Borgen too

After watching three series of Borgen (the Danish political drama) I am starting to re-think our need to modify our political system. If this show is anywhere near reality (which I am guessing it is since most political drama has to survive the local sniff test) then the Danish multi-party system (MPS) system looks like a disaster to me.

Some commentary …

1. The need for constantly shifting coalitions means that politics rules over policy at all times. There apparently is never a calm moment for a government to implement an agenda.

2. As a voter you never know what you are voting for since the governing coalition is bound to be a mish-mash of policies, some of which you hate. Countering, this is a problem in our system too – at the last election, when it came down to marking the box, I found that I couldn’t in good conscience vote for any of the parties.

3. Most worryingly, the politicians in Denmark seems to dream up policy on the run whereas here the ideas go into the departments for anti-wrinkling and budgeting only to re-emerge as totally different beasts. This could be due to the small size of Denmark and possibly a smaller public service.

4. The influence of personal morals on policy. There was an episode on the laws related to prostitution and it looked as though a large fraction of the parliamentarians were quite happy to ignore facts in favour of their dearly held prejudices. This is the one aspect of our system which is quite amazing – the system’s inherent resistance to moralistic bullshit.

5. The need for every major new policy to be negotiated between multiple parties means that, as implemented, most new policies are compromised. This is fine when it’s business as usual but could be major impediment if there was ever a need for immediate and drastic action in light of a major change in the environment. Especially if that major change was not immediately apparent (like global warming for example).

6. Their queen is up the road and ours isn’t even a citizen and could resign at any minute without any succession plan. This is something we should fix.

7. They don’t have states so the national parliament is it. God help the Danes on this one. I would hate to be fully exposed to the stupidity of our national government. The fundamental issue, here, there and everywhere, is that no sane person wants a job in politics. Long hours, high stress, zero privacy, low pay, and an environment like academia that rewards the arseholes – it’s not much to aspire to and no wonder we have dickheads for political representatives. In this context, the more layers of government that we can have, the better. Sure it costs us, but the payoff is that the fuckwits all end up neutralising each other and for us this is like a useful insurance policy.