Policy Research Media Morhamburn

I recently watched a programme where a TV architect revisited the Grand Tour to look at where Britain’s architectural inspirations came from. On the tour, he visited Paris and Rome, and he explained how the wonderful layouts and architectural achievements of the two great cities were effectively down to strong-arm planning.

In Rome, no less than the Pope decreed that swathes of the town should be demolished to build the plan; no thought was given to planning laws or those who already lived there. Likewise in Paris, Haussmann’s remodelling of the city into what we now recognise involved flattening whole districts that might interfere with the plan.

However when a similar plan was laid out in London, where a wonderful planned cityscape would be built around St Paul’s Cathedral in the wake of the Great Fire, complicated rules, committees, councils and landowners put paid to the idea. As a result the City of London to this day remains an anarchic network of unplanned streets and lanes; certainly not without its own charm, but not the great boulevards and piazzas that it was hoped would rival Europe’s other great capitals.

There is a point to all of this; that dictatorship won the day over more democratic processes. To use that slightly sinister old maxim, dictatorships ‘get things done’. But in these days of deep-rooted western democracy, such anachronistic ideas of ‘strong leadership’, ‘enlightened despotism’ or downright dictatorship could never re-emerge.

Or so we might think. But last weekend, political academic Professor John Keane gave a lecture on the idea that western democracy may be burning itself out. Mired in triumphalism since the great victories of World War II and the Cold War won by western liberal democracy, we have become complacent and our ideology is being degraded by widespread disengagement.

Talk about challenging political orthodoxies; it is only a few short years ago that Western powers were starting a pseudo-evangelical war to spread liberal democracy to the middle-east, and some would argue we still are in Afghanistan.

But maybe it is exactly this kind of iconoclasm that we need to reinvigorate our ideology. With the rise of the Eastern economies, some of which are semi-democratic, some of which are (in theory at least) communist and some which are dynastic, maybe it is time to at least talk about the potential weaknesses of democracy?

It may be verging on sacrilegious to question the legitimacy of democracy, but then once upon a time so was questioning the divine right of kings. Many ideas that we would now take for granted, such as universal suffrage or workers rights started out with a brave or visionary few questioning the established status quo. Maybe it would be no bad thing for the health and development of our democracy if such a debate were to occur again?

[The views expressed by Morhamburn people in their blogs are theirs and theirs alone. they do not represent the thoughts of the company as a whole or our clients. If you have a comment to make on any blog, please email info@morhamburn.com and we’ll put the printable ones up on the website]