Hang the Great British Public

In the early 1990s I accidentally lived in Andover for a year. It had home comforts in the shape of my parents, who accidentally lived there for seven years, but not much else going for it. Let's just say it's the only year of my life I have ever managed to maintain a gym membership.

In between flexing my pecs and digging a tunnel to civilisation I did manage to identify some drinking buddies. They were a strange bunch but they were prepared to drink with me, and so it was every Tuesday night we would find ourselves in the Railway Tavern, constructing a midweek hangover that would see us through till the weekend.

They were all boys apart from Rose, who wasn't out often as she was a single mother and the father of her child had gone back to Russia, or maybe never left Russia, the detail is sketchy now. There was Michael who periodically tried to get off with me, Owen who was always driving and drank five pints of lemonade, Richard who wore cowboy boots and smoked B&H and liked to move it move it, and Steve, who was big and loud and opinionated and worked in a video shop. He ended up having a thing with my Australian artist half aunt, and later still went back to college and did a degree in archaeology, but those are other stories.

We used to have fierce arguments, which would get fiercer as the night wore on, and would usually end with me and Steve thumping the table and yelling at each other. One such (as I finally get to the point, but I thought it worth setting the scene) was about Steve's 'if I ruled the world' approach to local democracy. Citizens would all have little voting consoles (a la 'Ask the Audience' in Millionaire). Their views would be canvassed constantly and there would be no need for politicians or indeed a judiciary. Legislation would be designed and justice meted out by the man in the street. It would be fair and swift and efficient.

Hang on a minute, I would say. The man in the street would bring back the death penalty. The man in the street would send all asylum seekers home. The man in the street would outlaw abortion. The man in the street would start burning witches again, given half a chance, and I'd be first on the pile. You're only going to get a fair hearing from the man in the street if you are Just Like Him.

And yesterday's revelation that a third of 2000 British people surveyed by Amnesty International believe a woman is partially or completely responsible for being raped if she has behaved flirtatiously could not prove my point more.

I could probably have predicted that attitude, but I was still shocked. What shocked me even more was that nearly half of the people holding this view were women. Women who never flirt, one presumes. Or who have ever been raped.

Representative democracy. It's the only way. The people have quite enough power sometimes.

joella