BBC Democracy Live

This a channel entirely devoted to proceedings in our various governmental bodies. We have a lot of these, far too many in my opinion - House of Commons, House of Lords, Welsh Assembly, Scottish Parliament, Northern Ireland Parliament, European Parliament plus Select Committees which discuss the price of cat food or the aid we should give to Dharfur in equally shallow but polite ways.

The House of Commons is generally pretty empty apart from Prime Minister's Question Time for that is an opportunity to taunt him. The Lords is usually well packed. They, of course, have nothing else to do - no electorate to respond to for they were not democratically elected. There are about 735 of them, about 10% due to lineage and birth. The rest are there because some Prime Minister wanted to pack the place with his cronies.

The regional assemblies are quite funny in their self importance and irrelevance but unlike the Commons and the Lords, they are modern and each representative has a laptop. That really frees them up from the tedious matter of listening to whatever is being talked about. Watched Jane Hutt this afternoon ignoring her First Minister, playing with her mouse and typing things in. What is she up to - Facebook, YouTube, emails or the price of fish? I hope its emails for she has a lot of catching up to do - she hasn't responded to one of mine from last summer.

Select Committees are a body of MP's who call in individuals to explore ostensibly serious issues. But it's all rather genteel and nobody gets a hammering. We need a bit more shouting like 'WTF did you carry on trading when you knew you were bankrupt?' But we won't and the outcome will be just another piece of legislation on the price of sausages.

In the European Parliament, as I write, Bulgaria's Foreign Minister is rambling on about humanitarian aid. She does however seem to more interested in telling everyone that Bulgaria has bought two aircraft to fight forest fires. I suppose I should be grateful that they are not discussing the standardisation of fonts on all European newspapers or new regulations on the size of cauliflowers.

There is one single abiding conclusion from watching all of them. They are all talking froth. When trying to make a serious point, one representative recites an anecdotal tale about one of his constituents, aged 81 with a broken leg, who has to hop 3 miles to the hospital for treatment. Unfortunate but statistically irrelevant.

And that leads me to the conclusion that none of these assemblies actually changes things in all this chit-chat. The changes come from proposals of their civil servants and all the politicians do is rubber stamp them or maybe, if they have paid some attention, rubber stamp them after making a few minor alterations.