'Will'power - but whose 'will'?

Any loss of liberty can only bring misery because people have an inherent desire to be free, within of course specified limits of their freedom - however, it is important that those specified limits must therefore be agreed by the people.

As I have suggested previously, I hold that in a democracy there can only be two versions of government - representative democracy or parliamentary democracy and the two are polar opposites. The former rests on the belief that people have inherent, inalienable rights, rights that precede the formation of any government, therefore sovereignty must belong to the people. The latter rests on the belief that only those elected to form a government can decide those rights that people have, which results in a situation whereby those rights are not rights but privileges.

So, what is this 'sovereignty' upon which our politicians claim our democracy rests and about which they spare no effort or opportunity to preach? I hold that sovereignty for any nation is the ability of its people to make and enforce its own laws and to be the arbiter of the implementation of those laws; it is the ability of the people of a nation to decide its relationship with other countries; and it is the ability of the people of a nation to decide their own future - hence sovereignty belongs to the people, not to any government that they may elect, consequently governments cannot exercise any power that the people have not granted them. When discussing sovereignty, it is worth recalling that there are three main pillars on which a nation's sovereignty rests and they are political independence, military independence and economic independence.

At this point it is perhaps worth quoting from Dissertations on First Principles of Government by Thomas Paine:

"Rights are not gifts from one man to another, nor from one class of men to another; for who is he who could be the first giver, or by what principle, or on what authority, could he possess the right of giving?...[......] The word "sovereignty" has reference to that which is supreme or the highest. Sovereignty exists within the individual because of his free will and so his natural right and power to make his own decisions and to act upon them."

The present form of democracy acts as a conduit for ambitious individuals to gain control of a nation's people; and once that power is obtained, it knows no bounds - consider history. It is also worth remembering that power, once ceded, is invariably never returned - do turkeys vote for Christmas?

We experience today a situation whereby those who are part of our representative democracy sit idly by while others, who we have not elected and cannot therefore influence, decide our future and our destiny. To compound the problem the leaders of our representative democracy, in the true fashion of dictators, deny the people a voice on this problem. When a prime minister denies the will of the people because he/she doesn't agree with their views, but is in the position to act as if empowered by the people, then he/she exhibits all the powers of a dictator. 

That the will of the people transcends the will of government surely cannot be in doubt, yet our politicians fail to do anything about restoring our rights, they fail to raise their voices about our loss of rights; and it can therefore be presumed they no longer think about our rights - only theirs. To those politicians, I can but address a quotation nicked from Calling England:

"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen."