Our Democracy

One of the barriers to empowerment is sometimes that people feel they have a lack of knowledge about the political system in which they belong. This can lead to a lack of confidence in asking politicians for help. It can mean you feel lost when deciding who to vote for in an election because you don’t know who can influence what things. 

Understanding our place in democracy also helps us feel entitled to enforce our rights. The politicians who run our country work for us. The civil servants work for us. Public sector workers work for us. The money spent on public services is our money. We are morally entitled to the things we are legally entitled to, and we should never feel guilty about fighting for those things or for asking politicians to help us. 

What is democracy?

In a nutshell, the idea of democracy is that the people who live somewhere have the right to rule that place, and that all people in that place are treated equally. This is important to remember - the UK and Scotland are democracies, and therefore we all have the right to influence laws and decisions in the place that we live, and we all have the right to be treated fairly.