Is politics too important for politicians?

Unless you happen to live under a rock, you won’t fail to have noticed that the UK is currently being forced to endure yet another underwhelming Tory leadership election contest – the ruling party having defenestrated its leader and Prime Minister, it now falls to a small coterie of party members to select from a final two whittled down by MPs. Over in the States, meanwhile, the country is undergoing another spasm from its ongoing culture wars. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision to overrule Roe vs. Wade, the US midterms are partly shaping up to be a referendum on abortion access.

In all of this, publics on both sides of the Atlantic are forced to bow to their political masters – officials who, certainly in the UK system, largely managed to have ingratiated themselves with a labyrinthine party machine and convinced local members to back them at constituency level. A brief time inside the machinery of politics would quickly disabuse even the most starry-eyed would-be politician of any sense that modern politics is genuinely merit-based. Yet, these are individuals who hold peoples’ lives and livelihoods in their hands, as well as those of their children, spouses, friends and families. 

But generally, these are people who have neither the experience nor character to do the job for which they are tasked. Little wonder most eventually fall back upon unelected advisors and civil servants. We can see in autocracies like China what happens when too much power is concentrated in too small a group. We are witnessing it play out right now in the Zero Covid dystopia across Chinese cities, in the surveillance state which isn’t even allowing bank depositors in the country to access their money. We get a sense of it too with overweening government bureaucracies as well as the power of big tech and big finance, aided and abetted by their allies in government. We also saw it consistently during the government overreach of Covid. 

While in the West, people at least get some say over who comes to power (notwithstanding the least-bad-option choice for Tory leader, to be decided by around 0.3 per cent of the UK population), there is no contract in place with the public. Put simply, politicians can make promises they don’t have to honour and which citizens have no means to enforce. Yes, said politicians can be booted out at the next election but by then the damage has largely been done. In the UK, with Brexit, the decision of whether to actually stay in the EU had to go to the public a) because it was tearing the ruling Conservative Party apart, and b) because the decision ultimately had to be decided by the public so contentious had it become. In holding a referendum, the politicians were also able – like Pontius Pilate – to wash their hands of the whole affair. 

Perhaps today, with the ongoing culture wars it would make sense for more difficult decisions to be put back to the people. Data from the US on abortion access shows a country which is totally split, with massive inter-state and intra-state divides. A cultural chasm is also evident in the EU but the major conservative-liberal divide falls along a neat axis dividing progressive western Europe from conservative central and eastern Europe. Moreover, the EU is nowhere near as integrated politically as the US. In the EU’s case, partition is that much easier, while in America’s case, it is far more difficult.

To hold things together then, it may make increasing sense to throw social questions in particular back to the people: the Brexit solution. Is there a model? Well, the US already makes extensive use of referenda, especially in New England. The best national system for “direct democracy” however is probably Switzerland. In Switzerland, fifty thousand signatures are enough to insist parliament submits a proposed new law to a referendum. Popular initiatives can also be proposed with one hundred thousand signatures. 

The Swiss ensure referendum results are definitive, not open-ended. Signature-gathering is not an overnight task, mitigating flights of fancy and ideas on the fly. Meanwhile, the Swiss vote on legislation, not day-to-day government. Far from infringing minority rights – which would be crucial for diverse Western democracies – direct democracy helps the Swiss navigate internal affairs. A double majority – where an idea must win over a majority of voters and states – further protects minority rights. Popular initiatives must deal with one topic at a time and cannot infringe upon basic rights.  

Such a system may enable increasingly fractious Western democracies not only to navigate thorny social questions but to reveal how much these countries can exist in their current form. The voting system itself may also be up for discussion. Coming back to the UK, should Labour win the next election they will almost certainly do so with the help of the centre-left Liberal Democrats, and possibly the Scottish National Party (SNP). As a condition for coalition, the Lib Dems are almost certainly going to want a referendum on ditching first-past-the-post for proportional representation (PR). 

Today, data from YouGov, and Redfield and Wilton Strategies, suggests the public backs proportional representation. Such a move would lock the Conservatives (and Labour) out of majority government almost indefinitely, something Labour seems more accepting of given the electoral arithmetic. The system today does certainly lead to major anomalies. In 2019, for instance, the Tories won over 56 per cent of seats in parliament with under 44 per cent of votes. The Lib Dems, instead, got just 1.7 per cent of seats in parliament with 11.6 of votes. In 2015, Nigel Farage’s UKIP got 12.6 per of the vote but just 0.2 per cent of seats. The result is a gradual destruction of trust in politics and politicians, with resentment and anger growing, possibly even to the point of violence.

Introducing democratic changes to Western political systems may have the effect of giving people more of a voice, bringing thorny issues to the surface and enabling some resolution of culture war questions. The alternative appears to be more of what we have now – politicians making decisions which often appease very few, bolstered by systems no longer having the confidence of the public. Sadly, for most Western countries, they no longer possess the national cohesion and consensus they once had. If they are to coexist, they are going to have to develop systems which effectively manage the nasty and hostile political environments which are now developing. Ultimately, the alternative to coexistence is co-destruction, and that is precisely where we are heading.

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