Elections, riots and distrust: what’s the state of democracy?

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2024 on Saturday 19 October at Church House, Westminster.

ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION

Despite boasts that democracy was the winner in the recent UK election, with a peaceful transition of one party in government to another, democratic cohesion feels on shaky ground. Within a month of Labour taking power, violence on the streets – and a more general feeling of alienation from those in power – suggest the ballot box is no longer considered the legitimate last word, and many seem convinced their concerns are not taken seriously. ‘They are all the same’ and ‘What’s the point in voting?’ are constant refrains. The low turnout suggests such sentiments are deeply felt.

This sense of disenfranchisement is not helped by the distorted outcome for those who did turn out to place their X on the ballot paper. Despite Labour’s landslide victory, some ask if this was Britain’s least-representative General Election of the modern democratic era. Labour’s 411 seats – 63 per cent of those in the Commons and one of the largest majorities (172) in postwar history – were won with just 34 per cent of the vote and just 20 per cent of the potential electorate. The principle of ‘one person, one vote’ is further confounded by the fact that to elect a Reform MP, it took 820,000 votes, but to elect a Labour MP took just 23,000.

Yet despite receiving the lowest vote share that has ever led to a majority, the Labour government has shown little humility. For example, in response to the recent riots, critics complain that Starmer and his ministers have exhibited imperious and tone-deaf indifference to what might be driving social discontent and civil unrest. Instead, the government has used authoritarian measures to silence and censor popular concerns about mass immigration, Islamism and two-tier policing.

Beyond the usual, if reasonable, complaints of an unfair first-past-the-post voting system, there seems to be a more profound disillusion with democracy. Losers’ consent has become ambivalent, whether the attempts at overturning the 2016 Brexit vote or Donald Trump supporters’ refusal to accept his loss to Biden. The turmoil in France was created by similar attempts to block the popular will. President Emmanuel Macron’s snap legislative elections seemed driven by a desire to thwart the success of Marine Le Pen’s right-populist National Rally (RN), while the disparate ‘coalition of coalitions’ that followed was formed specifically to ensure that the RN – regardless of voters’ wishes – could not form a government.

More broadly, democratic accountability is becoming increasingly ring-fenced away from the electorate as decision-making is outsourced to unelected quangos and law courts and reined in by transnational bodies and treaties. Such encroachments are mirrored in extra-parliamentary activity that sees democracy as a barrier to getting its way. Pro-Gaza activists took to the streets during the UK election to menace and intimidate any candidates who did not denounce Israel as guilty of genocide. Just Stop Oil disruptions are justified because the electorate refuses to listen to their claims of impending climate catastrophe. Some argue the riots were an inevitable reaction to democratic failure on, for example, dealing with the small-boats crisis.

Does this pincer movement of top-down disdain for the demos and bottom-up populist and activist disenchantment with elected politicians seriously threaten democracy per se? How best can we restate the case for the radicalism of democracy and the ideal that all citizens must have the equal right to determine the affairs of the nation, that everyone’s views – from banker to builder, from corporate CEO to care worker – should be heard and responded to?

SPEAKERS
Professor Frank Furedi
sociologist and social commentator; executive director, MCC Brussels

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet
columnist and commentator for Telegraph, UnHerd, GB News, BFMTV (Paris)

Josh Simons
Labour MP for Makerfield; former director, Labour Together; author, Algorithms for the People: Democracy in the age of AI

Baroness Stowell
chair, Communications & Digital Select Committee

Luke Tryl
executive director, More in Common UK; writer and commentator; former political special advisor

CHAIR
Claire Fox
director, Academy of Ideas; independent peer, House of Lords; author, I STILL Find That Offensive!