The best Democracy money can buy

French estate agent by Izzie, aged 6

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I think it was Lenin who blew off the whole concept of democracy as being nothing more than dictatorship, punctuated every five years by an illusion of freedom that lasted for five minutes inside a polling booth.
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Yesterday, the leader of the opposition conservative party, Michael Howard, indicated that his party would support imposition of compulsory identity cards in the UK. This raises the rather interesting question as to who to vote for in the next general election. The UK is faced with a whole mass of important constitutional issues and popular opinion concerning most of these issues is well known. For example:

• Most us don’t like the idea of compulsory ID cards
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• Most of do not want to adopt the Euro or sign up to the European Constitution
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• Most of us believe the Iraq war to be wrong

Of the three major political parties in the UK not one of them supports the majority view on all three questions. This is strange because all three issues touch on inter-related questions of personal freedom and the nature of government. If you are a true libertarian your opinions will match those of the majority in these three examples. If you favour the growth of more powerful, unaccountable government you will be against the majority on all three.
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So, what are we to do? Voting for any one of the three main parties will be taken as a mandate for their position on all three questions. So, if I vote Liberal because of their principled anti-war stance I am also supporting the deeply flawed European project. If I vote for the Conservatives and their Euro sceptical approach I am simultaneously endorsing the war and the dangerous ID card scheme. Whichever party we vote for we lose, they win. Not good. Not good at all.
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