Teach Yourself: Democracy

I got home from college to find this lurking on my facebook feed. A man being ejected from a town council meeting for asking a question. I was rather disgusted and outraged to say the least, so I cracked open a can of cider and got down to some serious philosophising on the matter:

This video shows a man being forcibly ejected from a Penzance Town Council meeting. It's claimed he'd entered late and did not hear the Mayor explain that members of the public would not be permitted to ask questions unless they'd been submitted in advance. Security guards were asked to remove him from the room after he asked, if he could ask a question. We'll be hearing from people who were at the meeting on Lunchtime with Laurence from midday.
Posted by BBC Radio Cornwall on Tuesday, 3 November 2015

Should I be angry? I want to say yes and leave it at that, but that's not good enough. Maybe the man shown had been genuinely out of order?

It doesn't seem so, apparently the problem was that questions from the public were to be submitted in writing, but he missed the start of the meeting where this was stated.

Really I say "so what?" to this. It's not a question of whether any protocol was breached or the meeting disrupted. It aught simply to be a matter of explaining the protocol.

Oh but what if that is indeed what happened? Well that's something I'll have to concede here: I don't know what happened prior to that video being recorded. Maybe the gentleman was told of the written submissions and still requested to ask a question?

For the sake of argument let's pretend that not only did this happen, but that he insisted on asking (which seems unlikely, given that he doesn't mention the question he wanted to ask in that video, so I presume he had yet to ask it):

Is it really too much to ask? Even to merely ask to ask?

In the video it can be heard someone saying that if every person there asked a question they'd be there a long time. A ridiculous rationale to my mind, it is quite clear that the other people in the room were not sitting on their hands in desperate self-discipline.

Allowing everybody to ask questions doesn't mean that every single person there will ask one. Sure, I might be taking this a bit too literally but clearly whoever said that rubbish believes in absolutes too:

Are we to assume it is beyond the wit of civil discussion to decide on a one-to-one basis whether there is time to ask a question and have it answered? Is there no chair to this meeting?

I suppose, again, I will have to stow my moral outrage a moment to concede that I don't actually know whether this happened. Perhaps there wasn't time and this was clearly and reasonably explained.

Even if we give all possible benefit-of-doubt to the Penzance Town Council, does that justify the disgraceful use of force?

Oh it would be inconvenient to answer this question, let's just have him removed instead! Guards!