Alarmingly I read today in the newspaper that voting in the Houses of Parliament will now be done electronically instead of using good old fashioned pen and paper. This is the very moribund of Parliamentary democracy in Great Britain. We now live in a "mal-technocracy". It is not MPs who will now decide on the results of elections but it is now in the hands of computer programmers, who can re-shuffle the outcome of any votes at their whim. Yet why is this so?
I once met a member of the Irish Republican Army (an Irishman, naturally) who held a degree in politics, and he explained to me the history of electronic voting. He told me (from a very well informed perspective) that every single attempt and experiment of electronic voting had failed, systematically, from one thing: tampering. Even the most recent experiment (at that time) was using a sealed black-box (supposedly "tamper proof") that had very simple hard-wired functionality: Yes, No or Abstain. Participants were breaking them open and re-wiring them to swing votes, and the experiment failed miserably. Alas, how much easier is this to do with software? Very easy.
The history of democracy is not traced to pirates (as is written on wikipedia) but harks back to ancient Greece. The term demokratia meaning "rule" (kratos) of the "people" (demos) can be traced to circa 470 Before the Christian Era, possibly to Cleisthenes. The first voting machine to stop corruption was known as the kleroterion. Cicero tells us that the Romans voted standing up while the Greeks voted whilst seated.
The Houses of Parliament were first built circa 1025 of the Christian Era for King Cnut. The ascendancy of the House of Commons came about during the sixteenth century and eventually superseded the House of Lords with the Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949. More recent amendments of the Lower House have further bypassed the supremacy of the Lords, on technicalities and loopholes.
The House as it stands was completed in 1860, designed by Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin in the Victorian perpendicular Gothic style following the fire that destroyed Westminster in 1834.
Today we witness a thousand years of Parliamentary democracy dealt a fatal blow and consigned to the annuls of history, to be replaced by a new "High Priesthood" - computer experts. He who controls the flow of information (thus the outcome of any vote) will now control the power in Great Britain. This is the end of democracy in Britain, and a sad day for our once mighty nation.
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