Labour’s win is a triumph but our democracy is broken. Here's how to fix it
Our representative system is no longer fit for purpose; we need to give power back to the people
(Image credit: Illustration by Stephen Kelly / Getty Images)
It’s over. It’s done. The Conservative party has gasped its last. And how fitting for its final death rattle to be narrated live on Channel 4 by bestselling romance novelist Nadine Dorries, a woman so committed to Method that she selflessly rendered it through the medium of her own nervous breakdown. By contrast, the new Labour dawn is a chance for British politics to reinvent itself as a serious business after more than a decade of what, if it had been a satirical drama, would have been binned after the first season due to the exhaustion of plausible storylines. In doing so, it’s also a vital opportunity to halt the erosion of public standards after a government in which democratic accountability was less sidelined than it was violently defenestrated into the Thames along with basic integrity, a few dozen fixed penalty notices, and the contents of London’s sewers.
Yet despite this undoubted victory for decency and good sense in the abstract, we are now faced with an uncomfortable truth: our elective system just handed untrammelled executive power to a party chosen by only 34% of voters. This is a truly sobering statistic for an ostensibly democratic nation. In the coming weeks, we will understandably hear many calls for changes to our voting system; the champions of proportional representation will fill the airwaves. But the change we need is not a tweaking around the edges. It is time for democracy to evolve more radically — and the answer can be found in a city in South America (by way of Switzerland).
We should also fix the sewers.
The problem with the current system
The system we live under in the UK is nominally one of representative democracy. So how exactly have we ended up with a government that represents only 34% of us?
The story is partly one of abysmal turnout. At 60% of registered voters, this election saw the second lowest since the 19th century (with the exception of 2001) with one Manchester constituency actually reporting a number below half. This means that after more than a decade of political clusterfuckery that resulted in waiting times for ambulances so long that if you suffer a heart attack it would likely be quicker to crawl to hospital yourself, only just over half of the adult population bothered to vote. When you consider that polling in 2023 revealed that only 9% of voters trust politicians to tell the truth – the lowest level in 40 years – perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised.
The second contributory factor is Britain’s unusual system of allocating seats in parliament based on a first past the post electoral system. In other words, we effectively disenfranchise large swathes of the population due to arbitrary lines drawn on a map – albeit quite fitting for a country that gave us such unproblematic lines as Radcliffe and Sykes-Picot.
The result is that 14m voters in the UK live in seats that before this election hadn’t changed hands in almost a century. In East Devon, it’s been 189 years since the seat last left Conservative hands. This means that a local family who do not vote Conservative would have to travel back as many as 8 generations to find a relative whose vote actually helped to elect their MP. If they are working class then this predates universal suffrage, meaning their family had never before in its history had an electoral voice. As political commentator Ian Dunt accurately points out, “the whole idea that the distribution of the vote is more important than its quantity is itself utterly deranged. Democracy was not won by people campaigning for the franchise as long as it was sensibly distributed in space. They campaigned for one-[person]-one-vote, with an expectation that the ensuing government would accurately reflect that vote. Their struggle is betrayed by the system we use now.”
Why proportional representation is not the answer
The most obvious alternative to first past the post – and the one Dunt champions – is a system of proportional representation (PR). Under PR, constituencies would be represented by multiple MPs allocated in accordance with the number of votes for each party. PR in action tends to produce not majority governments able to enforce their will on a population of whom most voted against them, but coalitions formed of multiple parties. Coalition government has become a bit of a dirty word in the UK since 2010, but it’s important to remember firstly that not every coalition government has to include Nick Clegg, and secondly that they allow for a greater plurality of views to be represented. PR also opens the door to smaller parties like the Greens as people are no longer pressured to pick only between the largest two.
Nonetheless, PR has not solved Europe’s problems; indeed levels of trust in political institutions declined significantly on the continent over the last decade. Additionally, for every new Green MP that PR elects, you’re likely to also see seats go to the types of candidate who want to Make Britain Great Again or say, those who boast that they can strangle a badger with their bare hands. In the latest UK election, PR would have produced 94 seats for Reform, with Labour down from 411 to 236. Some progressive proponents of PR reasonably argue that we might not like this but that’s what democracy means; we can’t just support it when it aligns with our own views. As it happens, we’re likely to see some interesting contortions from any previous PR champions who particularly benefited this election from FPTP incentivising tactical voting to their advantage. Indeed, the Lib Dem reverse ferret on voting reform will likely achieve speeds of 0-60 faster than Ed Davey down a log flume (or Nick Clegg on tuition fees).
But the problem with the argument for PR even in the face of rising extremism is that it assumes that people’s choice of party aligns with their actual policy concerns. When you drill down into what voters really care about (and are told to blame immigration for) the top issues are the housing crisis, the NHS, and crime. (They’re also pretty pissed off about the shit in the rivers). Therefore, when middle-class progressives disdainfully refer to Reform voters as idiots who can’t be trusted to make “sensible” political decisions, they have the issue entirely back to front. The problem is not the people – the problem is outsourcing political decision-making to often incompetent representatives with limited accountability. In doing so, we then open the door to charismatic figures peddling dangerous misinformation about who’s really responsible for the country’s woes.
Ultimately, we’ve got ourselves in this position because, over the last 100 years, we’ve come to think of representative politics as the only practical implementation of democracy possible. In other words, having assumed that the roll out of universal suffrage meant that we achieved the pinnacle of political progression back in 1928, we’ve given up revising the system. (If we similarly ceased all scientific progression in 1928 then we’d be living in quite a different world). A century on, universal suffrage feels a tad less meaningful when so few turn out to actually use their vote. But people do care about political issues; what they lack is true democracy in which to exercise their voice.
Getting warmer…
Elsewhere in the world, there has long been the realisation that everyday people are more than capable of making wise decisions about policy. In Switzerland, a system of direct democracy means that any citizen who objects to a piece of legislation can force a referendum on the topic, provided they obtain 50,000 signatures. Popular initiatives can also propose new changes to the constitution and in recent years this has seen the Swiss vote to improve working conditions for nurses as a result of the Covid pandemic (rather than merely clapping them) and even to curb bankers’ bonuses and golden handshakes – those being payouts for early retirement rather than that thing Trump may or may not have done in a Moscow hotel room. The result is a country that scores highest in the world for democratic satisfaction.
For those immediately scoffing at the bureaucratic absurdity of allowing people to vote on any law they choose to, it’s worth pointing out that this equates to only about 5 national referenda per year. It’s also important to note that at the time of writing, Switzerland has not yet voted for all public fountains to run with wine, it hasn’t requisitioned Credit Suisse funds to scrawl “Fuck the EU” across the Matterhorn, and it certainly hasn’t legislated for the deportation of refugees to a central African state with genocidal tendencies. (They should consider the wine thing).
But Switzerland is not entirely immune to the charms of the far right, and one problem with referenda is that they run the risk of asking non-experts to solve complex questions with minimal knowledge, or worse, after extended campaigns of weaponised misinformation. While the Swiss go some way to addressing this by sending out detailed information packs explaining every law in full, democracy works best when solutions are discussed in public forums. Ideally, these involve the combination of expert knowledge with lived experiences in an active process of consensus-building.
The proof of the effectiveness of this form of deliberative democracy can be found in some smaller scale initiatives across Europe. The last decade has seen gathering interest in the use of Citizens’ Assemblies, a form of decision-making body often employed to solve particularly thorny political questions. Members of the public are selected at random to participate and then spend time collectively learning about and discussing an issue in depth, with scientific expertise and relevant data to help guide their deliberations. When approached in this way, consensus tends to emerge on even the most divisive of issues as participants gain a realistic understanding of the challenges and potential solutions, allowing the Assembly to produce recommendations for government.
While the nominally sane residents of one London commuter town recently burned an effigy of the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan on a bonfire in rage-protest at the introduction of an Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) in the capital – aimed at reducing deaths from pollution – in Ireland, a Citizens’ Assembly on climate change concluded with 80% in favour of higher taxes on carbon-heavy activities, and 92% advocating for prioritising spending on public transport over the development of new roads. Much as it is indeed everyone’s right to die from lung cancer if they so choose, only one of these approaches feels like a useful expression of political agency.
A democracy for the future
But participatory approaches to governance can (and should) go far beyond single issue policy recommendations, and they should be open to all. One pertinent example is the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. Despite its location within a country not otherwise an exemplar for democratic success, the city has transformed its fortunes over the last 30 years through a system of participatory budgeting. They’re so proud of it that their municipal cars can be found emblazoned with the slogan “Porto Alegre – the city where participation makes democracy”. (While slogans on the side of publicly funded vehicles have understandably garnered a slightly bad rep in the UK in recent years, this one might have something in it).
In Porto Alegre, neighbourhood committees meet regularly to discuss issues like schools, road-building, healthcare, and leisure facilities, and the conclusions are fed up to a city-wide assembly that allocates the budget according to the priorities of the people. In the first ten years, fifty schools were built, higher education rates doubled, sanitation significantly improved, and funding particularly increased in areas of greater deprivation, as wealth began to be redistributed where it was needed most. On top of this, tax evasion dropped as people began to feel that they understood how and why their money was spent, and attendance at committee meetings shot up as everyday citizens realised they could make a difference.
The problem that Porto Alegro faces is that a participatory budget can only go so far when local funding is ultimately determined by the federal government and impacted by the economic and political stability of the country as a whole (you’ll recall that this is a city in Brazil). The new government in the UK therefore presents a particular opportunity for positive change. To fix our democratic deficit, it is participatory forms of governance that should form a model for the future.
Labour’s eleven Metro Mayors should be tasked with building out participatory budget committees in their local areas, following the Porto Alegre model. The process should be one of testing and learning, so that the system can evolve as we understand what works best, and with success metrics focused on political engagement and satisfaction (and obviously things like not tanking the economy). From these individual local initiatives, the long-term strategy should be to build out a national model for participation; we will still need elected representatives for the day-to-day task of governing, but the public should have the option to feed into political decision making. A hybrid of Swiss-style direct democracy combined with local participatory budgets feels like a sensible end goal, but rather than a pre-defined blueprint, we should take an experimental approach that adapts as we learn more.
Ultimately, the positive result of this month’s election papers over a loss of faith in the political system that not only spells danger for the future, it undeniably means that our democracy simply isn’t what it says on the tin. Rather than becoming complacent because the country is no longer run by a party that considers people like Chris Grayling and Nadine Dorries to be sane, competent stewards of state affairs, Labour should take this chance in power to give a large chunk of it back to the people. And clean up the rivers.