It’s time for real change. That must start with Westminster.
Sarah Clarke, Unlock Democracy
From elation to sadness, trepidation to indifference, there will be mixed emotions for people across the UK. The 31st January marks the UK’s legal exit from the European Union after what much of the public has perceived as being a frustrating and fraught negotiation period.
This is one chapter closed, but the rest of the story - involving complex questions that cut to the core of the UK’s current democratic settlement - remains to be written. If Brexit is about something more profound than EU membership - about sovereignty, control, and giving more power to the people of the UK - as many of Brexit’s leading proponents staked as their driving motivation, then the moment for real change is only just beginning. And real change must start with Westminster.
A divided kingdom
The people of the UK were clearly divided over the UK’s membership of the EU. These divisions were multifaceted - they cut across educational backgrounds, towns and cities, nations and regions.
In leaving the EU, some of these divisions are likely to become more, not less pronounced. For one, Brexit will see both Northern Ireland and Scotland, as constituent parts of the UK, leave with the UK as a whole, despite the voting majority of their respective electorates wanting to remain EU members.
The process of leaving the EU has highlighted just how incomplete and unstable the current devolution settlement is. The UK’s creaking constitutional settlement has enabled the UK government in Westminster to unilaterally shape the terms of exit, with demands for inclusion from the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly largely falling on deaf ears. Northern Ireland was left voiceless for the majority of the negotiation period - despite the significant potential consequences of Brexit on communities in Northern Ireland - with Stormont suspended due to a breakdown of the power-sharing agreement.
An appetite for change
Despite these divisions - some simmering, some open wounds - there is one thing that does tie the people of the UK together. That is, a widespread dissatisfaction with the UK's political system, which is perceived as being rigged and in service of the rich and powerful. Edelman’s 2020 Trust Barometer laid out in stark terms how widespread distrust and disillusionment with the UK’s political system is - with three in five having lost faith in democracy, and two-thirds (66 per cent) believing that the political class is undermining trust in government.
If most of the public does not approve of the political system that rules over them - believing that politicians serve the interests of the rich instead of the public, and that they are powerless to affect change - then how can that system be said to be meaningfully democratic?
Critics of the EU and advocates of the UK’s exit characterised the arrangement - and the bureaucracy in Brussels in particular - as an opaque, distant, and unaccountable; a system that disempowered the electorate in the UK from having a real say over decisions that affected them.
Those critiques can be applied with similar force to the UK’s own archaic political institutions. Our ‘elective dictatorship’ in Westminster has unparalleled power. Highly overcentralised. For all that our system hails the principle of parliamentary sovereignty - which many leading Brexit campaigners desired to herald the return of - one thing that has become plain in the Brexit process is the limited and often ineffective role MPs can actually play in holding the government to real account.
Overhauling Westminster
Brexit has fired the starting gun on a constitutional overhaul of the UK. The referendum itself created a profound constitutional conflict between parliament and the voting public, challenging the foundational principle of the UK’s constitution - parliamentary sovereignty. Exiting the EU will result in multifaceted changes to the UK’s constitutional settlement, with wide-ranging ramifications for our rights, and standards that are in place to protect the public.
Now, the Conservative Government has set its sights on changing the UK’s constitutional settlement. Page 48 of the party’s manifesto elaborates on various reforms to UK democracy, most ominously plans for a Commission on Democracy, which promises to review the fundamental relationship between the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary.
If the past is anything to go by, when reform of the political system is the brainchild of the politicians and vested interests in Westminster, we likely to see a maintenance of the status quo - or worse, an erosion of hard-won democratic rights and freedoms. Indeed, the Conservatives promise to go ahead with the Boundary review - likely cutting 50 MPs - and introducing voter ID - likely disenfranchised some of the most marginalised people in the UK - will all see a shrinking of our democracy.
Democratic transformation
Brexit will not, by default, change any of the UK’s political institutions, or the norms that are driving profound dissatisfaction amongst the public with the status quo. Leaving the EU will not by default transform our politics into one in which the public, on the whole, feels better represented, more empowered, more in control over the decisions that affect their lives, their communities, and their futures.
Brexit has sparked a national, if fraught conversation, about the very nature of our democracy. Who has power, and who should have power? Our political system needs to change - and we know that it will change. With the Commission on Democracy set to launch in Spring 2020, the Johnson Government has made it clear that constitutional change in the UK is coming.
Democratic transformation is needed to combat critical levels of public disillusionment. But that change must start with overhauling the archaic and overcentralised Westminster political system that is the very cause of alienation and democratic erosion.
This is not a job for Westminster, it’s a job for us - for the public, and for civil society. If the terms of democratic change are left to the same vested interest in Westminster - the ecosystem of lobbyists, dodgy donors, and dark money interests - then change could mean the continued erosion of hard-won rights and a shrinking of democracy.
Real change could look like an inclusive, deliberative, and democratic process that reshapes our political institutions to make them fit to fight challenges like the climate crisis, automation, and rising economic inequality. Real change could be delivered through a citizens’ convention on UK democracy, that brings together the people of the UK, for the first time in our history, to decide together what political system we want - perhaps one with a fairer voting system, an elected senate instead of the House of Lords, a federal system that gives a fair voice to the four nations, a new Bill of Rights that protects social, economic and cultural rights.
The Government is going to change the constitution. Those that want to deepen and renew democracy must seize this moment to build an inclusive movement for radical democratic change.