The United Kingdom and the United States of America Have Both Lost “The Mandate of Heaven”
by George Tait Edwards
1 Introduction
The “Mandate of Heaven” — that a leader should rule a country in the interests of ALL the people — is the essential foundation of democratic legitimacy, even if universal voting rights were not available at the time of its earliest consideration.
The Chinese philosophers, seeking to explain the see-sawing of China from its first union by the Chi state and its frequent disintegration into warring states, and its subsequent re-union into a single state, used the concept of the Mandate of Heaven.
In the unfolding of historical events, this idea explains why previously leading and historically important states fall from grace because they become corrupt in the sense that their leaders permit and encourage the elevation of part of their society above the rest of their people.
Western writers often assert that the 6th century BCE city-state of Athens was the first democracy because it was the first to have a voting system which gave one vote to each citizen. But Athens was a slave state and “citizens” did not include slaves and women (who were “barred from political partitipation”) so although voting rights were widespread these did not include all the people. There were slaves everywhere in Athens and Greece and they performed all of the menial and most of the economically essential tasks. Athens was therefore not a fully functioning democracy because its leaders were not elected by, and did not rule their city state, in the interests of all its people.
This “Mandate of Heaven” idea has elsewhere perhaps been asserted as the legitimate foundation of leadership in the much later 1320 Declaration of Arbroath (in Scotland) which declared that the legitimate power of the Crown rested upon the will of the people, and the nobility. As Wikipedia reports, that declaration says
“most controversially, that the independence of Scotland was the prerogative of the Scottish people, rather than the King of Scots. In fact it stated that the nobility would choose someone else to be king if Bruce proved to be unfit in maintaining Scotland’s independence.”
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_Arbroath
The 1776 US Declaration of Independence, which, after asserting the prime rights to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”, goes on to say
“That to secure these rights, government was instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these things, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government.”
Historically, that is what happens, but it takes a while to come about.
The “Mandate of Heaven” in China and elsewhere has frequently acted as an historical justification of whatever victor occurs through the idea of a successful “legitimised insubordination”.
Yet the idea that any political rule is doomed to be replaced when it does not act in the interests of all the people, is well demonstrated by a great deal of history.
Most of history in China and elsewhere has been a battle between the people (or the “plebians”) and the privileged, with the continual result that most governments have historically been captured by, and act in the interests of, the already rich and privileged.
And that has led to internal or external war, as Arnold Toynbee has asserted — internal class war or external wars been countries, driven by the desire to extend the rule of the rich or settle other “perceived political” differences — are, Toynbee asserts, the principal cause of cultural collapse.
The Recent Removal of Voting Rights By Conservative Forces in US And UK Governments
Since 1980, the elective dictatorships of both the United Kingdom and the United States have increasingly ruled in the interests of the rich and privileged. But they have not been content just do that.
For example, voting rights have been denied to felons for the most minor offences in the USA, and the continuation of that disenfranchisement has been decided by the Florida governor Jeb Bush. This led to that state and its electoral college votes being declared for President George Bush in the 2000 election. As Mother Jones commented at
“The 2000 presidential election was ultimately decided by a 537-vote margin in Florida. More than 500,000 ex-felons were barred from the polls, including at least 139,000 African Americans, who vote overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates. Their exclusion almost certainly changed the outcome of the race. The beneficiary, of course, was Jeb Bush’s brother.”
In the United Kingdom, David Cameron’s Coalition Government passed the 2013 Individual Registration and Administration Act which initially disenfranchised 13% of voters — mainly many women, the poor, council tenants, the Black and Middle East Community and the young — all of whom are unlikely to vote Conservative. In the worst case of the largely black community of Hackney, 40% of voters disappeared from the rolls. Cameron won the 2015 election to the surprise of all the pollsters and the people because of that massive politically-driven disenfranchisement.
See “How David Cameron’s Government Stole the 2015 General Election” at:
and “Is Britain Now too Gerrymandered to be a Genuine Democracy?” at:
and see the summary list of the evidence at
and if you are really interested, read my book at:
Social Effects of a Damaged Democracy
Society has sometimes been defined by sociologists as an orderly arrangemnt for deciding which people do not get enough to eat if there is inadequate food. In both Britain and America, these two previously leading edge economies and historically important nations are now deliberately worsening the plight of their workers by reducing or removing the safety nets which prevent starvation or provide essential services to the poor.
The starvation of millions of British families and their children has been promulgated as a deliberate policy by the Cameron and May Governments of the UK. See the Rowntree report at:
and the Ken Loach film “I, Daniel Blake” where this situation, of the Government-created denial of the right to benefits and the harassment of the poor, is explicitly set out.
In my opinion the British statistics for unemployment do not reflect the reality. The number reflects those who are “unemployed and in receipt of benefit.” The British Government has deliberately made the application for the receipt of unemployment benefit, which was previously automatic, into a difficult, time consuming and computer-dependent process with the intention of denying benefits to the poor. That process has been successful in reducing those in receipt of benefit but has created a vast army of the unregistered unemployed.
Both the USA and the UK Governments pretend that they are fully functioning democracies. Because they have disenfranchised the less privileged in their countries, neither now are.
These Western Governments have clearly lost the “Mandate of Heaven” and the reverberations of that reality will follow during the rest of this 21st century.
Furthermore, the reason for the decline of the West in general (and the United Kingdom and the USA in particular) is that Western and westernised countries have ignored the need to have local public banking systems that support local invention and enable it to be scaled up into local innovation. The sole exception to that observation is Germany, where the public banking Sparkassen system funds local SME start-ups and their development. The major real advantage to Germany in BREXIT is that British bankers, currently located in Brussels and drafting legislation that would destroy the Sparkassen public banking system in Germany, will be kicked out the EU.
The ONLY way a nation can exploit the natural inventiveness of all its people is by having thousands of local bank branches committed to the success of local inventiveness and innovation. That’s how Scotland established the first industrial revolution, how England became the workshop of the world, and how the USA under FDR had their 1938–44 economic miracle.
Of course, some development happens even in a country with no local SME-supporting banks. Naturally, the rich benefit most where the purpose of government is to increase the income of the rich. The personal success stories of the West nearly always have come from already rich families. The fathers of Murdoch, Bill Gates, Donald Trump and many others who succeeded were millionaires who naturally helped their sons with start-up money.
The truly inventive billionaires who seem to have succeeded on their own accounts have often had to manufacture their products abroad because of the absence of supportive local banking for industry. The Dyson vacuum cleaners are made in Malaysia, the Apple iPad is made in China, and many clothing millionaires design in Britain but produce abroad. It is not just low wages that produce that result but better financial-industrial systems which fund foreign factories.
From 1945 to the mid-1970s, the development of the rest of the world and led by American institutions was, as Alice Amsden has remarked “graced by Heaven.” After 1980 the Western world went slightly mad and elevated a non-functioning economic theory — neoclassical economics, otherwise called the “Washington Consensus” — to be “as valid as Physics, applicable everywhere” when that system does not perform well anywhere. It does not increase prosperity anywhere it has been applied. If it worked, the Western and Westernised nations would be flourishing, and they aren’t. Poverty is worse throughout the West than it was before, in nearly all the less developed countries and particularly in the “Washington Consensus” theory homelands of the USA and the UK.
After the rise of the Reagan-Thatcher Axis and the legalised reduction in union power which led to the long-term reduction in the share of wages and salaries in national economic growth and the allocation through rents, profits and high interest rates of the lion’s share of economic growth being canalised to the already rich and privileged, the majority of the people in the UK and the USA no longer benefitted (as they previously had) from economic growth.
The major justification of capitalism (and it is a moral justification) was that system was the fastest route to widespread prosperity for all of the people in a nation.
It no longer is.
The “Mandate of Heaven” has been lost by the nations of the West. It has been passed from the West to China and to the nations of the Tokyo Consensus, who understand high-growth Shimomuran-Wernerian macroeconomics, which is the foundation of the increasing prosperity of all of their peoples.
This is the major theme that will play out during the rest of this 21st century.
© George Tait Edwards 2017
