Twelve becomes six, becomes one?

There should be a General Election here next year. I'm wondering - how many seats will we be voting for? Now that ExCo has granted itself power to ignore what the other seven councillors think (yesterday's Sentinel, p9 and also see Cyril Leo's letter p2) maybe we will be voting for ExCo members only with LegCo being disbanded? What now is the point of LegCo? The committee system that has been bypassed was slow and tedious, and certainly doing away with LegCo would speed up the process of getting decisions made and Ordinances passed, if speed and efficiency is the primary objective. But if so, why stop there? To further increase speed and efficiency why have elected representatives at all? The fastest and most efficient way to take decisions is to vest all power in a single individual – the Governor – and stop all this slow and tedious Democracy all together. Think of the money we would save! Imagine how speedy and efficient decision making would be! And the $64bn question is: how much difference would that actually make? Frighteningly little, I suspect. Already our Governor apparently has ExCo doing his bidding. I can’t remember the last time I heard of the Governor proposing something that ExCo rejected. Allow dubious investors to buy up vast tracts of St Helena for their doubtful projects? OK. Destroy fisheries and sell off the fishing rights to people overseas with local groups being officially excluded from the process? Also OK. So if LegCo has been muted and ExCo is no longer challenging what the Governor demands, we really don’t have a democracy here already. Recognising that (and saving a whole ton of money in the process and also improving speed and efficiency) has got to be the obvious next step. St Helena managed without democracy for over 300 years, from colonisation in 1659 until 1963. Should we declare the democratic experiment a waste of resources and consign it to history? I’m sure our councillors can find other jobs. Maybe they could start fishing .....