The differences between the two societies start at the roots. They rise from there to affect not only democratic practice but the two peoples' attitudes to life. Half of the legislature is not elected at all. This British experience has resulted in an ingrained view of political power rightly flowing from the top. For in reality we have and executive dictatorship over which Parliament is powerless.
Power is centralised in London, in the central government.
Britons vote for politicians who are bound by their party line, not for an individual representative who will respond to what their electors want. Thus there is no capital punishment in Britain, although opinion polls suggest that about the same proportion of Britons as Americans favour it. The sense of powerlessness that this engenders is reflected, Freedland reports, even in phone-in shows. Britons like to ask questions, he says, but are much less likely than Americans to express their own opinions. In a Britain where the people are subjects of the Crown rather than citizens from whom political power derives, it has been so much easier for the state to extend police powers to search, to end the right to silence in court, to maintain an unjustifiable blanket of state and corporate secrecy and to restrict the freedom of the Press.