Re: Democracy or Dictatorship?
 

Apologies to Greg Pope, I got him mixed up with the other one, Graham Jones!! I vehemently deny senile decay.

I still think this Bill is extremely dangerous - particularly in the hands of extreme radicals of whatever party.

Re: Democracy or Dictatorship?
 

I do not trust any politicians to tell us whether it is dark or daylight......let alone the truth about a bill that is so contentious. It scares me witless to think that if this bill is passed an unscrupulous party(maybe even the one that is currently in power) will have very little to hold it back, and we would be able to do precious little about it.

Re: Democracy or Dictatorship?
 

The sad fact is that we don't have democracy in Britain... we have a single-party system which has 2 faces with a 3rd (smaller) party being the only form of opposition. The government (whichever party) is controlled by specialist interest groups (aka corporate lobbies, NGO's) whose primary interest is capital gain for the wealthy and elites with all legislation designed dto subjugate the masses and perpetuate the consumer society.

The mainstream media is complicit in this by never actually effectively challenging powers-that-be (war in Iraq a case in point), in fact the mainstream media is OWNED by the system that they're 'supposed' to observe and criticise (every mainstream media source is owned by a corporate master thus making it impossible for them to truly attack the establishment they're a part of). The only other mainstream media outlet that is left to challenge government and corporate irresponsibility is of course the BBC, however the BBC is controlled by government through high-level contacts (witness the dismissal of Andrew Gilligan over his 'dodgy dossier' report which proved to be the truth). If you want to see many more examples of the media's involvement in establishment then visit the independently and voluntarily run www.medialens.org for constant updates and challenges to media disinformation and ommision.

There's also an enormous amount of evidence that points to a large portion of media editorial and journalistic staff being either directly employed by, or at least on the payroll of the intelligence services to propagate 'news' and direct attention away from the real issue - this isn't paranoid delusion, it's really beeen happening since the end of the second world war!!!

Other sources of our dirty dirty governments (past and present) tricks can be found through John Pilger's work over the past 30 years or so.