Running the country

Subject: Running the country

With the Brexit result and now the result in the USA, electing Trump. The argument about a 'franchise qualification' being a prerequisite to vote, along with the question, "is democracy the best way of choosing our political leaders" is now being asked.
One person, one vote, each equal in potency, each suggesting an artificial equivalence amongst all the people within a nations boundaries.
It could be argued that artificiality is the problem.  We usually accept  that education lends an advantage to decision making in that it supposes the educated person will it is better inclined to take the trouble to turn over more stones to seek the truth. But of course, history and facts on the ground illustrate that poorly educated people often have as strong a sense of political grievance and need to be able to articulate their desire for change more than the educated individual.
We know that generally amongst the poorer class of people there is less interest and less an assumption that politics matters. The poor are prejudiced by their plight to believe that change is on the minds of the politicians in Westminster who come from a different class and can hardly be expected to understand their needs so why waste time turning out to vote.
There is of course within all of us is an ingrained sense of right and wrong, of fairness and unfairness. For some voting is based on maintaining a financial opportunity whilst for others, their conscience towards those less well off makes them vote for a party who proclaims an interest in righting that inequality in the civic system.
Politics is also tribal. Generations of families vote a particular way, sometimes unthinkingly. A poor man will sometimes vote for an Establishment party so as to believe he is one of them. A rich man will vote for a socialist cause because he feels it's the humanitarian thing to do. In each case the artificiality of their decision makes politics and democracy uncomfortable handmaidens.
If democracy is skewed by emotion then the argument, that it represents an attempt at providing a level playing field, within the populous as a whole, each persons vote given equal weight, and the importance of pure 'rational thinking', taking into consideration your economic and social status within society (which is what politicians address), if this is set aside by emotional proposition, (a sort of faith based thinking ), then the democratic process has failed, other than in elevating the mystics.
Cynicism is rampant towards the political class and in part this is because democracy has been seen to fail in securing change. A vote at a general election is largely irrelevant because with our current 'first past the post' system only a few swing seats have relevance to the actual outcome.

The Party Manifesto, the offer on which people are supposed to chose who to vote for, is thrust aside as soon as a party takes power and the enticements which were offered are withdrawn.

It seems to me that the Manifesto should be a contract which is legally binding and can only be broken for valid usually economic reasons. It should be properly adjudicated by an impartial body to ensure its claims are pursued by the party who has come into power on the promises made in the manifesto.
This would return the vote to having relevance and remove the natural cynicism people have as they see the politician reverting the very things he or she promised us to gain our vote.
So there is nothing wrong with democracy it's the way it's practised. If the cabinet were a board of executives who failed to follow the minutes of the board meeting then the shareholders would be entitled to throw them out but somehow running a country seems to offer a different set of criteria than running a legally constituted company.
Why !!