Democracy House Magazine
It is now fifteen years or so since I first, as Leader of the Lib Dems, started to warn that there was a crisis coming in our democracy. The mismatch between the way people live their modern lives and the old unchanged way by which we are governed grows wider and wider. In our personal lives we have choice and control; the internet offers us a freedom individuals have never had before; to range the world for information; to choose our friends without the constraints of geography or convention; to communicate our views not just from place to place but person to person, irrespective of their rank importance or position. The market tells us, from supermarket, to bank, to service industry, that we are king; that consumer choice is the rule which runs the world. But democratic politics remains distant, deaf, arrogant, unresponsive and resistant to choice beyond a choice of three once every four or five years. The result is that, we suddenly – frighteningly – find that increasingly it is not Governments in charge, but the faceless, unpredictable, irresistible surges of face-book opinion; that our establishments of democratic power are universally distrusted and, in many cases, hated. Nor is this just a phenomenon of the Arab street – it is found on ours too, as the Student riots of last year and the London riots of this should remind us. “Turning and turning on the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer” as W.B.Yeats put it.
There are those who, admitting the need for change, propose “put our house in order” by providing a Downing Street facility for electronic petitions or providing more transparency in our system of Members expenses.
Necessary, but not sufficient. The gap between Government and governed; between politics and people is now too deep for small measures.
For the last two, maybe three decades our political challenges have been the challenges of contentment. The issue has been how to distribute the ever larger fruits of ever expanding economic well-being. The politics of conviction took second place behind the value-free politics of managerialism. How we distributed the goodies was more important than what we believed in. But now, as the game becomes not how to distribute. not the fruits of growth, but the pain of retrenchment values and belief are about to come centre stage again. And, given the vacuum the conventional Parties have left in this space, the danger is that the first ideas which begin to take root here will be the ugly ones. You can see it happening already. If we will not return to a democracy built around the clash of great ideas, then others, outside St Paul’s and elsewhere, are going to do it for us
Democracies depend on an effective connection between Government and governed – and ours has been shattered. Unless we can radically reshape the space in which we conduct our democratic politics, then I fear there is worse to come.
There has to be a radical re-settlement of power within our constitution. The old settlement of Bagehot and Dicey will no longer do. The key will be to emulate the spirit of our age by placing power closer to people; by creating – or maybe recreating – effective intermediary institutions between the citizen and the State and having the courage to invest them with real power. Westminster should do far less – maybe then it would do things better. We are a national Parliament; let us then concentrate on those things that are genuinely national in nature; defence; foreign policy; macro-economics; the instruments of justice; a framework of national rights and entitlements which must be available to every citizen. But how those entitlements are delivered, especially in those services which touch on the welfare of the citizen, such as health, education and welfare ought increasingly to be decided by the citizen at a point much closer to where they live than a distant and un-listening Government hundreds away in London.
Many say democracy is our most treasured institution. They are probably right. But in so many advanced Western countries, Britain included, democracy has grown old, tired, decrepit, widely disregarded and, in the eyes of many even increasingly corrupted. The choice is between real reform or continuing decay.
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