I have published more than a hundred articles. As far as Fourth World Review is concerned I come in fifth after John Papworth, Leopold Kohr, John Seymour and Kirkpatrick Sale. Many of my pieces are book reviews which suit my way of writing so is a genre I adopt quite often. When I looked in Books in Print ten years ago before Google was invented I found that my principal claim to fame was as the translator of a book about the King of Sweden. However since then I have got myself an ISBN for my 1989 publication The Rise & Fall of The Swedish Green Party (1982-1997).

Over the weekend I revisited this magnus opus about the future of European politics after reading an article entitled How Big Government has Swallowed the Tory Party by Fraser Nelson in the 25th February 2006 issue of The Spectator. In a chapter on Democracy and the Money Power I wrote about pocket boroughs and electoral bribery. Here is an extract from a meeting of the newly established Money For Old Votes (MOV) Party.

‘If we are going to bribe people to sell us their vote, let us get on with it and let the people know we will buy their vote. Why beat around the bush talking, talking, talking instead of getting on with it. The question is quite simple. What is the price? Once we know that, we can get on with the job of agreeing who is going to put up the money and how he is going to be paid back! Everybody has their price. So what does it cost to turn a Green Lady into a Blue Meanie? Throw out a scenario. 2801 Liberals to turn and 2437 Greens...[we are considering the Gotland constituency at this point]...A few idealists, but with a budget of a few million pounds, we could offer them five thousand kronor each. That compares with the hundred thousand we have to invest in each work station promised in the days before the New Realism, so looks cheap at the price. We will work on that basis.’

I continued with the arithmetic. ‘One Member of Parliament from a Rotten Borough will cost us five million pounds, allowing for our own fees. With something on the side for the Heavy Mob that’s a working figure of ten million pounds for each rotten borough member of parliament...five thousand votes bought gives ten thousand votes for us...so that means twenty rotten boroughs and we are into parliament...that is a quarter of a billion...no problem there...good...go ahead on that basis.’

Here is how I ended the chapter: ‘Unlikely? Improbable? Never heard of such a thing? Then you have not read history’...leading into the chapter entitled Investing in Democracy. There is one other extract I intend to burden this weblog with. It comes in the chapter about Democracy & Communism. ‘As a politician in a party created specifically to crush Capitalism, [the Communist’s] target is always to acquire the power to effect structural changes in the distribution of wealth and to shift the distribution of daily rewards from the looter, the moocher and the usurer to the producer. The British Fabian Socialists at the turn of the [nineteenth] century introduced the idea of ‘Earner’ and ‘Unearned’ income as helpful labels in this regard. Indeed the Shavian wing always insisted that Socialism was Equal Money.’

In the past two hundred years instead of electoral reform eliminating the corruption of the rotten borough it has extended this corruption to the entire democratic process so that mass elections are now exercises in mass bribery. Here is the reality confronting any political party seeking to win control of the House of Commons.

More than half the electorate are dependent upon the government for their guaranteed incomes and therefore have a vested interest in ever expanding government spending. Leaving on one side subsidy-dependent farmers and untraceable tax credit recipients, 52% of the electorate come from four groups dependent upon the state for their money: 15% are state employees (6.8 million); 11% are out of work and on welfare (4.5 million); 18% are benefit dependent pensioners and 8% are pensioners of independent means. The Department of Works and Pensions estimates that two-thirds of pensioners are dependent upon the government for at least half of their income.

This new democratic model was pioneered in Sweden by the ruling Social Democratic Party. Fredrik Erixson from the right-wing think tank Timbro summed it up when he remarked that ‘Even if Sweden has a change of government at the next election the policies will not change. It will just be new faces.’ Since the new Conservative Party leader David Cameron has reached the same conclusion as his Swedish counterpart Fredrik Reinfeldt it is of more than passing interest to British politics to study The Swedish Model….

In my little local internet café community it is sometimes quite difficult to concentrate with the banter bouncing around. Today everyone creased up at Tony Payne's joke about a Buddhist monk who walked into Pizza Hut to place his order. ‘Make me one with everything.’