UK: Is the Democratic System Dying?

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by Laura Lai/ Essay

Amid discussions on the exit of the UK from the European Union (EU) many questions have been circulating in the British public space. Questions such as: ‘Is the democratic system dying in the UK?’, ‘Does the Parliament handle BREXIT well?’ and ‘Is the government capable of governance?’ are interrelated questions spinning around a more complex political concept: the political system.

            These questions are legitimate because there are almost three years since the referendum on BREXIT, from the 23^rd of June 2016 (with a 72,21% turnout). Following that referendum 52% of voters (meaning 17,410742 British citizens) demanded their politicians to take their country out of the EU. And no solution on how to exit was supplied so far by the politicians in the House of Commons. The government came up with a Withdrawal Agreement, rejected three times by the House. Options such as: remaining in the customs union and/or the single market, a referendum on a withdrawal agreement, no deal, revoking Art. 50 (implying no BREXIT at all), there were all rejected by the House. They have agreed on one (old and repeated) alternative: to ask the EU for another extension. But this requirement does not please the EU. It might happen that the EU is not confident that the UK will find a solution to this deadlock if another extension will be provided. At its turn, the EU – through the voice of the President of the European Commission and/or the voice of the President of the European Council – announced that the UK will get an extension only if the House of Commons will accept the Withdrawal Agreement, which pleases the EU a lot.

It is in this context that questions on whether the democratic system is dying in the UK are circulating. I rhetorically wonder whether this European public statement – that you (UK) will get an extension from me (EU) only if you accept my (EU) condition – is not to be framed in an even more general context of a downfall of the democratic system. Of course, that it is the UK’s decision to mind only its own … democratic system and to wonder whether or not it is falling down.

            What makes a system democratic or not, we might all already have a (very) good idea. What a political system is, is more difficult to explain or to summarize in one word. A political system of a country encompasses the institutions, the government, the politicians and the way they are voted to office, etc. and it mainly refers to the dynamic within a state between decisional bodies in supplying the demands coming from the voters. And in a democracy it is the majority that decides on the public demand that the politicians must supply.

The question on whether or not the democratic system is dying in the UK is very legitimate three years after a referendum in which a 52% majority decided to leave the EU and the politicians haven’t delivered it, yet. Voters usually demand, but they can never tell politicians how to do their jobs, because the politicians are those people – from among the citizens – who run for public (and decisional) offices, because in comparison to the general mass of voters, the politicians are supposed to distinguish themselves by courage and vision; and they are paid by everybody to find solutions to voters’ demands. It is definitely not an easy job to be confronted to all sorts of problems and find solutions to them, without being allowed to say things like ‘I/we don’t know how’ or ‘I/we have no solution’, etc. This is what to be a politician is mainly about, otherwise all voters can be politicians. Margaret Thatcher was such a politician (and with a great sense of humor): She courageously stood for a reform of the EU, and the EU reformed its Common Agricultural Policy. She constantly opposed what she was envisaging that the European Economic Communities – from her times – were becoming. And it became a supra-national entity with a supra-national Parliament, a supra-national Government (the Commission) and a supra-national European Council (Senate), with which the UK has difficulties to cope and from where the UK is struggling to exit.

The results of different votes in the House of Commons on different alternative routes to deliver BREXIT – mainly the rejection of revoking Art. 50 – imply that on behalf of the British politicians there is still a commitment to deliver BREXIT. It means that the commitment to deliver the demand of a majority of voters is still alive among the British politicians from both the government and the House of Commons. The thing of not knowing how to deliver it does not mean that the democratic system is dying in the UK.