.The big dEE .

7.1.2025

LONDON: Petitions committee chair and Scottish Liberal Democrat Jamie Stone advertised the merits of the United Kingdom’s political system on Monday by comparing it to systems in some of the world’s most brutal dictatorships.

In a debate on a 3.1 million strong petition demanding an election, Stone explained that the public cannot call an election and the only person who can is the prime minister, who can ask the sovereign to dissolve parliament.

He asserted the democratic merits of that system. “The fact that we are here today, in this place, debating this matter is surely evidence that we live in a democracy in which our electorate can express discontent, demand our attention and know that we will listen to them and take their concerns seriously.”

Stone assured the debate, which failed to take the petitioners’ demand seriously, was a demonstration of democracy not enjoyed by citizens of all countries. The debate is a sign that “our representative democracy in the UK is alive and well, which is a lot more than can be said for far too many other parts of the world where it is not alive and well at all.”

He considered the UK’s “long-standing and robust” political system to be “the envy of many other parts of the world.”

Convinced of the democratic legitimacy of the debate and the electoral system, Stone celebrated the superiority of parliamentary debates in the United Kingdom over those in Russia and North Korea. “We have had a full and frank exchange of views; could you imagine that happening in the Duma, or—perish the thought—Pyongyang?” he said.

The debate ignored the petitioners’ demand and revealed that the system’s sole democratic mechanism – elections – are only available at the discretion of the most powerful person in that system.

“That is one thing that we do very well in this country: we actually debate things properly,” he ended, with an utter lack of irony. The lead petitioner who was present was not allowed to take part in the debate.