It’s a few days old, but Tom Bentley wrote in The Guardian You can’t impose democracy from above
[…] democracy in Britain is in crisis […] we need to understand that the idea that genuine democracy can be advanced simply by creating more formal rights, more freedoms, more procedural rules, is fundamentally misguided […] compare this to Lewisham Listens, an internet based consultation programme for young people run by a London borough […] We should be looking, not at the formal institutional structure but more at the informal spread of relationships, conversations and ideas. The technology and the organisational structure make it possible, but they are not the democracy […] These new processes of interaction do not achieve change unless they are connected to the use of power; that is why formal politics continues to matter. But it is the connections between institutional function and everyday behaviour that generate the potential for change, not the properties of the institutions themselves
