Democracy in the United Kingdom isn’t working well. People have drifted, disillusioned and increasingly mistrustful, away from the rights and responsibilities of civic participation. In doing so, the public have become markedly dissatisfied, disaffected and distant from power.
Despite the government’s much trumpeted localist agenda, over the past dozen years power and control have become increasingly concentrated in Westminster generally and in the government and Prime Minister’s Office specifically. Local authorities and public services, long centralised and much constrained, suffered further indignity with remaining local decision-taking and variation suppressed through targets, statutory codes of practice and compliance-based auditing.
And, despite the government’s putative commitment to electoral reform, abuses of this power and control continue with virtual immunity to electoral redress. It has taken the broadly opposed war in Iraq and the revelation of systematic corruption in the House of Commons to shift the public mood from apathy to anger. However, the public have found little effective outlet through which to channel this discontent and to force democratic accountability.
No surprise then that satisfaction with the political system has been rapidly declining. The proportion of people who are very or fairly satisfied with the way Parliament works has dropped from 34% in 1995 to 20% today, while over the same period the proportion who are very or fairly dissatisfied has grown from 31% to 66%.1
It goes almost without saying that the public’s trust in politics today, both in political institutions and politicians themselves, is at an all-time low. Only 13% of people trust politicians, down 8 percentage points year-on-year following 2009’s revelation of widespread exploitation of the expenses system by MPs.2This low level of trust places the political class at the bottom of the professions in the public regard.
However, attempts to restore the public’s trust in Parliament is to get things backwards. The problem of democratic reform stems from a political class unwilling to trust the electorate, as well as its local representatives, to participate meaningfully or differently in decision-making.
Voting continues to constitute the sole form of engagement with the political system by the vast majority of citizens. Looking at other types of political expression over the past year, only 17% of people have presented their views to a local councillor or MP, only 6% have written a letter to an editor and only 1% have stood for public office.3 Only 3% have donated money or paid a membership fee to a political party in the past year.4 Ordinary people no longer see themselves as able to make effective and meaningful contributions towards the local or national interest. Only 32% agree with the statement: ‘When people like me get involved in politics, they really can change the way that the country is run.’5
The civic middle in British public life – the self-organised associations such as unions, churches and activist organisations – has largely disappeared over the past thirty years, as fewer and fewer people join associative organisations, other than surrogate vertical ones, or sterile groups focussed around narrow obsessions. Yet not only has the civic middle historically acted as a balancing force between the public and the political, it has in the past provided alternative mechanisms for political participation.
The decline in varied and more involved forms of political participation is a trend which anyone concerned with having a robust and active civil society must seek to understand and reverse. Doing so will require a new civic culture of political association and participation, which will need to be matched (if not facilitated) by radical new forms of politics: devolving power, budgets and decisions to the lowest level possible; changing the architecture of institutions to encourage amateur involvement; extending indirect political participation by mechanisms such as easing and localising the selection and de-selection of candidates, and extending direct participation where constructive; facilitating and empowering self-organising associations in civil society; tapping into new technologies in order to inform the public, build networks and nudge participation.
Already the growing disaffection with politics has seen marginal and extremist parties begin to capture political ground, as people turn away from the mainstream of politics, or politics altogether. The most recent European parliamentary elections, which followed closely on the heels of the expenses scandal, saw a dire turnout in England (34.7%) and the election of two BNP candidates to Brussels.
While the insensitivity of Westminster’s institutional structures to the public may ensure a certain continuity and shield against these more extreme forms of populism, this numbness has begun to spread from the political sphere right across society. Voter turnout has declined steadily over the past two decades, as even the cursory act of voting has been too much for the increasingly detached and bored citizen.
Those who do participate in elections often feel that their vote counts for very little – or, for a lucky few, a disproportionate amount. As it stands, 41% of people feel that they have little influence over local decision-making and a further 32% feel that they have no influence at all. Similarly, when it comes to national politics, 44% of people feel they have little influence over decision-making and a further 41% feel that they have no influence whatsoever.6
We have a fractured and disassociative citizenry that exercises little or no local power. In consequence it distrusts and repudiates national politics. So a renewal of the latter requires a revival of the former.
Westminster works on a first-past-the-post system, where each MP is the single representative for a constituency. The thinning numbers of the public still looking to affect change through the ballot box are confronted with a system which often breeds further dissatisfaction, as well as complacency and even corruption in many of the elected officials that it fails to hold to account.
In the most recent general election in 2005, despite the issue of the Iraq War and the introduction of postal voting, only 61% of the electorate voted – a lower national turnout than in any of the fifteen other original EU member states. This was in fact a slight gain on 2001, which saw a historical low of 59% of the eligible public vote.7 To give some context, modern voting levels peaked in 1950 at 83.9% and remained in the high 70s until dropping to 71.5% in 1997.8
Despite the slight increase in the proportion of the public voting in 2005, the proportion of the vote that Labour captured was 5 percentage points lower than in 2001, dropping to only 35.2% of the total vote.9This amounts to only 21.6% of eligible voters nationally supporting the party that went on to form the government. Although it took such a small proportion of the vote, Labour retained a 66-seat majority – capturing 55% of the total seats. This disparity between vote proportion and seat proportion has never been wider, leading the Electoral Reform Society to dub the 2005 general election ‘the worst election ever’.10
The election was characterised by some genuinely scandalous deficiencies. In three constituencies, MPs were elected with less than 20% of their local electorate supporting them: George Galloway (Respect), Roger Godsiff (Labour) and Ann McKechin (Labour).11For the first time ever, fewer than 35% of MPs were elected by majorities of the electors in their own constituencies.12 This historical anomaly represents not so much a fluke outcome as a honing of strategic campaigning, where political focus and resources shift to an increasingly limited number of ‘swing voters’ in marginal seats. So-called safe seats, where one candidate is highly unlikely to be defeated, are left effectively uncontested by all parties – weak candidates and few resources are put into contesting them. In the last election, the major parties were said to be concentrating predominantly on a field of some 800,000 voters who were not firmly resolved in favour of any particular party and happened to live in a marginal constituency.13
Besides the general democratic deficit that this strategic focus on an extremely limited subsection of the electorate engenders (the undecided 800,000 amounting to less than 2% of the eligible voting public), it also creates many related negative side-effects. Undecided voters are by no means a representative sample of the wider population. Furthermore, it has been widely noted that support for more extreme parties (such as the BNP) has grown precisely where the mainstream parties consider their vote safe and thus disengage from the electorate, diverting their resources to other fronts.
The problem of safe seats is neither a small nor a recent one: shockingly, half of all seats have not changed hands since 1970, and 29% have remained with the same party since 1945. This has also had a serious impact on voter turnout in these areas – in 2005, an average of 51.4% of people came out to vote in safe constituencies, whereas an average of 68.6% of people came out to vote in contested seats.14
While it is more difficult to get an overall picture of democratic involvement in local authority elections, which vary significantly between regions, turnout generally has been significantly lower than national rates, and election results have not proven particularly representative. Taking the most recent local elections in London as an example, the average vote share of parties running councils was 43%, with only five councils being won with a majority of votes cast. Minority voting support, however, often translated to large majorities in seats – in Newham, for example, 43% of the vote allowed Labour to capture 90% of seats.15Conversely, in six boroughs, the party which received the most votes did not win the most seats.
The three major parties have made specific pledges to address voter disenfranchisement and democratic deficit. This is not least the case with Labour, whose pledge to instigate electoral reform in 1997 and 2001 was repeated in the 2005 manifesto, which promised the public a referendum on ‘the new electoral systems introduced for the devolved administrations, the European Parliament and the London Assembly’. Despite reneging on this proposal, Gordon Brown has recently called for a referendum on limited reform, in the form of the alternative vote system which would maintain the link between a constituency and its MP. The Liberal Democrats have called for the introduction of proportional representation through the single transferable vote system. While the Conservatives have usually stood out against electoral reform as a matter of principle, they have sought to increase the power of Parliament over the central authority of the executive branch, and have suggested instead a radical devolution of power to local authorities.
In the end we need to balance the need for a more representative voting system with an equal need for strong government and the possibility of decisive leadership, rather than endless coalition. The lesson from the USA is that the legacy of ‘checks and balances’ is in reality a recipe for the preservation of vested interests and a guarantee of a perpetual stasis that cannot even deliver healthcare for its own citizens. If all proportional representation delivers is a dislocation between the MPs and those who elect them, then this would not be a desirable outcome. On the other hand the current system is palpably unfair, because a very small group of individuals and constituencies decisively turn the outcome of an election. What system would mediate between the two extremes? One might suggest the alternative vote system which would use the same constituency boundaries as now, so preserving the link of direct local representation. However, within each constituency under this system a majoritarian rule operates: each candidate is elected according to an order of preference of the voters. Whereas at present few candidates gain 50% of votes in the poll, in the alternative vote system, second and third preferences (the voter ranks candidates on the ballot paper) are also counted if in the first instance no candidate gets 50%. The strength of this system is that all MPs would have a solid support from the majority of their constituents, while the local link would be preserved. In addition the principle of first-past-the-post is sustained, thereby obviating the risk of perpetual compromise.
Yet however desirable, formal changes to the electoral system, or rebalancing the distribution of power within Parliament or between local and national politics, will not in itself be sufficient to re-invigorate political engagement. Parliamentary reform cannot be a substitute for political involvement: it must come as the result of renewed participation.
Quite how we achieve this is a matter of some debate. Clearly we need some measure of direct participation by voters in legislation. One measure we could adopt is the practice of indirect law creation which exists in some US states where a proposed measure is referred to the legislature after acquiring the requisite number of voters’ signatures. Additional direct involvement by voters could be petitions to trigger a debate in parliament or to derogate powers for such decisions to the relevant constituencies – where if referenda were permitted the measure would go through. We might call this a local derogative power that would allow genuine democratic variation under a universal legislature.
However, the recovery of democracy is not just to do with Westminster. It also needs to be a bottom-up process. Governing authority should be derogated from the local council to areas, towns or even streets. This power could be two-fold: a power of budgetary devolution, whereby localities were able to appropriate for themselves the budget allocated to them in order to put it to better use, and the election of ‘micro-mayors’ who would have legislative ‘pushup’ and budgetary authority in that area.
There are powerful international examples of members of the general public and political class working within existing systems to innovate the public–political relationship. Most recently, the Obama presidential campaign in the US tapped into new technology in order to engage the public, using social networking platforms and peer-to-peer channels to build a broad and interconnected community of supporters. This garnered more than just votes. It facilitated the transmission of ideas in both directions and mobilised supporters to become directly involved in organised campaign work. This was especially effective at engaging young people in the political process.
A similar potential for political involvement exists in the British public. Tapping it will require innovative and inspirational as much as technical measures, and the crucial test of any new system will be whether it fosters a citizenry that is active, involved and desirous of associative relationships.
1 Hansard Society, ‘Audit of Political Engagement 6’, Hansard Society, 2009.
2 Ipsos-MORI (Oct. 2009) ‘Trust in Professionals’. Available at: http://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/poll.aspx?oItemId=15&view=wide.
3Hansard Society, ‘Audit of Political Engagement 6’, p. 64.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., p. 28.
6 Hansard Society, ‘Audit of Political Engagement 6’, p. 66.
7 Electoral Reform Society, ‘The UK general election of 5 May 2005: Report and analysis’, ERS, 2005, p. 5.
8Lewis Baston & Ken Ritchie, ‘Turning out or turning off?’, ERS, 2004, p. 6.
9 Electoral Reform Society, ‘The UK general election of 5 May 2005’, p. 7.
10 Ibid., p. 3.
11 Ibid., p. 10.
12 Ibid.
13Tom Baldwin, ‘The hidden election: Parties spend millions on new techniques to target just 800,000 key voters’, The Times, 6 Apr. 2005.
14 Electoral Reform Society, ‘The UK general election of 5 May 2005’, p. 10.
15Electoral Reform Society, ‘The UK general election of 5 May 2005’, p. 16.