They, the people

Governments decide policy, control economies, pass laws and wage wars. Who gives them that authority?

In his song L’Italia, Marco Masini sings, “È un paese, l’Italia, che governano loro”, which can be translated as Italy’s a land ruled by “them”. Masini sings of his homeland, but is it not something that we can say about every country?

Famously, the US Constitution begins with the words We, the people, so America is not ruled by them, it is ruled by us (by which I mean the Americans). Yet, the US Constitution was not signed by the entire population of the colonies. In fact, only 38 of the 70 members of the Constitutional Convention signed it (one of whom also signed as a proxy, making the total signatories 39 in number). Yet, I’ll warrant that, in most Americans’ breasts, there surges a sentiment of pride and honour at hearing those words, We, the people. So, here, in 2024, as America launches into its election season, who, exactly, are we, the people?

The answer to that question is as nebulous as the identification of who Masini meant when he spoke of loro—them. Who are Masini’s they? The government? Northern Italy’s industrialists? The communists? Ms Meloni’s far-right support? The Cosa Nostra? Or are loro in fact noi—us, whatever the government’s constellation might be? What do you think he means? And what do you think he ought to mean?

Italy and the US are both democracies. That ought to mean that it is indeed we, the people who are loro. But the nation state is a strange creature. In a state of anarchy, each individual is king of his own castle. Just like Englishmen are. Democracy is unrestricted freedom under the law, within the bounds of the law, exercisable by all and sundry, equally and without preference or denigration. We, the people, exercise utter and absolute freedom aside from what is proscribed by a law that applies to all of us equally. That is democracy. We ensure this by electing our own representatives in government, and abrogating to them the prerogatives that would remain our own were we to exist in that terra nullius state of anarchy. Politics can be seen as a complex structure but its complexities stem essentially from its existence as a career form. The career that politics offers makes it less than practical to step into and out of it like chairmanship of a theatrical society. It’s a full-time job, and the very election process demands fame, name-recognition, campaigning, money and promises—to those who pay the money, as to those who give their votes (which can sometimes lead to the elected parliamentarian being less than honest to one or the other). It demands keeping everyone, or as many of everyone as is possible, happy all the time. And, when the happiness factor ceases to add up (like when 70% of the British populace clamours for its elected representatives to demand a ceasefire in Gaza and government and opposition alike ignore them), that is when democracy starts to show its weaknesses. That is when it starts to show that the fairness, the universal consent on which it is predicated, no longer obtains. It is at that moment that America’s We, the people becomes Italy’s loro (at least as I believe Masini meant it).

Do the shops open on Sundays where you are? When I was in The Netherlands at the weekend, it occurred to me to do a little shopping for some Dutch specialities. I like their peanut sauce, special cheese, nasi goreng mix and atjar tjampoer for an Indonesian rice table, and other things you can’t get so easily here. But Albert Heijn was closed in the small village where I was, so I’ll need to pine for peanuts a little longer. “Ah, yes,” said my buddy, “but the shops in larger towns are open some part of a Sunday.” I think that’s right, but it got me curious. Who decides when a shop opens? (Clue: it’s not always the shopkeeper.)

In France in 2013, there was uproar about shop opening times. The legislation governing shops, les magasins, les commerces, was so multi-layered, it attracted the nickname millefeuille, a name normally reserved for a luxurious confection made of endless layers of wafer-thin pastry (French-speakers like to exaggerate: they thank you a thousand times, don’t just split hairs, but cut them into four, and use the expression “no, perhaps?” to mean “certainly!” (see note); millefeuille literally translates as a thousand leaves, but you needn’t ever count them).

Note: merci mille fois ! ; couper les cheveux en quatre ; non, peut-être ?

The millefeuille referred, of course, to the stack of rules, exceptions, special provisions, sectoral application, industry norms and so on that constituted a veritable labyrinth of legislation when all that’s really involved is (a) shops and (b) people who want to go to shops (or don’t, as the case may be).

It seemed that opponents of grands surfaces like Merlin Leroy enjoyed sauntering down high streets shuttered with roller blinds to avoid vagrant hooligans lobbing bricks through store display windows, and window-shopping at those that dared run the risk of errant vandalism, the odd car chugging past carrying its occupants to a dutiful afternoon of coffee and cream horns with Tante Béatrice, at which smartly besuited children would sit, hands exposed palm-down on their knees, being seen and not heard, as the grown-ups all remarked “Oh, comme ils ont grandi !”, and felt that no one should be desecrating their or anyone else’s Sunday pleasures by actually contracting sales and purchases with those very devils, themselves: les commerçants.

British Sunday-opening laws are also a mish-mash. Because there are none. The rules in the United Kingdom differ among Northern Ireland, Scotland, and England & Wales (hence, not British). When London hosted the Olympic Games in 2012, the Sunday trading laws were suspended for eight weeks, and I can assure you that that alone would’ve had Eric Liddell reaching for his chariot of fire, if it’d have been Paris 1924.

Whatever had been the overpowering need to introduce them in the first place back in 1930 was no longer a burning issue in 2012 as long as hordes of affluent global travellers were in town just itching to be fleeced of their souvenir budgets; once the visitors had re-departed for their own corners of the globe, England’s shop-closure laws came back into force. Some say they’re there for religious reasons, but clearly one is allowed to be a sinner for the Olympic Games. Ain’t that a slug in the rubber parts: lift-and-lay legislative morality. (Lift-and-lay what?!!)

Scotland has no Sunday trading laws, and that’s a bit surprising, since they’re all protestant puritans up there. I know, I am one. When Scotland started building its railways (the first was 1722—Tranent & Cockenzie), there were no rules against Sunday running, and yet no railway company ran trains on a Sunday. By 1850, over 6,000 miles of railway had been laid in Great Britain, and much of it was running services on Sundays. Except in Scotland. The first attempts at Sunday running of trains met with furious opposition from the church and its parishioners. You might wonder why there were therefore no laws against Sunday trading up in North Britain. Well, there were also no laws against spending all day stood on your head. Put simply: the one was regarded as unlikely as the other, and so there were laws against neither.

Sunday trading laws are the kind of laws that get introduced when the assiduously followed way of doing things ceases to be assiduously followed, and are used by those who wish to continue assiduously following the way of doing things to make sure that no one else stops being assiduous. Perhaps they think, like some French, that children should be seen and not heard. In England a child’s hands should be kept under the table. In France, it is de rigueur to place your hands on the table. France and Britain may be fromage and cheese, chalk and craie, but they both know superfluous levels of conventionality. And, changing conventionality can be an upward struggle. Even if the ultimate aim of abandoning conventionality is in fact the very democracy that it is proclaimed we all live in and need to defend.

What Sunday trading laws do in England, just to take one example, is treat different trading sectors differently. Here’s an excerpt from the web:

‘Small’ shops, which are classed as up to and including 280 square metres (or 3,000 square feet), can open any day or hour and do not need to follow Sunday trading laws. Effectively, if you run a small shop, you could be open 24 hours a day all year round.

In England and Wales, large shops (over 280 square metres):

• May open on Sundays for no more than 6 consecutive hours between 10am and 6pm

• Must close on Easter Sunday

• Must close on Christmas Day

If the above laws apply to your business, you are obligated to display your opening hours clearly in and outside of your store.

Restrictions regarding loading and deliveries may also apply to you depending on where you are based. If you run a large store in England or Wales, you should check with your local council whether you can unload goods and take in deliveries before 9am on Sunday.

Failure to comply with Sunday trading laws can result in a considerable fine.

Exemptions

Some large shops don’t have to follow Sunday trading laws. These are:

• Airport, railway, service, and petrol station outlets

• Registered pharmacies

• Farms selling only their own produce

• Motorbike and bicycle supply outlets

• Aircraft or sea vessel goods suppliers

• Exhibition stands

• Restaurants and public houses

At one level, Sunday trading is an arcane matter that doesn’t overly concern the average member of the public: if a shop is shut, they go somewhere else or wait till it’s open again. At another level, there are shops that can be open on a Sunday and shops that can’t. The shopkeeper’s option of opening or not is restricted, and, not only that, but certain trades can open on a Sunday and some can’t (an exception made for Sunday newspapers but not bookshops meant that you could not purchase a copy of the Bible on a Sunday, but could buy pornographic magazines). The inconvenience of not being able to pop into a ships’ chandler’s to buy a new rope for your mizzen mast could be more serious than the inconvenience of going without butter, but these are judgments made not by sailors or pastry-bakers, but by parliament, to whom sailors, pastry-bakers and everyone else have abrogated the power to decide what you ought to be able to buy when. It is the distinctions that those elected lawmakers have introduced into the laws on Sunday trading that create inequality under the law. And, no matter how banal you might find this example, it’s a pattern that repeats itself across the field of the economy, rights, criminal punishment, right down to the right to appoint members of parliament.

Appoint? Yes, in the UK, many members of the upper house of parliament, called the House of Lords, are appointed by a member of the lower house, called the House of Commons. A prime minister leaving office can appoint a number of members to that upper house. This is a privilege that can be, and is, exercised by a retiring prime minister, regardless of how excruciatingly awful they were as a prime minister. The fact that the occupier of that post for a mere 46 days in 2022, Liz Truss, who virtually collapsed the entire UK economy and whom even the King was moved to greet on a second occasion with the words, “Oh, it’s YOU again,” has, in the new year’s honours list, got to appoint one member of the House of Lords for every one and a half of the 50 days she was in office. Cynics (of whom I’m not one, to be sure) might opine that this list of honours was the sole reason she was elected in the first place: to pad out the upper house (just before the Conservative & Unionist Party as good as vacates the lower one). All’s fair in love, war, and political shenanigans.

I think the US president is widely regarded as the most important policymaker in the United States. Whether all his or her policies make it into the statute book is not something within his or her power, however, but rather within the power of the two chambers of Congress. When the president is elected, voters vote in favour of their preferred candidate … … … In theory.

Dwight D. Eisenhower’s campaign in 1952 was permeated with the slogan I like Ike (Ike being Mr Eisenhower, to the initiated). The 2024 campaign by … whoever it’s between … is liable to be marked by slogans such as I slightly prefer the lesser of two evils or I don’t like either and that is a product of a system that is perpetuated by money and in which there are rarely more than two runners. The US presidential election could be made to work if it were based on proportional representation; but, even with two runners (in which, logically, any election must be based on proportional representation), it is frighteningly odd to have to point out that there has never been a US presidential election that actually was based on proportional representation, because of the interposition of the Electoral College. For all We, the people is such a highly praised collocation of words, such as to accord it an honoured place on the obverse of the Federal Reserve System’s ten-dollar bill, it is in fact We, the Electoral College who appoint the US president, and not the people as such. Even if the College stringently adheres to the preferences within the states that each of the members represent, the votes they cast make no difference to whether the state itself voted a 51% to 49% preference for a certain candidate or a 100% to zero preference, the result being that, if 49% of a huge electorate in one large state votes for A and 51% of the electorates in a number of small states vote for B, it’s possible that B is elected, even if the 49% of state #1 outnumber the 51% of a collection of smaller states. That’s before the voting districts get gerrymandered. And all voting districts are gerrymandered, whether we like it or not.

For the past 30 years, two political scientists by the names of Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher have taken UK constituency boundaries as redrawn by the Boundaries Commissions and applied them to the then current administration to see what would have been, had the new boundaries applied at the election by which the current government was elected. For instance, the next UK election will be held on the basis of boundaries redrawn since the 2019 election. Applying the new boundaries to the 2019 election, there would have been small changes in the numbers of seats held by each party: Conservatives +7, Labour -2, Liberal Democrats -3 and Plaid Cymru -2.

I must quickly add that, unlike in the USA, there is no political input to this process and it is broadly accepted that the Boundaries Commissions (one for each constituent part of the UK) operate in a manner that is beyond reproach. As regards the US, it is a little disingenuous that the same political parties who fight elections get to decide—since they get to appoint the judges who decide—the districts in which they fight their elections. It’s very hard to find any aspect of life in the US that is decided in a spirit of utterly disinterested equanimity. Driving tests, maybe.

You may be thinking that the next UK election (anticipated in 2024) will, of course, produce a ballot that is very different to 2019’s, because we are five years on. But the figures produced by Rallings and Thrasher apply even if no one changes their vote: simply the position of the constituency boundary determines which party wins the seat in some, if not, in the end, all, cases. The graphic on a web page of the Electoral Reform Society illustrates this at work. Skip over there and see the same map of the same town with the same votes being cast change colour depending on where the wards are drawn. From predominantly red to predominantly blue, and flashes of yellow in between.

If you’re tempted to see this as a part of the game, as something from history that we just have to live with, or even as part of the great democratic tradition in your country, then I’ve little doubt, when you play Monopoly, you will not allow players to buy on the first round and will bankrupt your own bank by placing all fines on Free Parking, so someone gets a nice windfall at the bank’s expense. However, Monopoly purists don’t play these rules: you get your money at the start in order to buy property, that’s the aim of the game, so not buying on the first round is simply idiotic; and not circulating money back to the bank makes no sense, because Monopoly is capitalism and, for that, you need a market, and a nation state, and tax. Not anarchy.

So erecting a democratic tradition based on anything but democracy is not disingenuous. I’m sorry to say, it’s a lie. We, the people is a lie, perpetuated by 39 people to whose tune 333 million people today have to dance. First-past-the-post in a multi-party system is ludicrous, when you see what distortions are incorporated into the system ab initio. And first-past-the-post in a two-party system like the US that gets turned to a travesty by the inter-positioning of an averaging committee that owes no duty to the actual ballot results … well, it’s hardly what you’d call fair, is it?

It’s as if you had a class committee in a school, whose democratic results get filtered by the faculty, who have the final say. Tell kids that, and they’ll be outraged. Tell them that’s how their country is run, and half will say, “Okay, that’s cool,” and half will still be outraged. At that point, the half who find it cool and the half who are outraged will start flicking ink-blots at each other, and perhaps even worse. Because living with unfairness generally tends to be accepted by those in whose favour the unfairness is rigged, and it gets the backs up of those in whose disfavour it works. Meanwhile, we have the faculty busy trying to get everyone to agree it’s cool, instead of railing against its dishonesty and getting things put right.

Somewhere in the middle of this ink-blot fracas, there may be a teacher or two and a pupil or two hiding beneath the desk who say, “Please, stop the fighting! Let’s make the system fair, regardless of whether we under the desk benefit from making it so or not.” We’d sooner lose to a fair system than win to one that is unfair. Because that, in the end, is what democracy is all about. Preferring fairness to unfairness.

The time is fast coming for us to realise that, in order to save democracy, we first need to create it.