The Will of the People does not exist. It is the abominable snowman of politics

I shall now attempt something in which I fully expect to fail. My pessimism is not unfounded. I’ve been trying to put across this case for 30 years, without ever seeing in my hearers’ eyes that glint of recognition that signals the successful communication of an idea.

Failure to convey an argument that I’m sure is important and right has been frustrating. But this is the fate of advocates of theories that challenge the very terms of a debate. The same difficulty is encountered by advocates for atheism; may well be encountered if the Hadron Collider in Geneva fails to verify the existence of the Higgs-Boson sub-atomic particle; and was among the reasons the miasma theory of the transmission of diseases lingered so stubbornly in the face of counterfactual evidence.

Advocacy struggles when central to its logic is the submission that something we take for granted, and around which a great web of related reasoning has been built, simply doesn’t exist. Even if forced to accept that the missing entity has not been usefully described, let alone proved, people will resist the conclusion that it doesn’t exist, preferring to protest that, though we all suspect it’s there, and though it surely must be there if there’s a perfectly good English word for it, it’s proving difficult to tie down.

And so to the current argument about changes (or ‘reforms’) to Britain’s voting system. My submission is this: that the Will Of The People (WOTP) does not exist. There is no such thing. The WOTP is a fiction, a mirage, a conceptual void, a construction as fanciful as the creation of ploughs, scorpions and huntsmen out of the random dots of stars in the night sky. Once we accept that there is no such animal as the WOTP, the secondary debate about how most accurately to represent it simply falls away; and we become able to ask more practical questions about the right relationship between the many and often conflicting wishes and opinions of many people, and the structures of their governance.