Is the UK truly democratic?

The first thing to consider, is that true democracy is participatory democracy, where members of the public are effectively members of the government by voting directly on policies. However, this is difficult to do and as a result, most modern democracies are representative; the people of the U.K choose who they want to have power over the country and trust that person to devise policies that will benefit them. However, not all that potential prime ministers promise is true and they can lose a lot of support from the people due to broken promises. A representative democracy can easily become an elected dictatorship if the population’s views are not heard. The question then, is to what extent is Britain democratic?

Democracy is power to the people, which emphasises itself through the vote. We vote on members of the Commons but not on the Lords. We vote on local representatives but not party leaders. We vote on people but not policies. We vote people into Parliament but not out of it. We vote for a particular party but our second choices are not considered. We vote on only that which we are asked to vote on. We cannot ensure policies are maintained by our vote. Evidently our democracy is far from flawless,  police barraging of public protesters and Rupert Murdoch’s mass media control show us that we are not quite as free as the democratic terminology seems to suggest.

One could argue that Britain could be made more democratic through a proportional electoral system, compulsory voting, a removal of unelected members of Parliament and more referendums. But it seems in these examples, more democratic is inversely proportional to more efficient. Proportional electoral systems may confuse voters and will result in less strong government; compulsory voting would cumber us with the careless votes of those uninterested in politics and therefore would not be an accurate representation of what the population wants; a removal of unelected members of Parliament may increase political bias and reduce the expert value of the Lords; referendums may be subject to people who do not know what is best for the country, and even then only those who set the agenda of the referendum – members of Parliament – are those possessing the power; they decide what we may decide on.