DEMOCRACY is very much the byword for this week, or more precisely the subversion of it.

While the yeah and nay camps in the EU referendum debacle continue to ramp up their blustering bullshit and bipartisan bastardry as polling day nears, both are very keen on employing the term for their own ends.

“We must preserve our democracy,” they howl in faux anguish. While conversely anything they disagree with but can’t win the argument over is simply branded undemocratic, nonsense, or both.

Sadly though, few of those so keen to strap themselves to the mast of democratic principle seem to understand the concept and you get the strong feeling that if they did they wouldn’t like it.

The Collins English dictionary describes democracy thus: “government by the people or their elected representatives.”

Well? I hear some people say: “We have elections and the candidate who accrues the most votes wins. That’s democracy.”

Hmm … up to a point, perhaps.

If you ignore the fact that successful candidates and elected governments seldom manage to gain the support of more than a third of the electorate.

Or the fact that, while technically it is possible for almost anyone who can scrape together the deposit to stand, with very few exceptions they will get nowhere because the major parties will deploy their vast resources and steamroller them, or smear them out of the race.

Even the term race is risible, it’s like the Epsom Derby with a handful of riders on thoroughbred steeds and the rest on donkeys.

And as if that wasn’t unfair advantage enough, as the ongoing investigation into the Tories’ election spending looks likely to show, if they still can’t win they cheat.

If the allegations are proven — and the evidence is mounting by the day — this means that we have a government which literally stole the election.

And these are the scumbags on both sides of the referendum row who want us to trust their ever more dire doomsday pronouncements for a future in or out of the EU.

Brexit campaigners claim that the EU impinges on our democratic rights, although what they really mean is that it stops them doing whatever the hell they want.

Which, given this current shower’s track record, is to persecute the vulnerable, immeasurably broaden the gap between the “haves and have nots” and of course line their own pockets. Without having to deal with pesky irritations such as international law.

A worse bunch of spivs, shysters, charlatans, crooks and hypocrites you would be hard pressed to find outside the arms industry or the US presidential elections.

More on both of which in a moment.

The interesting thing about democracy is that only your version of it counts.

This was graphically illustrated by two major stories this week, one on either side of the Atlantic, which received paltry coverage amid the blanket coverage of the referendum and the even more interminable US presidential election.

On Wednesday an analysis of the British government’s own figures by Campaign Against Arms Trade showed that this country licensed the sale of £4.6 billion worth of armaments and weaponry to regimes that continue to carry out the death penalty and routinely abuse human rights.

This is despite Britain’s avowed opposition to the death penalty “under any circumstances” and the fact many of these client states are listed as “countries of concern” by the Foreign Office.

As always Saudi Arabia was the biggest customer, spending £2.8bn on such democracy-enhancing items as drones, armoured vehicles, grenades, bombs and missiles in 2015 alone.

Now, call me cynical if you must but am I the only one who thinks that flogging arms to despotic regimes so they can oppress dissent is something of an impingement on the democratic rights of the citizens of those countries?

It certainly makes a few spurious headlines about straight bananas and the Great British Banger allegedly being banned by EU bureaucrats pale into insignificance.

But, despite having several centuries more practice when it comes to subverting democratic principles on a global scale Britain is not in the same league as the US.

Ah, America! A country where the word democracy is so intertwined with its own warped self-image that it seems to think that it invented the concept and slapped a copyright on it to make damn sure no-one else can have it.

Which brings us to Argentina where, last Friday, a court jailed the country’s former dictator Reynaldo Bignone for 20 years for his role in the nefarious 1970s US-sponsored Operation Condor which saw the murder, kidnap, torture and disappearance of hundreds of thousands of left-wing activists and trade unionists across six Latin American countries by paramilitary death squads trained and actively supported by the CIA.

US involvement with death squads is not exactly news.

But what is hugely important about the verdict is that it is the first time a court has explicitly proven a criminal conspiracy between the fascistic former regimes in Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, and the US.

It is worth reflecting on this when we hear the empty rhetoric of both presidential candidates as they mangle and distort the term democracy for their own personal gain.

And speaking of which, the spirit of Winston Churchill has been much evoked during the last few months on these shores.

He has been hailed as a paragon of British values and a poster boy for the British stiff upper lip, and go it alone mentality.

Well, while Churchill may have had many laudable qualities — although I struggle to think of any at the moment — egalitarianism was not one of them.

I give you this quote from the man himself: “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

Well, at least the Tories are adhering to one of his principles. They hold everyone in contempt, even each other.