Sainsbury’s is made accessible to everyone all over the country (to a degree) anyone can jump in the car and drive to their local branch to make their purchases and no real background knowledge of the supermarket, economy or franchising is needed to buy your weekly shopping there, however, in Westminster, it’s not very accessible at all to the general public to have a political effect you need to be in contact with the ‘right’ people. These days you can’t just drive up to London and take a walk around Westminster and to make informed decisions on which parties to follow, you need some background knowledge on politics and the effects certain parties’ policies could have on us as individuals and as a country. You need to actively watch the news, listen to the radio, sign up to certain newsletters or buy the newspaper. There are two main different types of democracy, allowing different degrees of ‘people power’ in politics. The first is direct democracy, where the public will have continuous participation in political matters. This is the harder of the two to organise, it would be very time consuming and be very difficult as it would require the whole population having a say on current affairs and the tasks of government. In the UK for example, some 60million (say 40 million, excluding children and only counting those actually able to vote) would be very challenging to construct a way of voting on ‘petty’ matters comparatively often as not all topics would interest everyone. It would also require a general interest in politics, which at the moment the UK seems to be lacking in. A sense of apathy towards voting and politics in general has become apparent in the falling turnout for the past couple general elections. Not to mention, direct democracy would be a very time consuming task, peoples work, family life and social affairs would have to be worked around. The benefits are a sense of community, everyone working together to create a society in which we all have worked for and had some input in. Another problem is that people would have to vote on matters that are of no particular interest to them or matters in which they have no background knowledge in meaning laws could be passed on the basis of misinformed votes.
In the UK at the moment we have a second kind of democracy known as, representative democracy, where politicians an MP’s act in the interest of the public as they see fit. There are able, however, to call referendums, should they feel an important matter in which the public should have a say on, although, where referendums give us a sense of direct democracy and a feeling of being involved, it raises the question of how involved are we if it’s the government’s choice to call one initially? Having a representative democracy it distances the public from the world of politics and leaves important matters up to those who ‘know what they are talking about’ In representative democracy, we only have a certain impact on what goes on in our country and in a sense we (as a nation) have become almost like the shoppers in Sainsbury’s, browsing through manifestos and party policies to see which would benefit us most when casting our votes, just as customers of Sainsbury’s do when shopping for the best deals on food.
In conclusion voters should be mature enough to realise that they can’t choose and have everything they want politically as people will always disagree and it would just to be difficult to co-ordinate.