IS OUR Parliamentary democracy capable of running the country properly? Many people must now be asking themselves that question.
Our Labour Government is in considerable chaos with endless plotting to try to get rid of Gordon Brown even though there doesn't seem to be anyone wanting to replace him.
Labour's record in office is a mixture of good and bad.
They introduced t
he minimum wage, winter heating allowances for the elderly, more nurses, doctors and surgeons, more advanced forms of treatment and shorter NHS waiting lists.
But there has been too much public spending along with excessive bureaucracy in the police, in the NHS, in the schools and in the civic centres.
And now, following years of rapidly growing Government spending, rising personal debt levels and recklessly irresponsible behaviour by the whiz-kids in the City, banks are going bust one after the other.
They then have to be bailed out by the taxpayers to prevent a collapse of the banking system because it would inevitably be followed by a total economic meltdown.
The Conservatives do not have a blameless record either. They took us into the bureaucratic EU and tried to join the Euro.
In 1992 we had the disaster of Black Wednesday when billions were thrown away in one day trying to maintain the level of the pound against the Deutschmark.
And they privatised water, electricity and gas in order to introduce competition and give better service to their customers. Without success in my view.
They told the building societies they could convert to being banks and those that did are now failing.
Jobs are being lost and branch offices will have to close down. De-mutualisation has been a failure and the taxpayers are having to pick up the tab.
The present chaos has also been caused by the reckless share traders and their ineffective supervisors, the indifferent directors in the board rooms (as long as big profits were being made), inadequate regulators, and incompetent politicians.
The problem is that politicians, of all parties, are expected to understand extremely complex situations and then formulate policy responses without, in many cases, their having suitable qualifications or experience.
When they are given sound advice they often don't understand it.
The result is that we get a mixture of bad decisions and good decisions. And choosing between Labour and Conservative becomes a choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
Jim Allan,
Hartlepool.
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