Too timid to endure responsibilities

At the moment, polling suggests that about 63% of UK voters would vote Labour, Conservative, Lib Dem or Green in a general election. We might say that democracy blockers rule because these voting intentions, assuming they are accurate, cannot resuscitate UK democracy.

Until voting habits change drastically towards the promotion of major reform around issues voters claim to care about, then it is not clear how anything democratically positive will come about.

Opinion polls are a political scammer's guide. Voting intention polls are a political scammer's guide. As a result, voters are mostly scammed until the next election when they will be scammed again.

It’s an old problem and there are few indications of worthwhile change. Democracy hasn’t decayed as G K Chesterton wrote well over a century ago, it never really got going –


Now most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities. And Mr. Shaw and such people are especially shrinking from that awful and ancestral responsibility to which our fathers committed us when they took the wild step of becoming men. I mean the responsibility of affirming the truth of our human tradition and handing it on with a voice of authority, an unshaken voice.

That is the one eternal education; to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child. From this high audacious duty the moderns are fleeing on every side; and the only excuse for them is, (of course,) that their modern philosophies are so half-baked and hypothetical that they cannot convince themselves enough to convince even a newborn babe. This, of course, is connected with the decay of democracy; and is somewhat of a separate subject.

G K Chesterton – What’s Wrong With the World (1910)