Ray Azzopardi, in his article ‘Beyond ideologies and political jargon’ (The Sunday Times of Malta, December 4), was absolutely right in his assessment that people are now beginning to realise that democracy has morphed into oligarchy, or rule by a small group of powerful people.
Those achieving power, if not already rich, then rapidly become rich by milking the system and then use their power and amassed riches to protect their privileged position.
As the American economist Thomas Piketty argues, this inequality accelerates over time and the resulting concentration of wealth leads to a concentration of power, which is self-perpetuating. Until recently, those at the bottom of the social pile have been too busy trying to survive austerity to be aware of what is actually going on.
As Mr Azzopardi writes, the Brexit vote in the UK came about because people woke up to the fact that the EU, “rather than helping them to strengthen their autonomy was depriving them of their sovereignty.”
In the UK the awakening was largely due to Nigel Farage, who adopted showman tactics and flamboyant language (the “drunker Mr Junker”) to rouse people from their lethargy and make them realise the contempt in which they were held by their EU rulers.
This re-assertion of democracy is actually a worldwide phenomenon, as also demonstrated by the election of Donald Trump as US President and Matteo Renzi’s loss in Italy’s referendum on constitutional reform.
In the UK the counter-attack by the elites and their supporters drove the many Ukip supporters underground, to emerge victorious on Referendum Day, as also happened in the US with supporters of Trump.
However, the vote for Brexit did little to dent the smugness of the elites, who claimed that the recent Richmond Park by-election result was solely due to voter dissatisfaction with the Referendum vote. The seat was actually Lib-Dem until 2010 when it was won by Zac Goldsmith, a millionaire and Conservative member of the local elite.
In 2015, Goldsmith accepted the Conservative nomination for mayor of London, but apparently decided he didn’t really want (or need) the job. He then ran a lacklustre campaign, based largely on the fact that he was not Sadique Khan, the non-elite Labour candidate, and he lost to Mr Khan.
This was totally unacceptable to the residents of Richmond, not only because Mr Khan was left-wing and definitely not one of them, but because he did not even have the redeeming feature of being filthy rich or of being likely to take the opportunity to remedy that situation.
Mr Goldsmith believed that the one issue that could unite the voters behind him was his opposition to the third Heathrow runway, recently confirmed by his Conservative government. So, as a gentleman of principle, he resigned his seat in protest, re-stood as an independent, and lost. That Sarah Olney, his Lib-Dem opponent, was attractive, intelligent and dressed well didn’t help, but there was no Conservative candidate opposing him and he should have won.
The main factor in his defeat was the local disgust that he had lost the mayoral election to Mr Khan and it was pay-back time in the Park.
Had he lost the mayoral election to someone called Smith, Jones, Hawkins or Carruthers, the Richmond Park election result might have been very different.