DOWN WITH DEMOCRACY

As Matt d’Ancona says, ‘hanging chads’ are the words that spring to mind when considering the technical disasters that attended the vote in Scotland. But there is another, less charitable way of looking at it. Not all the trouble, after all, was technical. Thousands of ballots were spoilt because voters couldn’t figure out which boxes to tick. Alex Salmond seems to have felt the loss of votes more keenly than most. This morning he said that what had happened was “totally unacceptable in a democratic society”. One knows what he means, but some obscurantists may feel that what is really totally unacceptable is democratic society itself. It is outrageous that our fortunes should be decided by people who are not clever enough to fill in a simple form.

Salmond is a smart and engaging man (and if the SNP stood at the next general election, I’d head down to my south London polling station and vote for it.)