LONDON -- Speaking to the House of Commons on Nov. 11, 1947, Winston Churchill said, "No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
Churchill assumed that a democratic government would realize that if only in order to get re-elected, it had to pay close attention to public opinion, even though this is often difficult to gauge. Public opinion is not necessarily what the popular press thinks it is.
Some cynics have described parliamentary democracy as another name for an elected dictatorship. If one party has a majority in Parliament and is ready to use it to override all opposition, then it has become an elected dictatorship that can only be removed by a general election in which another party is elected to power. This is the case in Britain.
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