How representative is democracy?

I noticed this in Comment is Free today - Making every vote count by Ben Rogers - on electoral reform. He seems wildly optimistic that New Labour are thinking of reforming the electoral system.

Although there have been very minor electoral reforms in the last nine years it's still difficult to think of our democratic institutions as really being owned and controlled by the people themselves. In my view, it's going to take a far more wide ranging overhaul of our public bodies to even begin a much needed process of democratic renewal.

One of the things that irritates me about the 'respectable' electoral reform people is they want to focus on one bit of the system at a time. The House of Lords people don't want to look at the House of Commons, the PR people just want to focus on general elections and the devolution people only want to think about the regions. In fact if we can begin a process of reassessing these institutions it makes more sense to do turn it into one process rather than piecemeal reform that ends up leaving everything more or less the same but with a new logo.

Certainly representative democracy doesn't feel very representative to me. Here in Cambridge, at the last local elections, of the 32,835 votes cast the outcome was as follows;

LibDems
...........38.6% of the vote 69% of the seats (29) could have been 16 seats
Labour
...........25.4% of the vote 31% of the seats (13) could have been 11 seats
Tories
...........21.4% of the vote no seats could have been 09 seats
Greens
...........12.6% of the vote no seats could have been 05 seats
Respect
...........01.7% of the vote no seats could have been 01 seat (God bless them!)

The last number is an illustration of how many seats each group *might* have received had people voted the same way under a straight PR system for the local council (which is a bit of a supposition as people tend not to vote for people they don't think will get in). As it currently stands our council is decided on an almost a winner take all basis. The Tories get over 1 in 5 votes yet don't receive even one councilor to represent those 6,000 plus people who voted for them. Can that really be right?

Here are a few suggestions to be getting on with.

i) abolish the monarchy. Let the PM be head of state for a change.
ii) scrap the House of Lords - replacing it with a second, elected chamber.
iii) proportional representation for local elections (as in Scotland next year)
iv) widening the range of government positions (both local and national) that are elected rather than appointed.

But we also need to look at the experiments in participatory democracy, like those in Latin America, that do not rely on electing someone to look after our interests but allow us to directly look after our own interests for ourselves. That's not something that can come for legislation though - that has to be created from a community and workplace level.

Its only when we're starting to reclaim democracy as a living breathing thing with a content of its own rather than a system of structures and laws will we really be on the path to creating a democratic society.