DEMOCRACY may be run by those who turn up, but fewer people are bothering to even do that. Post Second World War General Election turn-outs topped 80 per cent. Now we struggle to get to 40 per cent.

Yet for the past six or so years, we have had a government that wants to consult upon everything, led by a Prime Minister who seems to have an insatiable need to be universally popular.

The problem is that, having consulted, there is a feeling that what happens is what was going to happen anyway. That the consultation was merely a way of getting some people together to support the already-entrenched views of the pressure group driving the particular planned change.

Change is the name of the game. People do not vote in General Elections on single issues. They vote because they are in broader agreement over a range of issues with one party than with another.

It is a mistake for any government to think that because it has been elected, even by a very substantial majority, that they have approval to impose their policies in all areas.

New Labour is increasingly adopting the American approach to appointments. They just pick the person wanted for the job, and if necessary place him in the House of Lords. Nobody had the chance of voting for Lord Haskins who has a great deal to say about rural affairs, nor for that matter, for Lord Whitty, who appears to be as near to a Minster of Agriculture as we have got.

Governments have always appointed their sympathisers into positions of influence.

Lloyd George, allegedly, sold peerages to the rich. A major plank of the platform on which this government was elected involved transparency and sweeping away sleaze.

What we have now appears to be more of the same.

So don't worry about not being elected, you might still get a job. In any event it is difficult to sort out which of the major parties is more right wing.

Even Margaret Thatcher did not bring in private companies to run schools.

The rural areas particularly seem to be sidelined by this process. Because this is an administration in which so few senior ministers have any prior knowledge of, or interest in, the countryside or its ways - with one or two notable bird watching exceptions - the feeling of helplessness in the face of this ignorance is increasing by the day.

The handling of foot and mouth disease has filled no one with confidence. The ministry responsible for agriculture did not understand, nor indeed know about, the detailed mechanisms of the working of the livestock industry that their policies had promoted.

If they did not know, how could the ministers?

What is even more depressing is that while their actions demonstrate that they did not know about, or understand the industries they were in charge of, they had been told on numerous occasions about the effects of those policies. Clearly they did not believe.

It is never the policy-maker who feels the effects of policy mistakes.

In small businesses the person who pays for the mistakes is the owner or manager. The effects are felt in the profit of the business and therefore in that individual's lifestyle.

In bigger businesses the buck stops at the top, as Lord Simpson at Marconi has finally discovered, even if his downfall was to be cushioned by a significant pay off.

Who in this government is going to pay for the decision to run down this country's defences against the importation of infected meat?

I imagine their salary is still being paid, leading on to a substantial pension, while the rest of us carry the can.