209 years ago the last great British political duel was fought between Canning and Castlereagh.

Canning accepted the duel even though he had never fired a pistol before.

Quoting from Wikipedia:



Duel with Castlereagh

In 1809 Canning entered into a series of disputes within the government that were to become famous. He argued with the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, Lord Castlereagh, over the deployment of troops that Canning had promised would be sent to Portugal but which Castlereagh sent to the Netherlands. The government became increasingly paralysed in disputes between the two men. Portland was in deteriorating health and gave no lead, until Canning threatened resignation unless Castlereagh were removed and replaced by Lord Wellesley. Portland secretly agreed to make this change when it would be possible.
Castlereagh discovered the deal in September 1809 and challenged Canning to a duel. Canning accepted the challenge and it was fought on 21 September 1809 on Putney Heath. Canning, who had never before fired a pistol, widely missed his mark. Castlereagh, who was regarded as one of the best shots of his day, wounded his opponent in the thigh. There was much outrage that two cabinet ministers had resorted to such a method. Shortly afterwards the ailing Portland resigned as Prime Minister, and Canning offered himself to George III as a potential successor. However, the King appointed Spencer Perceval instead, and Canning left office once more. He did take consolation, though, in the fact that Castlereagh also stood down.
Upon Perceval's assassination in 1812, the new Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, offered Canning the position of Foreign Secretary once more. Canning refused, as he also wished to be Leader of the House of Commons and was reluctant to serve in any government with Castlereagh.

Now that is a pretty extreme kind of personal responsibility to take for your opinions, but still strikes me as having a little more invested in ones' opinion than the investment that happens to your average politician's wallet. Canning could not have refused the duel and retained his influence.

This is a world to which we cannot return, and quite rightly too. But how do we ensure that our politicians are of noble intent? It was once the case that qualification for participation in politics required either a private income, or sponsorship of some kind; the sort of people supposedly, though never in actuality, above bribery and corruption because they didn't need it. That never worked as a system, so other models have been tried over time and in various places; and all of them haven't worked, for a given value of "worked".

So we have to temper and manage our expectations of political systems; what we are actually looking for is the least bad in an almost Utilitarian sense. But what we all fool ourselves into believing is that democracy is a panglossian panacea for all of our other ills, rather than the dynamic context in which they happen. And when it becomes apparent it isn't an universal panacea we throw out the baby with the bathwater, and replace representative democracy with other sorts of government, all of which are worse.

Given this rather cynical analysis, does the panel think that:-

a) We can manage our unrealistic expectations of democracy and the democratic process, and what democracy can achieve? If you like, can we save democracy from our opinion of it?

b) We can avoid the descent into New-neo-Fascism of a C21st kind?

c) Politicians will ever be the noble guiders and protectors of society, rather than the self-interested posing as ideologues, or ideologues posing as populists, or populists disguising their anti-democratic natures and aims and objectives?

d) I'm barking up the wrong tree, and eventually we will find a political system that is actually good rather than merely the least bad of an awful set?

Even our most rigorous systems inhere towards paradox. Maths gives us Russell's set paradox at its heart, and leads to the understanding of the breakdown of absolute meaning in language. So we fudge and approximate things with general agreements and conventions of meaning, but even so we do have an idea of best possible information. When politicians deny reality, and promote the denial of best information, the only justification they can possibly have is that history will prove them right.

I want to think about what should happen to them when history proves them wrong.