"Richard Crowley" wrote in message
...
"Arfa Daily" wrote ...

As I said Graham, your faith in a system of democracy that allows the
small man to have a say, is heartning even, but rather out of date I
think. We have not had democracy of that sort in the UK for at least the
last 10 years ( ;~} ) and probably longer. How many people marched on
London opposing the invasion of Iraq ?

As a fraction of the actual voting public? Or do you
mean how many did it look like on TV (vs. the actual
numbers.) We have demonstrations all the time over
here in the Washington DC "Mall" where you can get
a couple hundred people together and if you are on the
right side of the issue (that is the "left side"), the "news"
purveyors will shoot and edit it to look like thousands
(or even hundreds of thousands if it is a slow news day.)


The conservative estimate (by the police) was 750,000 - see
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2765041.stm

Now that's a big protest march in a country this size, by anyone's
definition. Over a million people signed the anti road pricing petition that
I mentioned. Again, that is a very substantial piece of the motoring public.
The day after that petition closed, the minister for transport, or whatever
he was, publicly declared that the petition was basically nonsense, because
the motoring public did not know what was good for them, and what was the
'right' thing to do, so they were going to go ahead with the pilot schemes,
regardless. Despite France and The Netherlands ( Holland ) returning a
resounding "No" vote to the establishing of a Europe-wide 'constitution',
which would seriously erode yet further, a country's right to govern itself,
and set its own laws and taxes, and which vote should have spelt an end to
further pressure on the member states, it is now being reintroduced by the
back door, in such a way that it will be very hard to knock on the head
again.

And to Mr T, the answer to whether we had more democracy under Mrs Thatcher,
from those of us who can remember her conservative government, the answer
has to be yes. At least I didn't feel like they were trying to run my entire
life for me, as this lot do ...

Arfa