How Ancient Athenian democracy killed progressive England

On Tuesday, having dined a bit too well in Athens, I walked up Lycabettus Hill. Here a wooded limestone crag shoots up above the swanky shops of the Kolonaki district. Crisis, what crisis? So it felt on these Chelsea-style streets. Exercise aside, the view from Lycabettus gratifies the climber with a hawk’s-eye view of the antique roots of modern democracy.

On Thursday, our domestic variant on that Athenian theme meted out a brutal come-uppance to progressive England. Voters chose to pave the way both for the eventual break-up of the United Kingdom and, in the 2017 referendum, the possibility of a nation-smashing exit from the Europe whose spiritual home still nestles in these hills.

On a haze-free May morning, you can peer down on to the rock of the Acropolis with, below it, the Agora. That marketplace hosted the speeches, debates, quarrels and, pretty often, fights that punctuated the city’s lurch from regime to regime. In the Agora museum stands a marble slab from 337BC. It forbids autocracy in Athens and pre-emptively pardons any tyrant-slayer. Here is the supremacy of democracy, literally, set in stone.

The stele has lasted better than the political tombstone on which, in a last-ditch stunt, Ed Miliband closed his ill-starred career as Labour leader by inscribing a handful of promises.

As for his conqueror’s monument: come 2020, that may commemorate David Cameron not merely as the last prime minister of the United Kingdom. It might also record the destiny of a man whose failed bid to ride the Europhobic tiger consigned his broken country to a lost generation of isolation, introspection and impoverishment.

The fate he now strides towards may turn out to be a tragedy on a scale to grace the Theatre of Dionysos, hewn into the hillside of the Acropolis. In the plays performed there, kings and heroes achieved their dearest wish, only to find that it destroyed themselves, their kin and their country.

Behind the Acropolis, on Philopappos Hill, the theatre-shaped bowl of the Pnyx hosted the city’s parliament, the Ecclesia. There the business of democracy got done. Up to 14,000 citizens at a time voted propositions directly into law, made war or peace, elected their officials, judged their peers in political trials, and sent over-mighty subjects into 10-year exile by inscribing their detested names on a pot shard, or ostrakon: hence ostracism.

Of course, women, slaves and foreign immigrants could play no part in this carnival of choice. But by the late 5th century BC, all male citizens did, a franchise only matched in Britain in 1918 and then (for all adult women) in 1928. After 400BC, you could even earn an attendance allowance just for turning up: one-third of a drachma per session.

The Athenians seldom loved the fissile system of governance they made. Even in its heyday, the city’s democracy looked more like messy clay – and often blood-stained clay – than shining marble. After calamitous wars with Sparta, gangs of oligarchs came back in 411 and again in 404BC. The latter bunch, the “Thirty Tyrants”, killed perhaps one in 20 citizens of Athens. When, yesterday morning, three party leaders (Miliband, Clegg, Farage) drained the hemlock within minutes, something of that sheer brutality returned to UK politics.

Most literary witnesses of Athenian democracy – above all, the teasing gadfly Socrates himself, in the words ascribed to him by Plato – sound hostile. It favoured the idle and selfish, so they maintained, boosted the rich, the flashy and the crooked, and put a brake on idealism and excellence. In Book Eight of The Republic, Plato has Socrates object that the childishly colourful “embroidered robe” of democracy is all things to all voters. Its nature shifts with every poll, so that “he who has a mind to establish a state, as we have been doing, must go to a democracy as he would to a bazaar at which they sell them, and pick out the one that suits him”. Far safer to entrust the ship of state to some superior crew of learned, virtuous – and unaccountable – civic guardians.

Complain about the raucous sound of the popular voice, in ancient Athens or contemporary Britain, and you risk sounding like a Platonic elitist or one of those would-be tyrants outlawed by that tablet in the Agora. Bertolt Brecht secretly wrote a poem (“The Solution”) when the Communist regime of East Germany crushed a workers’ uprising in 1953, asking with tongue wedged in cheek: “Would it not be easier ... for the government/ To dissolve the people/ And elect another?” But even though voters may act rationally, the wheezing machine that they feed swallows up their hopes and routinely spews out a stream of perverse outcomes, skewed rewards and unintended consequences. Thus Scotland almost becomes a one-party SNP state on half the popular vote; Ukip’s 12.6 per cent yields one seat; a 6 per cent disparity in votes between Conservatives and Labour delivers a 100-seat differential; around 1.45 million voters gain 56 SNP MPs, while 1.15 million Greens earn a single one.

And so on .... Today, how many really care? The musings over electoral reform that felt so urgent until Thursday evening have receded, however vital a fairer voting system may be in the long term. AV, STV, MMP and the rest of the alphabet soup of proportionality evaporates into the chatter of a few smoke-free rooms – where even Nigel Farage, with time on his hands, wants to join the conversation. Elsewhere, in both England and Scotland, the winner-takes-all savagery of first-past-the-post has crowned its champions and ground its victims into dust with a truly Athenian lack of mercy and scruple. Labour never fretted too much about that in the glory years of Blair.

Vox populi, vox dei? However divine the popular will, to regret a few of its results should not qualify anyone as a crony of despots or a patrician snob. The draconian public punishment inflicted on the Liberal Democrats this week may, with hindsight, come to look childish, irrational and even sinister. That herd-like quest for easy scapegoats is something the Athenians knew only too well. In 406BC, in a populist panic that Socrates tried to calm, they sentenced six naval commanders to death on trumped-up charges – and then, at leisure, had second thoughts. Nick Clegg, still just about upright in Sheffield, quit the field yesterday with a moving speech after five years in which his party – for all its obvious failures – had civilised a government that may now fall prisoner to its extremist flank. He said that “Fear and grievance have won. Liberalism has lost. But it is more precious than ever and we must keep fighting for it.”

In the late 1930s, another liberal – E M Forster – wrote that he could only muster “Two Cheers for Democracy”. Forster approved of democracy not because it empowers mighty forces but for just the opposite reason: that it safeguards a space for the loner, the dreamer and the maverick. “The people I admire most are those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover something, and do not see life in terms of power, and such people get more of a chance under a democracy than elsewhere.” Forster insists that he has in mind not merely a talented minority but so-called “ordinary people” who are “creative in their private lives, bring up their children decently ... or help their neighbours”. He also cherishes the freedom to campaign and to criticise. Then why does he withhold that last hurrah? “So two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three. Only Love the Beloved Republic deserves that.”

Back in Athens, the raptor’s-eye view from Lycabettus Hill might even spot the prison where, in 399BC, Socrates good-humouredly awaited death by hemlock after a small majority of jurors convicted him of impiety towards the civic gods and corruption of youth. If Socrates remains the best-known critic of Athenian political practice, there were plenty of others. Around 420BC, a famous grouch known as the “Old Oligarch” – think Victor Meldrew in tunic and sandals – whinged that democracy always blocked the better sort and gave the ignorant mob the whiphand. He also concluded, more than two millennia before Winston Churchill, that it worked better – or at least less badly – than any other arrangement. Less grudgingly, the statesman Pericles had in his funeral oration of 431BC celebrated the active participation of every citizen in government: “Here each individual is interested not only in his own affairs but in the affairs of the state as well. Even those who are mostly occupied with their own business are extremely well-informed on general politics.”

Yesterday, amid the frenzied number-crunching, one figure slipped past many pundits. Even those who noticed somehow deemed it a success. Just over 66 per cent of electors voted on 7 May, a fractional increase on 2010. However high the national stakes, one-third of us declined to exercise our rights. Ancient Athenians – to say nothing of Levellers, Chartists, Suffragists and every other campaigner who has struggled to update an antique ritual into the vehicle of modern freedom – would have thought that rate of abstention a disgrace.