"DEMOCRACY" says Cllr Paul McMahon in the Review, "needs probing and questioning voices and this should be welcomed and not constrained."

To which you might reply "yes Councillor, three bags full, Councillor," but only if you were deluded enough to think that Britain is a country where democracy prevails; in other words where power (kratos) resides in the people (demos) and where all eligible citizens participate equally.

The time for "probing" and "questioning" – a time when Britain had yet to become an inmate of the EU's sanatorium – is long past.

And the collapse in bedside visitors (or voter turnout, as it's more decorously described) merely confirms that her ruptured democratic principles have been left neglected by a self-serving political class for far too long.

The mere "re-arrangement of bedpans" (laboured over by Messrs Hogan and McMahon in their debate on "Council questions") is unlikely to make the slightest difference to disillusioned voters weaned on Big Brother and The X Factor.

When the "progressives" of the Lib/Lab/Con axis, preoccupied as they are with power and advantage, promote the mantra of equality and Britain's membership of the EU's creeping totalitarianism they encourage ignorance in the people and   the ultimate absurdity of egalitarianism.

We are all uniquely different, and equal only before God and the law.

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" proclaimed the pigs who controlled the government in the novel Animal Farm by George Orwell. As a comment on the hypocrisy of governments that proclaim the equality of their citizens but give power and privileges to a small elite.It's as apt now as it was in 1945.

To be fully human is to yearn for the true, the good and the beautiful, which requires an appreciation of what is false, bad, and ugly.

You may believe there's little hope for Britain but for the country to accede to the EU's ugly deceit, its corrupt institutions, and its obese ambitions.

But if you believe that Britain's democratic heritage is the antidote to this idolatry – that, as Winston Churchill said, "democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried" then the truth is that what is best and beautiful in Britain can only be reclaimed by a recognition of what's at stake – which is the Christian soul of Western civilisation.

For too long our representative democracy (and its charade of supine party leaders – those "hollow men, headpiece filled with straw, alas!") has failed us.

What chance, you ask, we burst forth from our cocoons of comfortable indifference? The jury's out.

But if we fail to rise to the challenge of demanding the only antidote to a new dark age of despotic rule – which is the introduction of direct democracy –we will have betrayed those Chartists who fought for our franchise 150 years ago. And worse, we will have betrayed our children and grandchildren.

– John Muir.