Reports comparing the non participation of younger people in the democratic process with the general engagement of the older generation tend to imply that the latter are in some way to blame when in fact it is nothing more than an abdication of responsibility by the former. Democracy is by no means a perfect system but it is infinitely better as a means of transferring power to those alternatives such as violent revolution or military coups.
In this country we have spent centuries building a democratic system, from the first stirrings of Magna Carta through the Reformation, the Glorious Revolution and the Civil War, culminating in the Chartists, the great reform acts of the nineteenth century and the granting of universal suffrage in the twentieth. Millions have died to protect these rights and millions more now alive in other, less happy, countries, wish that they possessed them.
If one declines to take part in the process than one can hardly complain if those that do decide matters.
Colin Bullen, Tonbridge
