democracy a great concipirecy..?

Do we really live in a democracy? We are told we live in a democracy. The word means "rule of the people". But how democratic is Britain really? And do the people really hold the power?
It is true that we have a parliament. It is elected by everyone over the age of 18 at least every five years. We can choose who to vote for.
But once it is elected there is no means of controlling MP''s, parliament or the govemment until the next election. If the government breaks its promises, which it always does, we cannot get rid of it, (according to the law that is), until the next election.
On a day to day basis we see how democratic our society really is. When a factory owner decides to close down a factory, the workers in that factory don''t get a vote on whether it should stay open. There is no debate about it - the factory is his to do with as he pleases. The homeless never get a ballot on whether they can occupy empty housing or change decisions to build homes instead of luxury office blocks. Black people and youth cannot decide to remove racist police who harass and attack them from their area.
Revolutionaries believe that even under the parliamentary system, real power lies outside parliament. Unelected civil servants, the owners of the press and television, judges, police chiefs, and army officers decide what is going to happen in society. The monarchy and the House of Lords, who are not elected by anyone, have the power to delay and block laws. The Queen still has the power to dismiss a government. She used it as recently as 1975, when she sacked an elected Labour government in Australia!
Real power also lies with those who own and control the wealth of society: the top bankers, financiers and big businessmen who make up the capitalist class. It is they who decide how the resources of this country are dished out. As most wealth and property is in their hands they want to keep it that way. So when the media say we live under the "rule of the people", we reply: which people? Certainly not the majority of us. We live under the rule of part of the people - the rich part. We live in a capitalist democracy.

Of course this does not mean that we have no democratic rights at all. We have the right to hold meetings and to print newspapers to get our point of view across. We can hold demonstrations to protest against things we do not agree with. Workers have the right to join a trade union. But these rights were not just granted to us from above out of the goodness of our rulers'' hearts. Every one of them, including the right to vote, had to be fought for from below.

Today the government is trying to restrict our rights. That is what the Criminal Justice Bill is about. Over the last years the Tories have brought in a series of laws which limit the ability of trade unions to strike in defence of their jobs and conditions. They have given the police more powers to attack demonstrators and break up picket lines. They have brought in powers to censor what we can say, for example banning Sinn Fein speakers from the airwaves.

While we fight for the broadest possible democratic rights, we do not believe that real and lasting change can come through parliament A government that tried to take wealth and property out of the hands of the rich would soon meet with opposition from within the state itself That is what happened in Chile in 1973. The people elected a government that said it would really change things for the better. The workers demanded that the government take over the wealth and property of the rich and put it in the hands of the people. The army overthrew the government, brought in a military dictatorship and murdered thousands and thousands of their opponents.
Many people might think that this could only happen in South America and that the British army and police would never disobey the rule of democratic law. But they would be wrong. All of the unelected top civil servants, judges, polices and army officers in Britain come from the same class. They and their families have enormous personal wealth. They go to the same private schools together and then on to top Oxford or Cambridge colleges. They have the same outlook on life - that they have the right to own most of the wealth. They are determined to keep it and if that means getting rid of elected governments then so be it