I noted today (from both a Sky contact and an article in the Telegraph) that it was Digger Telly which actually drove hard for the political leaders’ debate in that medium. I’m beginning to think that the format is just another nail in the coffin of intelligent debate in Britain – to add to the ones already hammered in by the likes of Hattie Harman, Peter Hain, the race relations industry, and Mark Thompson.

If only Oxbridge folk had been nicer to Rupert Murdoch sixty years ago – and thus enabled him to like us, as opposed to becoming a coarse republican with Chips Rafferty on his shoulder – he might not have begun his one-man mission to destroy British culture. But then, as his hatred of Britain comes an extremely poor second to his worship of money, on reflection this is perhaps unlikely. Mr Murdoch is, as most of you will already know, Born Again. It’s hard to know what to think about that hypocrisy, other than ‘If only he’d never been born at all’.

But while Roop both began and then accelerated the road leading inevitably towards Heat magazine, Chicklit and Simon Cowell, he can’t be blamed for our education system. And without our education system being utterly neutered by privileged Left-wing former public schoolboys after 1966, The Sun would’ve had little use beyond lavatory paper – because nobody higher up the evolutionary tree than an Orang-Utan would’ve read it. In this manner has Murdoch wound up in league with the very people he detested.

I’m sure that many readers of a dangerously liberal bent will see this as a vicious and bigoted attack on the working man, but they would be entirely mistaken: I urge you to read the comment threads of The Sun, and then compare them to those on the Mirror’s site. A lot of smart, wise and sensible people read The Mirror. Murdoch’s Currant Bun seems to attract women who think ‘menopause’ means not having sex for a day or two. And remember: these are the ones who can type. The men must be….I don’t like to think about it.

Enough Newscorp bashing….my point is simple: take dumbed electorate, mix well with amoral media, and add large dollop of unethical politicians – result, recipe for elective dictatorship.

“Democracy passes into despotism” Plato is credited as having said – but the quote is taken out of context. What he said in full was that if the electorate is thick, distracted and uninformed, then it’s easy, as a leader, to get your own way. A rough translation of the bit after that is “give the mob half a chance, and they will vote for their own serfdom”. The word ‘mob’ was his abbreviation for an incompetent electorate. Down the millenia it has come to us as demos….from which, the term democracy.

After 1880, the increasingly inquisitive British working classes got better and better access to education. By the late 1920s (and any survey of the writings from that time proves it) the poor man of the Left was erudite, well-informed and unwilling to be subdued. Today we would call this ‘radical’; but back then, marches were about the desire to have shoes, not Che Guevara teeshirts. By 1945, the mass electorate was so sophisticated, it could reject an overwhelmingly popular war leader in favour of a quiet little bloke from Labour with a bald head and even less charisma than Tessa Jowell.

This is called discernment. The mass voter was right: the country needed much more social mobility for the bright poor kids, and a strict accountant’s approach to massive debt. Captain Attlee knew how to deliver that – and the working man not only knew he did, he knew Churchill didn’t. For the bright kids to progress, Britain also needed to end the appalling ill-health that came with poverty – and Nye Bevan provided that via the NHS. We have never had a Government that was quite so right for the zeitgeist than the Labour Government of 1945-51.

Fifty-five years later, the sincere practicality of Attlee’s team – and the sensitive electorate who gave them their chance – has been replaced respectively by a ragbag of cynical didactocrats, and materially-fixated children disguised as grown-ups. The cypher between these two groups (and for each side, it is the only thing that really matters) is a media set promoting base behaviour, greed, cruelty, instant verdicts and fast living. Surely anyone of sound mind must now ask whether the dedicated-public-servant-accountable-to-perceptive-voter construct still applies.

I no longer think it does, but every good person faces a dilemma on reaching this conclusion: is it better to remain a democrat and let events take their obstacle course – or restrict democracy in the medium term as a means of saving our liberties? Plato would’ve plumped unhesitatingly for the latter: but he didn’t have to deal with a politically correct and educationally blinkered army of TV anchor-person pundits.

Perhaps one could defuse – even diffuse – that implacably ignorant opposition by packaging the bitter pill with another that is altogether sweeter: radical reform of the tax system.

I have an idea that many will think air-space castle building, but if you examine it, then the benign force of enlightened self-interest is there for all to see. We have a tax system that motivates only the idle and the rich, and an electoral/media interface that encourages the hasty, emotional response of the idiot. In turn, our society has become obsessed with money. What better cultural interregnum, then, than to have voting and taxation systems based on reward for good (rather than anti) social behaviour? This would attack and punish the crooked banker as much as the ASBO jerk, the embezzling MP as much as the welfare cheat. It surely cannot be a coincidence that the birth of the USA was based on the principle ‘No taxation without representation’.

In principle, this is an idea based on the needs of communities, and justice for all regardless of power and position. The detail would be a nightmare to work out; but as the old adage has it, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. It seems to me that keeping one’s money at the expense of the community – and voting for selfless people guiding that community – are privileges that should be earned. In the years that lie ahead, a great many things my generation has taken for granted will become unattainable for all but the most useful members of our species. If we are to protect the wellbeing and freedoms of those unfortunate to have been born without a great deal to offer, then perhaps they should be willing to accept that talent contest voting is a small right to cede.