2 October

We need to get rid of elections. There’s a huge list of basic jobs any community needs to get done, none of which are controversial. Right now though they don’t get done unless somebody can make it popular to do them. It’s like not mowing your lawn or fixing your toilet, until you can get everybody in the street to agree to it. Politicians drip-feed only a fraction of the needed money into communities, for electoral purposes, often with big novelty cheques. (They give vast amounts of it away in things like tax cuts, to curry favour with mates.) We don’t need them, government officials at all levels know what work needs doing, all politicians do is add a layer of pork-barrelling between the money and the jobs. If we want politicians, select them randomly by lot (sortition). As we do for juries. Every problem we have in politics would disappear overnight.