extract from own work!

A small eztract from most recent essay....no dangour now that its been handed in!

We normally view a country as either democratic or undemocratic. For example China could be said to be a country with no democracy. But, when we investigate a country in more detail, things are not always as they initially appear to be. We realise that there are different levels of democracy making some countries more or less democratic than others. D. Robertson, (a writer in 1986) said that “Democracy is the most valued and also vaguest of political terms in the modern world.”( http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/democracy.htm) The United Kingdom itself is listed as a free country, a country that sees itself as governed by the people. However, in Lord Hailsham’s 1976 Richard Dimleby lecture, he states
“the powers of our own Parliament are absolute and unlimited. And in this, we are almost alone. All other free nations impose limitations on their representative assemblies. We impose none on ours. Parliament can take away a man’s liberty or his life without a trial, and in past centuries, it has actually done so.” (http://www.republic.org.uk/liberty/index.php)
Lord Hailsham suggested that Britain was not as democratic as it was made out to be. In the same lecture he also said “We live in an elective dictatorship, absolute in theory, if hitherto thought tolerable in practice.”(http://www.republic.org.uk/liberty/index.php) I begin to wonder how much power we have. We get to vote around once every four years to help influence which political party will govern over us for a four or five year period. Apart from that I don’t really see anything else that we can do without political reform. Does this really make us a democratic country?