Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

16 January 2012

Since the start of 2012, the parliamentary leader of the so-called Labour opposition in the UK, Edward Miliband has been rabbiting on about the need for “responsible capitalism”.

Funnily enough, that is precisely what his opposite number, Tory Prime Minister David Cameron, also wants.

On 14 January the UK’s Guardian newspaper carried an interview with Edward Balls, Miliband’s treasury spokesman. The interview was summed up in the headline: “Ed Balls accepts Tory [spending] cuts and public sector pay freeze”.

Government and Opposition are at one. You could not insert a sheet of A4 between the policies of the one and the policies of the other.

What alone divides them is power. The Government has it, the Opposition wants it.

Our pseudo-democracy  is the fag-end of the legacy of popular participative government that saw birth 2500 years ago in Classical Greece.

What we have in the western world is a closed system in which no change is possible. Two parties slug it out for access to the levers of power on the tacit understanding that whichever wins at the ballot box there will be no tampering with the status quo.

At Antigone1984 we call this system “the partitocracy”.

[For a more extended analysis of the partitocracy, see our Mission Statement, which can be accessed at the foot of the rural image at the top of our Home Page. This analysis constitutes Antigone1984’s main contribution to contemporary political debate.]

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