2024 will be a big year for democracy, apparently. There will be elections in over 60 countries with some four billion people eligible to vote. This should be exciting. After all, there’s much that needs to be done.

We’ve got a planet frazzling before our very eyes. We have universal poverty and inequality, of staggering proportions. There are wars and drastic conflict in every corner of the world. On our doorstep in Europe, we bear witness to a century old re-run of the same freezing, mud-clogged quest for metres of land that was supposed to have jolted us into an understanding this was something we must never countenance again. History repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce, old Charlie Marx once told us. Right again.

So, to the ballot box we will go to rinse out the stale, the tired and the dysfunctional and try something fresh, new and invigorating. Well, if that’s what you’re hoping for, avert your eyes immediately from this week’s Iowa primaries. The strong indication is that this will start the process that cements Donald Trump as the Republican candidate for this autumn’s US election. Should he regain the office he so ingloriously failed to concede, he will be 78 years old – and he will have defeated a man whose 82^nd birthday coincides almost exactly with voting day. Has your blood stopped racing yet?

Long before the inevitable number-wrangling plays out in the land of the free, Putin will have re-installed himself in Russia, Modi will be happily preening himself in India and the Iranian parliament will remain defiantly unrepresentative of its people. Meanwhile, in China, Xi Jinping and his mates might be quietly enjoying a cheeky baijiu snifter together, happily sniggering about their global neighbours’ quaint insistence on their odd way of deciding who should be in charge.

Democracy may be a flawed system – ‘the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried’ according to the enduring champion of the fusty right, Winston Churchill – but at least it guards against the unelected usurping and monopolising power. Except, of course, when it doesn’t.

For example, we’ve been treated to quite a bit of Foreign Secretary, call-me-Dave Cameron, this weekend. He told us that his heart bled for migrants drowned at sea (as a result of his government’s own policies) and he’s put his real big-boy pants on by bravely supporting the bombing of Houthi bases. Mind you, when it comes to bombing the people of Yemen, he’s got form, what with him being part of a government that happily sold fighter planes to Saudi Arabia to do the same job for years. Such involvement with the great affairs of state explains why he was unable to recall ‘in any detail’ ever being briefed about the Horizon scandal when he was PM.

Like I say, he’s a busy man. Foreign Secretary. Holder of one of the four great offices of state. And did I mention that he was unelected? Not even an MP? Plucked from cushioned retirement in the Cotswolds to come and help the firm out? Had that slipped my/our mind? Along with the fact that he sent 73 desperate messages to ministers to acquire a government-backed Covid loan for basket-case Greensill Capital before it collapsed…….but not before he’d allegedly made a cool £10 million from his involvement with it. All this as well as carelessly plunging the country into its greatest constitutional crisis of modern times on his CV.

This outdated need for the backing of voters as a prerequisite for office is not specific to any political party. Labour has just announced that Luciana Berger will now assume a key role in developing their mental health strategy. Berger is not an MP, having left the party in 2019 to join Change UK (remember them? No – most people don’t) before quickly deserting her new chums and standing, unsuccessfully, for the Lib Dems in the same year. It’s a tricky business, this gaining public approval. Sooo much easier to just get your pals to find you a job. Success and achievement no longer essential requirements.

It’s been a couple of weeks when the seemingly impossible has been achieved: public confidence in those who run our major institutions has become even more irreparably degraded. Those in high office, elected or not, shamelessly declare themselves innocent and ignorant of crimes committed on their watch or under their remit. Evasion, blame-shifting and self-preservation are the order of the day. Punching downwards, whether it be on postmasters, immigrants, feckless parents, strikers or protestors, has become the default position of those in power. No wonder turnout in those 60-odd elections is predicted to hit an all-time low. Who would trust any of these people?

This isn’t intended as an encouragement not to vote: any indication of dissatisfaction has to be registered. But reliance on the ballot box when the choice is between indistinguishable options can only breed further disillusionment.

But there are hundreds of thousands on the streets in towns and cities over the world calling for justice for the Palestinians. There are now millions of workers in this country who know that the strike is a more effective way of being heard than a cross on a piece of paper every five years. There are individuals and groups who have fought for fairness from Hillsborough to Grenfell to the WASPI women through a dozen other causes up to the doughty Alan Bates.

As the chant goes, learnt by many who have participated in such actions for the first time: ‘this is what democracy looks like.’ And we should be encouraging it at every turn.