>>TO WHATEVER COMES NEXT<<

Aye, there's the rub.

What comes next could be extremely unpleasant and we now head into uncharted waters.

It is possible that Democracy and the rights of man are less to do with the enlightenment and more to do with access to energy.

Wood based societies such as Medieval Europe and Edo-Japan were highly feudal and rigorously class based. Coal, and later oil came hand in hand with Democracy as cheap energy enabled the common weal and an emergent middle class to spend time on other things than back breaking work and a dawn to dusk work pattern.

I would specifically refer to such things as the 'Mechanics Institutes' of industrial towns where young men , who left school at 13 were able to improve their lots by learning after factory shifts.

- Both about Engineering and politics and philosophy.

I would hazard further that the lot and empowerment of women is distinctly related to cheap energy and a the liberation from place by access to goods that run on cheap energy.

We could pass through one of many of several future states:

- Establishment (Army) Coup
- Elected and then perpetual National Socialism
- Dark age, later emerging as feudalism.

I doubt that OMOV democracy with consensual or even civilised adversarial politics will make it. It is simply unaffordable and it is a very recent flirtation conjoined with cheap energy.

Today, the nation that brought you the Magna Carta, the Forrest Carta, the Glorious Revolution, basically pissed on Habeus Corpus.

42 days for a FILTHY STINKING TERRORIST ! - sounds acceptable. Wait until they do you on some jumped up charge - maybe for reading this site, or disagreeing with the PM?

Who knows where this could lead...

We already know that Local Councils are using RIPA Terrorism legislation to snoop on rate payers. Britain is not immune. For every free-born Brit against these impositions, there is an anal, furtive, control freak who goes to bed at night wondering if someone, some where can be stopped from doing what they are doing and controlled.

Our same betters also left a folder full of Al Quaeda fun and naughty secrets on a train today. (Brutality + Incompetence is very Nazi...)

Do not expect things to stay the same.

That is true for Liberal, enlightened democracy as it is for energy and the economy.