Flawed democracy needs fixing

Populism will reign if action is not taken to preserve true democratic values. British philosopher AC Grayling warns of a ‘ticking time bomb’.

Philosopher and author AC Grayling. Picture: James Croucher

AC Grayling has been banging on about the crisis in democracy for some time now but insists he’s an optimist when it comes to rescuing a system he warns is easy prey for populists.

“I don’t think that it would take all that much to get the major democracies of the world — like the UK, the US, Australia, India — I don’t think it would take much to get them right,” the British philosopher and commentator says in a phone interview from London.

“(It needs) a relatively modest adjustment, a recalibration of how we operate our democracy to make it genuinely representative.

“We need reform to the electoral system, especially to understanding how important it is that people should feel that their voices are heard, that government doesn’t exist to carry out the wishes of one party, that it’s under a constitutional constraint to act in the interests of everybody.”

He says MPs are supposed to assess policy and legislation on behalf of all the people, rejecting the notion that expecting governments to be above partisan politics, is naive. Indeed the idea that governments have to act for everyone, not just those who voted them in, is central to Grayling’s latest book, The Good State: On the Principles of Democracy. It’s a follow-up to his 2017 book, Democracy and Its Crisis, which laid out the problem. This one has been termed a “rescue guide to democracy” and has detailed suggestions about the structural and cultural changes needed to arrest the decline of the Westminster system.

Yes, Grayling, who is professor of philosophy and master of the New College of the Humanities and the author of more than 40 books, suggests we are fooling ourselves when we hold up Westminster as the poster child of democracy.

Instead he argues that there is a “ticking time bomb at the heart of our UK representative democracy and in more than 50 countries around the world” based on Westminster. Many are “near democracies” that need renovation.

(Australia, he concedes, is much better placed than Britain, given its codified Constitution, compulsory voting and preferential voting system.)

The populism of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson has helped drive Grayling to this point: he was an outspoken opponent of Brexit and tells Inquirer that Johnson’s massive majority means “the parliament is dead, it’s a zombie parliament … it’s just there to do the bidding of government”.

He says reducing the power imbalance between government and parliament is key to a functioning democracy in which politicians look after the interests of the whole society, not just those who voted them in.

The inevitable factionalism and partisan politics of any system leads to growing inequality and more people feeling marginalised.

“In the situation where we have governments based almost always on a minority of the electorate, it’s going to distance people from the process and create disaffection,” he says. “That’s very bad for the political process in a country and very bad for a country.”

The big flaw in Britain, he says, is the “first past the post” voting system, which leaves any voter who supports a losing candidate unrepresented.

He wants a “genuinely” proportional representation system that would “generate a parliament in which no single party has a majority over all other parties”.

As well, democracy would be helped by a written constitution, by lowering the voting age to 16 (“when you can join the army and fight in the war and get married and have sex”); and a serious approach to ensuring voters are not manipulated by wrong information such as via social media (an antidote to Plato’s claim that the “mob” is not sufficiently informed or expert to be trusted with democracy).

Grayling’s is an argument for fixing a flawed representative democracy, although he argues he is not against referendums or ­direct democracy options such as deliberative democracy, suggesting these can work in small, educated states such as the Scandinavian countries.

“The point of a representative is this is somebody who is sent to do a job of work,” he says. “The job of work of getting the facts, getting information, listening to discussion, listening to expertise, hashing things out with others and coming to a view.

“A referendum takes away the representative aspect of a democracy and puts power back into the hands of people who are asked a very simple yes-no question.

“(But) the people may not have enough facts, they may be basing things on how they feel rather than on sort of rational principles.

“So, a referendum is a subversion of representative democracy because it takes away the possibility for considered, mature, informed judgment, which is what a parliament and a government ought to be providing us with.”

Would a constitution have made a difference to the Brexit outcome? “If we had a constitution, we may very well not have had a referendum because the constitution could have said the duty lay with parliament to get the facts and come to an informed judgment about the European Union,” Grayling says.

“But if we did have a referendum under a codified constitution, the codified constitution would tell us what a referendum should be. Because, here’s the extraordinary fact: every referendum which has been held in the United Kingdom since the first referendum was held on Ireland (1973), every single referendum has been held on a different basis, a different franchise, a different ­requirement.

“Does it need a single majority or does it not? Is it the bare majority? Is it advisory? Is it binding? Each one has been different. But this is a cheat on the people because the people have no sort of settled idea of what a referendum really is.”

Grayling argues a written constitution must be seen as a document that belongs to the people, not governments or parliaments: “The people say what licence they give to their representatives and their governors to act on their behalf. The constitution is not (something) that politicians offer the people but what the people use to constrain government.”

What of the notion that democracies are inherently inefficient and that dictators achieve more? That idea works only if you believe societies are only interested in increasing wealth and economic success, he says.

“From that point of view, the Chinese situation is ideal because the Chinese government will always lay down the law on whatever is going to increase GDP and increase production.

“In China hardly anybody in that vast population is all that concerned really about politics and about having a voice and government. They are much more interested in economic success. And economic success comes from stability and predictability, and you get stability and predictability in a tyranny, in a way that you don’t in a democracy.”

As for the West, it’s not that people are fed up with democracy, it’s just that “they’re getting fed up with the fact that democracy is not being allowed to work, deliber­ately … Modi in India, Trump in the United States, Johnson in the UK, they’re all far-right populists and they’re using that as a way of disregarding whatever constitutional arrangements (there are).

“What we’ve got to do is we’ve got to stop them early. We’ve got to try to drag ourselves back to clear thinking about what democracy is meant to be.”

The Good State: On the Principles of Democracy by AC Grayling (Oneworld, $34.99) is out on Wednesday.