Eurovision - a flawed democracy
So,
the Russians won. And we've had
the usual complaints:
SIR Terry Wogan, the veteran Eurovision commentator, has cast doubt on whether he would be involved in covering the event again.He said it was "no longer a music contest" and that prospects for western European participants were "poor".
One of the
Scotsman's commenters had the same idea as myself:
The obvious solution to the political voting problem, by the way, is for the BBC to allow Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland to enter the contest separately - it would be the right thing to do on its own merits, but it would also set up a new British Isles voting bloc to rival that of the Balkans, the Baltic, Scandinavia and the ex-USSR.
I'd go further: let's give the vote to the Isle of Man, Jersey, Guernsey etc., not to mention the Free State of Berwick upon Tweed. Then one of our lot would win every year.
On a more serious note (no pun intended!) this whole charade demonstrates some of the problems inherent in democracy itself. It does seem rather unfair that Iceland has the same voting power as Russia in the Eurovision contest. That could be fixed easily enough. Nevertheless, there's still going to be one winning country.
Similarly in a political democracy the winner takes all, no matter how "proportional" the voting system may be. You get Brown or Cameron; Salmond or Alexander; McCain or Obama/Clinton.
How different from the marketplace. When I go into my local pub no vote is held on what we drink, with the winner then being the only available product. No, we all "vote" with our money and the outcome is a huge selection and we all get what we want as individuals. That's why the state should do as little as possible (or nothing at all), letting the market handle almost everything.
posted by David Farrer at 20:42
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