TXSL #19: On Democracy, Disrespect and Duty

*Image credit: Parliament Building At Night, by Jean Beaufort. Public domain (link: https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=210463).*

Last week my partner and I went to see Operation Mincemeat, a comedy musical about the secret World War 2 plan to deceive Hitler into moving troops out of Sicily, allowing the Allied invasion force to advance with minimal resistance. One of the themes of the musical, and the topic of this week’s column, is the duty to stand firm against threats to democracy – something that should be on the minds of voters across the UK due to the local elections on Thursday.

Democracy in retreat

Ancient philosophers since Plato have proposed that political systems tend to cycle through various states. In The Republic, Plato describes a cycle with five stages: Aristocracy, Timocracy, Oligarchy, Democracy and Tyranny. Later thinkers have advanced variations on Plato’s original model, though the general idea remains the same: democracy arises as a response to injustices under oligarchic regimes, but may collapse into tyranny under destabilising conditions in which a populist leader exploits people’s frustrations to seize power. In my view, this process of ‘autocratisation’ in the modern era has its roots in the 2008 recession, and has been accelerated by political polarisation, e.g. on divisive issues such as Brexit, the rise of misinformation, and the sense that the average person’s living standards continue to worsen under ‘establishment’ parties and centrist governments.

But you don’t have to take my word for it: in March 2026 the V-Dem Institute at Gothenburg University in Sweden released their annual report, the Democracy Report 2026, which assessed every country on five components of liberal democracy – electoral, liberal, egalitarian, participatory and deliberative. Taken as an average, the level of democracy globally (as measured by the V-Dem Institute) has regressed to the level last seen in 1978! The report had a particular focus on the United States, which lost its ‘liberal democracy’ status in V-Dem’s categorisation of regimes, setting the US back to a level last seen in 1965. While the UK ranked impressively at 30th out of 179 countries, the report expressed concerns about democratic backsliding in the UK, largely due to “a substantial decline in freedom of expression and the media, which has fallen to its lowest levels in decades”.

Unfair electoral systems

The previous week saw a US Supreme Court ruling severely weakening the Voting Rights Act, making it extremely difficult to challenge a state’s congressional maps on the grounds that it dilutes voting power based on race, as the one proposed by Republicans in Louisiana would do. Viewed from the UK, where constituency boundaries are set by independent Boundary Commissions to prevent gerrymandering, it seems to me entirely absurd that state legislatures controlled by one party (usually, the Republican party in the Southern states) can arbitrarily change their voter maps to entrench the dominant party’s representation, and that California is having to resort to the same tactics to offset a similar partisan move in Texas. These practices are clearly demeaning to US voters as a group, since they set concerns about the composition of government at the national level above the fairness of the electoral process – as if the parties are somehow entitled to hold a permanent advantage in terms of seats in Congress, rather than serving as representatives of their constituents.

A lack of information

Ukrainian journalist Nataliya Gumenyuk’s retrospective article in the Guardian last week explored her coverage of elections in the US and Ukraine. In the article, she states that “The writer John Baskin, who co-founded a publishing house in rural Ohio, said about his fellow inhabitants that they voted against their own interests. Workers opposed raising taxes on the rich or improving services for lower-income families, for example.” But voters cannot always be blamed for this when information is lacking.

On a smaller scale, I’m usually frustrated by the lack of information available on candidates in local elections; I tweeted in 2022 for example that the Green Party in my area of London had spent all their efforts on getting one specific candidate elected, at the expense of providing basic information on every other Green candidate. (The practice of standing paper candidates so that parties can claim to be contesting a much larger number of seats than they realistically expect to win seems to me to be somewhat disrespectful to voters, but unfortunately there are various political and financial reasons for it in the UK.) At least data sets provided by services like Who Can I Vote For? and They Work For You can help to bridge the information gap.

Donations and state funding of political parties

Nigel Farage was dogged last week by headlines about the £5m donation he received from Thailand-based cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne – who also donated £9m to Reform UK in 2025. This has been reported by the BBC as “the biggest single donation to a UK political party by a living person”. Farage should have declared the £5m ‘gift’ in the public register of interests for MPs, and the Conservative party has rightly referred the case to the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner and raised concerns with the Electoral Commission. The government has also announced that donations from British citizens living overseas will be capped at £100,000. In the long term, my preference would be for political parties to be state-funded, to remove the risk that politicians will be beholden to individuals or lobby groups with deep pockets.

Individual responsibility

In the days immediately following the result of the Brexit referendum back in 2016, I remember going to a gathering in a park in London to discuss the impact of the Leave vote with others. A young man whom I remember as being wrapped in a Union flag was present, and he seemed to revel in stating repeatedly that the will of the voters had been clearly expressed and that democracy had prevailed. But, ultimately, he was misinformed. As verified by FullFact.org, for example, the Brexit referendum was indeed only advisory for the government; it was the government’s promise to voters to implement the result that created a compelling political mandate for Brexit to proceed, rather than any legal framework that required Parliament to be bound by the result. The young man was simply incorrect in his understanding of how the UK constitution worked, and specifically, in his understanding of Parliament having ultimate political power.

The above discussion might seem arcane now, but it illustrates that governments may delegate responsibility for political decisions to individual voters, who need to step up to the challenge; and that voters are ultimately responsible for ascertaining the facts of a situation and deciding accordingly. We reasonably expect jurors to serve diligently in court to reach the correct verdict, and the same should apply to voting in elections. I would further argue that there should be a duty on individuals to vote in the interests of society as a whole – in short, to vote in the national interest – to ensure that political power is wielded responsibly and for the benefit of all.

What does that mean for choosing candidates in elections? Personally, I used to assess the manifestos of each of the main political parties and assign scores to major policy areas, then average across those policy areas, with some counting for more than others. (Yes, it took a long time, and yes, I used a spreadsheet to calculate the score.) The highest-scoring party would generally earn my vote, unless e.g. issues like trust came into play. Of course, now there are usually quizzes from news organisations that advise which party in a general election best addresses the issues you care about the most, which certainly saves a lot of time compared to building a spreadsheet out of hundreds of pages of manifesto pledges.

For local elections, I generally go through the election leaflets from the major candidates. And it’s petty, I know, but as a proofreader, I can’t help but pay attention to typos and features like misleading charts. I can tell you, for example, that in the 2026 election booklet containing statements from the nine candidates for Mayor of Tower Hamlets, that the Labour, Conservative, Green, Reform UK and Aspire candidates had zero typos; the Lib Dem, Trade Union and Socialist Coalition, and Tower Hamlets Independent candidates had one; and the remaining independent candidate’s rambling essay of a statement had four. I understand not everyone has English as their first language, for example, but I do consider a lack of care in written communication as yet another emblem of disrespect for voters.

Shaping the new global order

The recent defeat of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party in Hungary shows that autocratic backsliding can be arrested and reversed at the ballot box. There are also signs that ‘middle power’ nations such as Brazil and Canada are forging new alliances with other like-minded nations – so-called “coalitions of the responsible” – to tackle the crises facing humanity. Voters can support these efforts by empowering candidates that advocate for the international rule of law, democratic governance, and evidence-based public policy; it’s the best chance we have to keep the spectre of tyranny at bay.

TXSL #19: On Democracy, Disrespect and Duty

Democracy in retreat

Unfair electoral systems

A lack of information

Donations and state funding of political parties

Individual responsibility

Shaping the new global order

Further reading

On global politics

On US democracy

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