Democracy in action?
Three visits to the polling station in as many months prompt the question: how effective is democracy?
On my way home from from work this evening, I called into my local polling station for the third time since February, and I fully expect to make a fourth visit before the end of the year, once Rishi Sunak decides to thrown in the towel and call a much-needed general election. Four opportunities to vote in a single year suggests a democracy in fine fettle. Or does it?
To answer that question we need to ask two more: what do we understand by democracy and how do we know if it’s working as it should?
We tend to use the term liberal democracy to describe the kind of society most of us in the ‘west’ call home. As well as Britain, liberal democracies include the United States, France, Italy, Canada, New Zealand, Japan and Brazil among other nations. Russia, China, Cuba and Saudi Arabia are examples of countries that are not liberal democracies, while countries like India and South Africa aspire to be liberal democracies but don’t make the grade, not yet anyway.
Being a liberal democracy is not just about holding elections periodically. Other conditions need to be in place before a country can legitimately claim to be one. These include:
Regular free and fair elections
The effective rule of law
A genuinely free press
Unimpeded freedom of expression and association
The unfettered right to protest
You’ll notice that I’ve added qualifying adjectives to each condition, italicised for clarity.
Even in the more mature democracies, elections are not always completely free and fair: In Britain, for example, compulsory voter ID was introduced in 2022, a move likely to reduce turnout among the already marginalised and economically disenfranchised. And for decades, electoral outcomes have been strongly influenced by the media, especially newspapers whose editorial line leans heavily to the right. When most voters have neither the time nor the inclination to engage deeply with the issues of the day, Daily Mail headlines supporting Conservative policies are always going to take votes away from Labour and the Liberal-Democrats, regardless of their veracity. Can Britain call itself a genuine democracy under these circumstances?
Voter ID is clearly a ploy by the governing party to take votes from the opposition. There has never been a serious problem with electoral fraud here in Britain, so why enact legislation to address an issue that doesn’t exist?
The fact that much of the press sides with the governing party is not the same as having a state-controlled media, but when so many news outlets identify so strongly with the politics of one party - and when they share almost identical interests - the process of democracy is inevitably distorted. Clearly, elections in the UK remain far more free and fair than those in Russia, China or Rwanda, but still, they are not perfect.
In respect of democratic processes, the rule of law needs to be effective to at least ensure that:
elections can be held safely and without voters being intimidated, and
politicians are held accountable for their behaviour in office and when campaigning for election.
Britain, along with most European countries, is thankfully free of voter intimidation, but of late, the rule of law has proved less than effective in holding politicians to account. Misleading parliament is a serious offence which, if not remedied, can constitute contempt of parliament. But the last time anyone was imprisoned for contempt of parliament was 1880, and there is no longer a statutory mechanism for punishing such behaviour.
For the rule of law to be effective, it has to apply to everyone equally. Ordinary citizens can be imprisoned for contempt of court, even for relatively minor infractions, yet Prime Ministers and other members of the government can get away with lying to parliament, and by extension the entire country. This obviously has implications for the quality of democracy. Many people are unable to distinguish truth from lies in a political context. We have already seen major decisions being made on the basis of falsehoods: the promise of an extra £350 million a week for the NHS post-Brexit is a perfect example of politicians, in cahoots with the media, distorting the democratic process for their own ends.
Parliamentary standards in Britain have taken a massive hit over the last decade, which helps explain why Britain is languishing in 18th place on the 2024 V-Dem Institute Democracy Index (see below).
Britain does better, I think, in terms of freedom and expression and association, and on the right to protest, which is rarely impeded before mid-afternoon, when things often start kicking off and the police feel obliged to intervene. That said, the provisions of the 2023 Public Order Act do presage the potential curtailing of the unimpeded right to protest. This legislation needs urgently to be repealed by the next government.
Nonetheless, the existence of these freedoms doesn’t provide much in the way of political traction for those of us who want to change things. I am old enough to remember the protests against the poll tax, which were ultimately successful in removing Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister. But when over a million people marched against Britain’s involvement in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, it made no difference whatsoever. And today, well-attended weekly demonstrations against Israeli actions in Gaza have no impact on government policy, nor opposition tactics.
The Gothenberg based V-Dem Institute, a think tank that monitors the rate of democratisation across the world, divides countries in to four systems of governance:
Closed autocracy
Electoral autocracy
Electoral democracy
Liberal democracy
each of which is defined in this graphic (click to enlarge):
On the basis of the above, perhaps my earlier classification of Britain, the United States and others as liberal democracies is too generous. Most of the countries that parade their democratic credentials are in fact only electoral democracies. Although that’s still way better than being an autocracy, electoral or closed.
Explanations for the recent successes of populist politicians are now starting to focus on alleged failures of liberal democracy. As I have written elsewhere, these arguments are justified, but they usually stop short of identifying the nature of these failures, which are principally bound up in economic failings. Liberal democracies have, almost universally, embraced an economic system that favours the interests of a small minority. A system of governance that boasts about giving every citizen a say in how the country is run, but appears intentionally to exclude open debate about the economy, is hardly democratic. We get to cast our vote, sure, but none of the options offer real change. No established party has the honesty to admit that the current economic order (let’s follow Joseph Stiglitz and call it ‘market fundamentalism’) makes it impossible to create a more inclusive society. We place our X on a ballot paper that, in economic terms, offers only slightly different flavours of the same dish.
This being the case, I’m not sure even V-Dem’s definition of liberal democracy cuts the mustard. If the democratic process delivers economic outcomes which are undemocratic: outcomes that routinely favour minority wealth and privilege and mitigate against improving economic security for the precarious majority, then it looks very much like a system designed to pull the wool over the eyes of those who struggle, or at the very least, an exercise in saying: ‘well look, you have the right to vote, if nothing really changes, then perhaps that’s because this is the best we can do’.
As many of us know, the current economic order is not the only flavour available. But liberal democracy, of itself, does not provide any assistance in getting some alternatives onto the menu.
I like to think of liberal (or electoral) democracy as a stepping stone towards a form of democracy that puts economic justice at it’s heart. So it’s worrying to see the extent to which V-Dem’s research shows the world heading in the other direction: Between 2003 and 2023, the number of countries moving towards greater democracy dropped from 35 to 18, while the number of countries heading back towards autocracy rose from 11 to 42. As a consequence, the percentage of the world’s people living under autocratic regimes rose from 50 per cent to 71 per cent.
This is not good news. It’s a horrible irony that more countries are turning to ‘populist’ autocracy precisely because as liberal democracies, they neglected the one thing they needed to preserve in order to remain democracies: the promise of improved economic security for the majority of their citizens. There is still time to remedy this oversight, but we need to hurry up if we are to avoid more countries turning their back on democracy.
Which brings me back to my four visits to the polling station this year. How do each of these acts of democratic participation stack up against the criteria of a properly functioning liberal democracy? Do they suggest that democracy in Britain in is rude health and heading firmly in a direction in which the electorate has some say in the future direction of the economy, or do they simply indicate more of the same?
On Thursday 15th February I voted in my first ever local referendum. This was conducted by Greenwich and Lewisham councils under neighbourhood planning legislation designed to
gives communities direct power to develop a shared vision for their neighbourhood and shape the development and growth of their local area.
Over several years, a group of highly motivated people in Lee, the part of London where I live, established a neighbourhood forum, consulted widely across the designated forum area which straddles two boroughs, and drew up a neighbourhood plan which, if adopted, would oblige the two councils to take into account the wishes of local people as indicated in the plan, when making decisions on planning applications. The plan was then subject to formal inspection before its adoption was put to a vote in a referendum of all residents living within the forum area. On the eve of the election, with very little in the way of resources, the organisers had no idea what kind of turn out to expect. When the results were announced, they were delighted to have achieved a turn out of 15 per cent, with 87 per cent voting in favour of adoption.
In many ways, this is a perfect example of democracy in action. But it took a huge amount of unpaid work over many years by a large number of people to make it happen. And in one sense, it should not have been necessary. The people of Greenwich and Lewisham elect local councillors to represent their interests. There is a widespread feeling (and not just in south-east London) that the planning process leans heavily in favour of the interests of developers and against the wishes of local people. The Lee Neighbourhood Plan should ensure more balance when the councils make decisions in the future, undoubtedly a good thing.
I could add that perhaps it is disappointing that only 15 per cent of those who could have taken part in the referendum did so, except that ....
On Thursday 7th March I wondered up the road to the community centre to vote in a by-election to elect a new Mayor of Lewisham. The by-election was a result of the resignation of the incumbent, Damien Egan, who had hot-footed it to Bristol to fight a parliamentary by-election in the seat vacated by Chris Skidmore, the principled Conservative who’d resigned over his party’s hypocrisy on environmental issues. Egan duly won the seat for Labour, and back in Lewisham was replaced as mayor by his deputy, Brenda Dacres, who won with 51.5 per cent of the vote on a turn out of a measly 20.7 per cent.
If Lee Forum can mobilise a turn out of 15 per cent with no resources and no experience of campaigning, then the turnout on 7th March, at the end of a campaign funded by public money, and with considerable local (and even some national) press coverage, then the by-election turn out was truly abysmal. It suggests either that most people don’t care about local politics, or they don’t think their vote matters. And they may have a point: I have no gripe with Brenda Dacres, a lifelong resident of the borough who became the first black woman to win office as a directly elected mayor anywhere in the country. But I didn’t vote for her because Lewisham is a one party borough: the Labour party holds every single one of the 54 seats on the council. Does this suggest a properly functioning democracy?
And today, Thursday 2nd May, I voted once again, in the election for Mayor of London, and for representatives on the Greater London Authority. In 2022, the government changed the voting system for mayor, scrapping the supplementary vote and returning to first past the post, a system generally agreed to deliver less representative outcomes; another legislative ploy by a government desperate to take back the capital. And it might have worked had the Tories been able to come up with a half-credible candidate to take on the incumbent Sadiq Khan, today running for a third term. But as Dave Hill reminds us in this excellent piece, Susan Hall is possibly the poorest candidate ever to run for senior office in Britain.
Looking forward: Sometime in October, I reckon, I will make my fourth and final pilgrimage of the year to the rickety plywood booth to cast my vote in the big one: a general election which now seems guaranteed to return a damning verdict on 14 years of Conservative rule and put Keir Starmer in Downing Street with a large majority. Once again, I will vote primarily for the reason that if we stop voting when offered the chance, we’ll soon stop being offered the chance.
And as things stand, I shall be voting Labour, because Starmer-led government offers the best chance of laying the foundations for the transformational change required to deal effectively with the many challenges facing Britain (and the world) today. I’m not expecting Starmer and co. to deliver that change, but if they did, well that would indeed be a very good day for democracy.