especially so it seems by those in ‘Whitehall’ and ‘Town Hall’? Is this due to a lack of money to inject in to the amelioration of such problems, or maybe it is that those in government just don’t care? This certainly cannot be due to lack of information about the increasingly broken society in which we live.

So, is a part of the problem the system of representative democracy that has dominated society and decision making for many years? We have the vote, and hard won it was over many years of struggle for this basic right, so what do we do with it? We elect representatives to look after things on our behalf, and every so often we have the chance to have another go at getting our choices right. Are we any good at making these choices? The answer to that would seem to be that there is room for improvement; is there a democratic deficit?

I raised some of these concerns in my Journal piece of 10th January on who controls AI: John Astley: 'Artificial Intelligence (AI) and our futures'

These representative choices are a key part of our right as individuals to make these choices. This is all part of our liberty, the focus on our decision making as an individual. Liberalism is the political doctrine of having certain kinds of freedom, whether this is in the marketplace of goods and services, for example freedom of trade, or, so it would seem, electing our legislators. To help us make these many choices we have political parties which is seen as normal in society.

So, on the one hand democracy would seem to promote ‘the collective’, the public sector, all of us, while liberalism promotes the individual, that person’s choices coming first. Is there a built in contradiction here?

Are lives, and certainly our political thinking, is dominated by ‘The Nation’ with all the myths that have created this. The daily theatre of memories. The State; legislators in Parliament, The Judiciary, and the Executive (the Government) all promote themselves as the guardians of The Nation. But, people ask, whose Nation? Last time I looked not everybody in The United Kingdom was all that united! One way forward in dealing with our frustrations is to think beyond the messages from get from the State apparatus, or from TV, or from advertising, or from wealthy and powerful individuals and corporations, who have demonstrated that their interests come first, maintaining their privileges.

The State wants us to conform to keep the wheels turning; our compliance, choosing to go along with the conformity is more convenient than coercion. But there is an increasing amount of this! Authoritarian and fascist regimes, like the Nazis (then and now) argue that democracy has failed, a no-hoper, so coercion by mind and body is the only solution. Neither liberal or democratic.

So what is to be done? Certainly we need to be less selfish, and less focused on consuming, and endless and naturally disastrous, things. We also should re-orientate ourselves away from a liberal democratic approach to our thinking and action taking, to a social democratic one, to take individual responsibility to be less concerned about ourselves and more concerned about collective needs.

Welcome to Spring.