Democracy

I've been thinking a lot about politics of late, wondering just how much of a democracy we in the UK are. Now, I've never studied politics, but my impression is that a democractic government represents and acts for it's population, through the process of elections. The government's basic role is to carry out the will of the people and maintain public institutions such as schools, the emergency services, benefits etc, and maintain international dialogues for trading, culutural purposes etc. Obviously it's role is more complicated than this, but that is what I understand as the basic purpose of government.

Now when the UK went to war against Saddam Hussain, it was claimed (maybe or maybe not through genuine belief) that Saddam Hussain had Weapons of Mass destruction and that it was in the interests of Iraq, and the UK and USA to remove him from power. As far as I can remember (and I may be wrong), the UK was told of Blair's justification for wanting to go to war. With this knowledge, over a million people still protested against it - and those were just the ones that could be bothered to go out and demonstrate. Given the size of the demonstrations, in a true democracy wouldn't this have made the government at least publically reconsider the war? Now I'm sure they didn't want to appear as weak, but in the end, it isn't the minsters that fight those wars; it's the army, people from the general population. Why didn't the government even make an attempt at pretending to have listened? Not that that would have made it better, but it wouldn't, in my opinion, have been such a blatabt flouting of democratic principles.

To make matters worse, turns out their reason for starting the war was invalid anyway, but by that time it was too late - Saddam Hussain was no longer in charge and the country was (and is?) in a state of near collapse. What bugs me now though, is that there seems to be a general perception that Iraq was invaded as part of the retaliation against 9/11. Everyone seems to have forgotten about Afghanistan.

Anyway, I digress. My point (longwinded though it is!), is that I don't think there is enough accountability in this country. Ministers should make an active effort to justify the policies of their departments, and where possible, get relevant and real people's opinions on how they will be affected. A long speech everynow and again isn't good enough. If the government is really the political representation of the people, then they should be actively engaging the public becuase they believe they should - not because they have to.

In the words of Douglas Adams, maybe it's true that:
'Anyone capapble of getting themselves made president should on no account be allowed to do the job'

Solutions anyone?!