Accountable to None: The Tory Nationalization of Britain.

Nothing will ever be the same again: voting for the opposition will not press the nation's rewind button, returning us to a golden age of traditional social-democratic politics. Postwar Britain is dead; the `ragged revolution' of the right and the globalisation of economies has seen to that. Any incoming left-of-centre reformists face a constitution already under question, where the issues of debate -- the Union, devolution, a Bill of Rights, proportional representation, referenda -- challenge the state and the nation. But if we want to know where we are going, argues Andrew Marr in Ruling Britannia, we need to know where we now are. And where we are is in fact in a stage of liberation from our imperial history, not the subject of gloom and cynicism as is so often averred, but one offering new chances and a great choice about our political system. What is now needed is to make take informed decisions about the future of our democracy since it has become fatally flawed by the shift of power from the elected to the unelected -- to quangos, and to markets, and to supranational bodies, particularly Brussels.

Marr's book is a record of contemporary constitutional reality, joining a distinguished list of recent works. His approach adopts a fresh perspective by starting at the grass roots: looking at the voter, the local party and local government, and moving on to Parliament. At the centre of the study is an investigation of the British state, as a system of government and as a player in the world. What emerges is an air of public cynicism about the reality of democracy that goes beyond mere weariness. The suggestions for expanding the role of the voter -- proportional representation, `citizens' juries', referenda -- need to be grasped as a matter of urgency if the privilege of voting is not to become a dead ritual. At local level, while there are still `finely-chiselled pediments' adorning the corners of our crumbling and vandalized cities', local democracy has been under assault since 1979. And at both local and national level the last two decades have seen an anti-democratic revolution -- the creeping replacement of elected bodies with the rule by `good chaps' (and chapesses) -- which is now a matter of concern for political parties. The result is …