You can’t trust the will of the people

Abraham Lincoln’s ringing declaration echoes down the years. His 1863 Gettysburg Address, delivered 160 years ago this Sunday, gave us ‘Government of the people, by the people, for the people’: a clear and simple formulation, it has come to be seen as the very definition of democracy.

But Lincoln was wrong: wrong then and wrong now. Government of the people? Yes indeed, after a fashion. Government for the people? Of course. But government by the people? The advent of social media and almost hourly opinion polling reduces that argument to absurdity, throwing its flaws into sharp relief. For me, a curious incident in which I was involved at St Pancras station recently illustrated this.

I had boarded the last train of the day with a connection to Matlock. Seated in the rearmost carriage and awaiting our train’s departure at 21.02, I heard not the customary final whistle from the platform, but the sound of shouts. ‘Get back!’ came a guard’s voice. Seconds later the door at the end of our carriage slid open and a youngish white man came running down the corridor, an East Midlands Railway attendant in hot pursuit. She raised her voice: ‘You must leave the train!’ Ignoring her, the unwanted passenger sat down towards the other end of my carriage. Two EMR attendants were soon by his seat, insisting he get off. Other passengers in the carriage were agog as the explanation for this ruckus became clear.

It seems that, minutes before our train was due to depart, the man had jumped the ticket barriers, knocking aside the attendant trying to stop him. He had protested that his mobile phone, on which alone his ticket could be accessed, had run out of battery power and died.