Bernard Shaw's politics and "The Apple Cart"

Today I started uploading several bits from a 1975 BBC production of Shaw's 1929 political play "The Apple Cart" to one of my YouTube channels. A play I had never heard of. Spotted the DVD at the library. But it has some good parts, and a very fine appearance by Helen Mirren playing the dishy mistress to the king, Orinthia.

I never paid much attention to Shaw's politics as I'm very unsympathetic toward his Fabian Socialism. However, turns out we have some similar views on democracy, goverment work, and the voting public. And he expresses it much better!

To (Shavian) wit:

"...choose between Cabinet government and monarchical government: an issue on which I frankly say that I should be very sorry to win, as I cannot carry on without the support of a body of ministers whose existence gives the English people a sensation of self-government.

But not one of them will touch this drudgery of government, this public work that never ends because we cannot finish one job without creating ten fresh ones. We get no thanks for it because ninety-nine hundredths of it is unknown to the people, and the remaining hundredth is resented by them as an invasion of their liberty or an increase in their taxation.

Politics, once the centre of attraction for ability, public spirit, and ambition, has now become the refuge of a few fanciers of public speaking and party intrigue who find all the other avenues to distinction closed to them either by their lack of practical ability, their comparative poverty and lack of education, or, let me hasten to add, their hatred of oppression and injustice, and their contempt for the chicaneries and false pretences of commercialized professionalism.

Our work is no longer even respected. It is looked down on by our men of genius as dirty work. What great actor would exchange his stage? what great barrister his court? what great preacher his pulpit? for the squalor of the political arena in which we have to struggle with foolish factions in parliament and with ignorant voters in the constituencies?"

and from an interview (a 1929 piece in "The Observer"):

"Do you seriously think that democracy may drift into the state of things shown in the play?"

"It has already drifted into it."

"Is not the tendency in this country towards a bigger percentage of voting and a more enlightened use of the franchise?"

"The tendency to disuse the franchise is so strong that in some countries it is a punishable offence not to vote. People vote in times of great social strain for which the government is blamed. The newly enfranchised (the women, for instance) vote whilst the novelty lasts. But in a condition of general satisfaction, or of general disgust at the failure of political parties to make good their promises, people will not vote. In the old vestries, for which anybody could vote, a little ring of men used to meet and elect one another without the interference of a single general elector. Shareholders' meetings are very much the same. Do you ever vote?"