Alice argues that
the country is facing a crisis of parliamentary and governmental impotence. In both the banking collapse and the row over the employment by British firms of migrant workers, the solutions and the causes lie outside Westminster. Westminster could arguably have prevented them, but it couldn't have caused them. And it does not seem able to stop them.
It reminded me of something I read on the train yesterday by George Mobiot in the Guardian.He firmly believes that democracy and therefore Parliament has become impotent
The small Welsh town where I live, many of whose inhabitants are among the very poor, was once a haven of progressive politics, built from nonconformist religious sects and a long tradition of social solidarity. People from these valleys were transported to Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) for demanding the vote.
The past inhabitants,he feels would turn in their graves if they saw the state of denmocracy today
had their forebears been told that, 125 years after the first agricultural workers got the vote, the poor would be bailing out the rich and (thanks to the first-past-the-post system) the votes of only a few thousand citizens would count, I doubt they would have bothered.
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