Few if any books I’ve read in and around the subject of ‘Democracy’ come to the same conclusions we do which is that unless and until the ‘People’ have real effective 'Power' nothing is going to change.
Take Murray Bookchin for example. In the two books of his I’ve read recently - ‘The Next Revolution’ and ‘The Ecology of Freedom’, totally some 638 pages between them, he covers his ideas for people’s assemblies in the first and traces the conflicts hierarchical structures bring to society in the second.
His idea for people’s assemblies at local level, at first appear to be a step in the right direction, but it soon becomes clear that they are nothing more than part appointed and part elected talking shops without any permanent power to change things.
Central governments are very good at hanging onto power and over the years have come up a number of ruses to convince the people that they are improving their local democracy from unitary councils, to regionalisation and devolution to name but three Westminster have supported.
However democracy whether national or local only lives up to its name if the people are recognised as sovereign and have the mechanisms to exert their power over their politicians.
Our six demands directly address the issue of who holds the power and one can come up with all the fancy ideas you like, to supposedly improve democracy, but unless the power is held directly by the people then the ideas are all simply window dressing.
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