Aged between 16 and 20, the youths in the pictures are friends from the Shadwell area in Tower Hamlets, which has its own DLR station. The photographs are mounted in the train carriages, in spaces usually used for advertising, paid for by the London Arts Board, Autograph (the Associa-tion of Black Photographers) and the London Docklands Development Corporation. This month, photographer Anthony Lam is attempting to introduce the East End to the Toy Train users with an exhibition of striking black and white images of a group of Bangladeshi youths. THE DOCKLANDS Light Railway, which swishes out from the City of London to East London's new Docklands developments, has been trying to persuade its passengers to call it the "D", which sounds kind of hip and New Yorkish. The passengers, though, most of whom are suited commuters, perversely insist on calling it the Toy Train, as it chugs along, all shiny, new, red and blue, ferrying them from one business centre to another, through the housing estates at the heart of the East End. But it can also breed a fatal cynicism: in the battle for democracy, Spitting Image will not be enough.. There is still an uncomfortable truth in the old slogan "the price of liberty is eternal vigilance".

He may be right to say that our culture is still "saturated with the spirit of democracy"; we have "good civic traditions, and a certain store of native wit" Laughter, he suggests, is "the secret weapon of democrats". Charles Masterman, like so many others, agonised about the condition of England. This was no accident: Victorians believed that democracy was a naturally Teutonic quality.Now we can be sure that while most peoples want democracy, they don't necessarily want it enough to fight for it Marr is cagey on just how strenuous the fight may be. He himself, in his account of the local protest movement, talks of "the Middle English in revolt". We shift unsteadily between the ethnic and the civic labels for our "nation". But it leaves him in the same uncertainty as the rest of "us" when he grapples with the collective qualities which underpin the democratic spirit. Even if his name were John Smith, Marr's approach would leave readers in no doubt that he is not English (he is a Scot).

This allows him to make several good quasi-Martian observations about the underlying logic of politics - the sort of thing that the English have traditionally avoided. Well, yes - but that still leaves the problem of who "we" are. He is sensibly sceptical of the fashionable invocation of "community".The answer seems to be that we need (as John Lennon told us) to change our minds before changing our mechanisms. He is noticeably lukewarm about such things as bills of rights and freedom of information laws, a little warmer about referenda and civics education. He certainly does not propose any other mechanisms for reform. He seems to hold to the enlightenment hope that pointing out errors will lead people to rectify them. Is there any way out of this fix? Marr is disappointingly cautious on specific remedies.

He emphasises the paradox whereby real state power has shrunk, with the erosion of its effective sovereignty in the international sphere by global forces beyond its control, while its internal control has burgeoned.Marr is clear that we have gone wrong somewhere, but sees that we cannot go back: the world has changed too much. Unfortunately, we are also unlikely to go forward - say, to a more responsive system of proportional representation - as long as power rests in the hands of the beneficiaries of the first- past-the post system. In his view the most baneful recent developments have been the erosion of local in favour of central government, and the delegation of immense governmental functions to unelected bodies - the creeping quango coup d'etat. He laments the destruction of parliament's effective role (especially in interrogating the rhetoric of "ministerial accountability") which has been accompanied by loud harping on the supposed "sovereignty of parliament". On this view, the important thing about a democratic system is not its institutions but public morale: do people feel that it is responsive to their problems? If not, what can be done - and who can do it?It is not hard to find evidence that British public morale is declining, even threatening the collapse of the civic culture, and Marr produces plenty of it. The case for democracy still needs to be made.In the abstract, there are both positive and negative arguments for it. Liberals thought it would tap a fund of public talent that would deepen as education increased.

Fewer people hold to that belief in the age of the Murdoch press and the TV soundbite, when the sophistication of public discussion has gone into reverse. The negative argument is that democracy, whatever its inconveniences, is uniquely robust because of its capacity to accommodate dissent. It was this resilience which led to the (possibly premature) rejoicing about the final triumph of liberal democracy in 1989. For all our haughty western disapproval of Asian ideas like "guided democracy", that has been very much the spirit and the practice of our own system. Many people will agree with him that it is not working, but they will not know when or why it ever did. He rightly says that democracy as he understands it - incorporating universal suffrage - is a recent set-up, and indeed, a strong case can be made that the British establishment has always been underwhelmed by the concept.