What happens next? Will Andy Burnham win the Makerfield byelection? Will Keir Starmer fight on? Will Wes Streeting run? After that, can Reform win the next general election? Is the Green bounce real? The politics-as-sports predictions rumble on. One newspaper editor texted me the other day asking who would be prime minister come Christmas, apparently because I was on his “clever list”. “Dunno” I said. “You’re off the list,” he replied.
My fear is that whoever is prime minister by the end of the year, a lot of attention will have been distracted from the underlying problem. Voters are not just giving up on this government, but on democracy itself. This weary, cold scepticism comes through in the polls, the focus groups, and it’s in the look in the electorate’s eyes. Politicians know it and it’s making the country ungovernable.
In all the analysis about why it’s so hard to govern, this key point is being missed: you can’t lead a country that has no faith in you. It’s like a toxic workplace that isn’t psychologically safe. “Culture eats strategy for lunch”, they say. You can’t do the difficult things that need to be done unless people trust you. You will fail.
This is the doom loop we are crippled by: people don’t trust the government, so the government can’t deliver, so trust is further eroded. And these cycles of failure are speeding up. The polls turn to ever more wildcard alternatives because really, could they be worse? Yes. This is what democratic backsliding looks like. It is a democratic emergency.
I don’t see anyone offering a political answer to this emergency beyond “we must deliver”, which, without legitimacy, will not suffice. The far right and the left avoid the hard conversations by offering simplistic, unworkable solutions. The centre gets lost in the detail. Tony Blair says strong leadership is demanded, but his reference points – big tech and powerful elites – miss the point. This is not about exerting more will on the population for their own good, it’s about listening more carefully to people and giving them a voice, to rebuild legitimacy and create a hope-loop.
My solution is different: we need more democracy, not less. Rather than abandoning democratic norms and following a trend that is unleashing across the world, we need whoever ends up running the country at the end of the year to work to upgrade democracy, and repair this broken relationship between the state, its institutions, and citizens. They need to win people back round to the whole notion of democracy. So what exactly does this look like?
Democracy needs a new operating system. Proportional representation and even Australian-style compulsory voting would help equalise everyone’s vote. But more rapidly, our everyday experience of democracy needs to change. People point to citizens assemblies – and they have merit on big stuck policy issues like assisted dying, social care funding, or the current work on digital ID – but there are now rich and diverse ways of involving people, using AI at scale, and by devolving power ever more radically to communities, to make people feel heard and responded to. This will speed up and de-risk decision-making rather than slow it down.
Democracy needs a new delivery system: our trust in the state is eroded in every microaggression experienced in public services that ignore you, then test you and then deny access. It’s an open conspiracy of service rationing designed to make it look at best like an administrative error; at worst, like it’s your fault. Blair’s “choice and competition” of the 00s, which collided with austerity after 2008, needs replacing with a new public service reform agenda based on respect, to prevent problems before they happen, and work in more human ways. That is where greater efficiency lies too.
Democracy needs new information systems: social media has, to toxic effect, fragmented the shared narratives that are needed for a citizenry to share basic facts and debate them. The supply chains of information that democracy relies on have become epistemically insecure. The BBC needs to be institutionally strengthened, and local news supported to fill the news deserts around the country that create open goals for misinformation and bad actors. Social media companies need new responsibilities to promote trusted and verified sources of information – the existing rules for broadcast could be extended for the digital age. Media literacy needs to be taken much more seriously.
Democracy needs a new deal between state, citizen and markets: the government has to take on the excesses of markets, and as we enter the technological disruption of AI, it has to ensure future growth is more equitable. Citizens need to play their part in that too. We can’t have it all, we may need to make sacrifices like paying more tax in the short term. But it can’t all be on us.
This deal demands honesty about the challenges and bravery about the change. You can’t do this without building trust simultaneously. This is the new deal to repair the broken relationship between state and citizen and upgrade democracy. It is the political project of our lifetimes.
The most consequential things in history happen too slowly for news cycles to record, too fast for academia to analyse. The decline of democracy is happening like that. The politics-as-sports commentary misses this bigger picture.
There is a dangerous moment in the emergency approaching, a point of no return. Democracy gets harder and harder to repair towards the end of political cycles, as the fight for political survival usurps concerns about democratic resilience. And it is so much easier to destroy than rebuild. We need political leadership to upgrade democracy now to meet this moment of real danger.
I might not be able to predict who will be prime minister at Christmas, but if they don’t prioritise fixing democracy while there’s still time, I’m not sure it really matters.
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Polly Curtis is chief executive of Demos. Her latest paper, The New Deal: How to repair the broken relationship between state and citizen, is published today
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