'The End Of Politics And the Birth Of iDemocracy' by Douglas Carswell

Radical stuff from rebellious Tory free-market MP for Clacton, Douglas Carswell. In this 278-page book he says that as long as governments can decide the value and availability of money as a commodity, the population will always owe more than it can repay.

Carswell is one of those who see the internet as the way in which people can free themselves through what he dubs ipolitics to inform themselves and directly influence the workings of government, as an alternative to the present system of handed-down law on tablets of stone.



Published by Biteback at £12.99 (widely discounted) and as an ebook.

https://www.bitebackpublishing.com/books/the-end-of-politics-and-the-birth-of-idemocracy-paperback

This book, though published in 2012, may now receive more attention, following Carswell’s defection from the Tories to UKIP. Despite attacking Carswell for making a Labour victory more likely in May 2015, the journalist Matthew d’Ancona praises his book as “a tour de force, an indispensable road-map for political action in the digital era which plots the potential links between new technology, transparency and decentralisation.” On the other hand, Michael White, another journalist who has written extensively about Carswell’s defection, dismisses as “idealistic” his belief that the internet “could exponentially improve the way we are governed”.

That’s the essence of the book. His first seven chapters are about ‘The End’, why, according to Carswell, our political system is rotten to the core. We can all probably agree with him on that, though perhaps for different reasons. I think it’s rotten primarily because it legitimises the idea that some people are, by accident of birth, entitled to be head of state, and because our upper chamber is also unelected and stuffed with party donors and cronies. Even our lower house is elected using a system which effectively disenfranchises anyone who doesn’t live in a marginal constituency. But these are my complaints, not Carswell’s.

The second half of the book, ‘The Birth’, is where Carswell hopes that ‘big government’, which he hates, will be made obsolete by the digital revolution. Time will tell if he’s right. He pours out the rest of his prejudices in his conclusion:-

"Europeanism, environmentalism, Keynesianism, monetarism ... The dogmas invoked to justify intervention in the affairs of men may vary, but the conceit of the interventionists remains the same. Until now. The digital revolution will reinvigorate the West, limiting once again the size of government and in the process helping make the West more truly Western. It will enable us to constrain those with power once again. The digital revolution will do to grand planners in the West what the collapse of Communism did to the socialist planners in the old Soviet bloc."

This isn’t my sort of book. If you think the state is too big, there’s no point in reading this propaganda because you're already convinced. If you don’t swallow the old cliché that “the government is living beyond its means” – in the seventh richest country in the world where 500,000 people rely on foodbanks - there’s little point in reading this book as it will only make you angry. Personally, I believe in big government and would rather live in big-government Sweden than small-government Somalia, but that’s for another thread:-
https://cuttingedge2.forumotion.co.uk/t830-big-or-small-government