Anthony Frewin is a novelist and screenwriter

It’s democracy, Jim, but not as we want it......
Our Fight for Democracy:
A History of Democracy in the United Kingdom
John Strafford
Beaconsfield: John Strafford, 2009
536 pp., notes, bibliography.
Anthony Frewin
The trouble with John Strafford is that he goes just too far with
democracy. I imagine that sentiment has been aired many
times in the Palace of Westminster and, after a pause, it
would be followed by: If he had his way everything would be
democratic! Well, perish the thought. As any fule kno you can
have too much democracy. It’s something that has to be
contained. Right? Strafford has written a detailed and
immensely readable history that begins with the Romans and
the Anglo-Saxons and continues the story down to the
present, with later sections examining contemporary local
government, the House of Lords, the European Union, even
the monarchy and quangos, and other bodies.
Strafford is not an academic and this has stood him in
good stead. So, rather than a dry as dust ‘pol sci’ approach
bogged down in constitutional minutiae he confronts the
subject directly with a straight-on approach that doesn’t
assume there was some historical dialectic that made
democracy inevitable. Indeed, as he notes in an introductory
chapter, ‘Riot and revolution are the mother and father of
democracy’ and ‘Our history shows that nearly all the
advances towards democracy were accompanied by violence.’
Whereas the view subtly promoted today to the uneducated
and to the Third World when we’re exporting democracy is
that some sort of epiphany wakened the royalty and
aristocracy of Merry England to the benefits of this system of
government and, hey presto, there it was in full flower (the
‘Mother of All Parliaments’ nonsense that conveniently forgets,
for instance, the ancient Greeks and Romans.)
Strafford recounts the major milestones in Britain’s
evolution of democracy such as the Magna Carta, The Great
Reform Act, votes for women and so on, and always seems to
come up with something new. It’s a critical history and
eschews the congratulatory ‘how wonderful!’ approach of
many writers on the subject. Let’s now examine a couple of
chapters that discuss specific areas.
First, the City of London. It was not reformed by the
Municipal Reform Act of 1835 and, further, the business vote
was abolished in 1969 in all other United Kingdom local
authority elections except for the City. A special place indeed.
In 2002 16,000 new business voters were created. Strafford
writes:
‘The principal justification put forward for the non-resident
vote is that approximately 450,00 non-residents constitute the
city’s day-time population and use most of its services, far
outnumbering the City’s residents, who are only about 9,200.’
In a private Act of Parliament in 2002 reforming the voting
system for electing Members to the Corporation of London, the
number of non-resident voters was doubled to 32,000. Now,
it’s not even as if these non-resident voters can vote directly.
No, they appoint a voter within their company and the number
of voters elected depends on the size of the company.
Strafford continues:
‘Wealth should not be allowed to buy votes. This is why the
business vote was abolished elsewhere and is why the
business vote should be abolished in the City of London.’
He argues that the non-residents should be disenfranchised
and only the residents allowed to vote; and if the objection is
that the electorate is too small ‘then the City should be
amalgamated with a neighbouring borough or split up.’
There’s a lengthy and damning analysis of the European
Union (pp. 384-96) and Strafford quotes approvingly from Paul
Foot’s book The Vote: How it was Won, and How it was
Undermined (2005):
‘The bureaucrats who put together the Treaty of Rome in 1956
as the foundation of a European Union were at best
uninterested and at worse downright hostile to extending