To go back to my previous example, the Lisbon treaty runs to several hundred pages. Can you honestly say you’d have read it before voting in a referendum if we’d had one?

It would have put us in a situation where we either had to spend a large proportion of our spare time reading a long boring documents that few people would be able to understand anyway, or voting on something we weren’t properly informed on. That is an unfair burden to place on someone who wishes to be an active citizen, and it is is not very democratic.

You might as well ask people to vote for Option A or Option B without telling them what it means, and then claim that the outcome is the will of the people.

I think you’re being unfair on ChrisC. He didn’t equate anything to paedophilia – he was just using an extreme example to make the point that not all natural impulses are okay.

I’ve seen some silly posts on here but that takes the biscuit. You are equating paedophilia and cannibalism with the desire to mix with people of your own class or culture? So because a man wants to mix with others of his type at the golf club, or another at the local pub, they are equivalent to paedophiles?

It’s also somewhat disturbing that you find these bizzarre extremes to be ‘natural’. Just to clarify, by ‘natural’ I mean that it is an instinct common to most of the human race. These things would not qualify under that definition.

To get back to the referendum, the Swiss voted in the way that most Western people would vote, given the chance. There have been petitions against mosques in various parts of our own country. These are usually only publicised locally however.

Yes I probably would.
It seems that Islam & Islamic culture ( difficult to unpick the two sometimes) are not condusive to democracy.

You can see the worst manifestion in the harrassment of Sayeeda Warsi in Luton yesterday.

That’s what the Swiss are worried about I think.

How do you know this? Referenda are part of the ordinary Swiss system, not strange and rare events as they are in Britain, My understanding is that precisely because the Swiss have regular direct voting, they tend to be much better informed than voters in other countries. I suspect that where people feel they have a real say in how their country is run, a sizeable proportion tend to be much more politically informed. Those who aren’t probably don’t bother to vote either, which is a choice in itself (ie a choice to leave it to other of their fellow citizens to decide matters for them).