A barren rose garden: what does Keir Starmer's speech mean for democracy?

Unlike our prime minister, we promise to 'go there' at the Battle of Ideas festival - join us to discuss the big and difficult issues of our time.

In the Downing Street garden, Prime Minister Keir Starmer made what has been described as a ‘deliberately gloomy’ speech laying out future plans for the government. His defensive tone, asserting that ‘things are worse than we ever imagined’, and that ‘change would not happen overnight’ seems to have united the political spectrum in annoyance. The Guardian quotes the Unite union as describing the prime minister’s first major speech as a ‘bleak vision’, while Conservative peer Lord Frost described it as a ‘scary mix of authoritarianism and vacuousness’. Starmer may have been surrounded by roses, but he certainly didn’t emerge smelling of them.

Indeed, it wasn’t so much the content of Starmer’s speech that seems to have touched a nerve, but the lack of it. Labour’s electoral tactic of ‘promise nothing, disappoint no one’ seems to have carried over into government policy. Starmer’s statement that ‘frankly - things will get worse before they get better’ sounds almost frightening when considered alongside the fact that very little of his speech gave any detail as to what kind of economic policy the government might be favouring come the next Budget. Likewise, Starmer’s assessment of the riots - caused by ‘the snake oil of populism’ sold by the Conservative government, in his view - reveals a worrying lack of political assessment. The country is indeed facing a series of crises, but if this speech was supposed to make us all feel better about who is in charge, it hasn’t worked.

Perhaps most concerning is what Starmer didn’t mention - immigration, the issue many see as number one on the public list of political problems to solve. Likewise, Labour’s controversial plans relating to free speech, from criminalising misogyny to the crackdown on online discussion post-riots, failed to get a mention. This kind of tone-deaf approach to a nation’s priorities is telling. For voters of all political persuasions and none, political representation seems to be failing. The fact that the recent General Election provided a huge parliamentary mandate with limited popular enthusiasm is a good example of the weird, disillusioned tone of much of today’s political landscape.

At the Battle of Ideas festival this year, we’re going to talk about these things - even if our prime minister won’t. Below is one of our Keynote sessions - a strand of discussions at the festival that take an overarching view of political trends to ask the big questions of our time. Is there a war on the past? Is populism being quarantined? And, in this one, what’s the state of democracy?

Here at the Academy of Ideas, we think you’ve got to be in it to change it - and so we invite you to join us at the Battle of Ideas festival on 19 & 20 October, at Church House, Westminster, to try to make sense of the world and the challenges we face as a society. We’ve been working hard to get our programme together, which is nearly complete - have a read of what we’ve got planned here.

Time is running out for early-bird tickets, so get yours now for big discounts, or join our volunteers team for free access to the festival. See you there.

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Elections, riots and distrust: what’s the state of democracy?

Saturday 19 October, 10:15—11:45, Assembly Hall, Church House, Keynote Controversies

Despite boasts that democracy was the winner in the recent UK election, with a peaceful transition of one party in government to another, democratic cohesion feels on shaky ground. Within a month of Labour taking power, violence on the streets – and a more general feeling of alienation from those in power – suggest the ballot box is no longer considered the legitimate last word, and many seem convinced their concerns are not taken seriously. ‘They are all the same’ and ‘What’s the point in voting?’ are constant refrains. The low turnout suggests such sentiments are deeply felt.

This sense of disenfranchisement is not helped by the distorted outcome for those who did turn out to place their X on the ballot paper. Despite Labour’s landslide victory, some ask if this was Britain’s least-representative General Election of the modern democratic era. Labour’s 411 seats – 63 per cent of those in the Commons and one of the largest majorities (172) in postwar history – were won with just 34 per cent of the vote and just 20 per cent of the potential electorate. The principle of ‘one person, one vote’ is further confounded by the fact that to elect a Reform MP, it took 820,000 votes, but to elect a Labour MP took just 23,000.

Yet despite receiving the lowest vote share that has ever led to a majority, the Labour government has shown little humility. For example, in response to the recent riots, critics complain that Starmer and his ministers have exhibited imperious and tone-deaf indifference to what might be driving social discontent and civil unrest. Instead, the government has used authoritarian measures to silence and censor popular concerns about mass immigration, Islamism and two-tier policing.

Beyond the usual, if reasonable, complaints of an unfair first-past-the-post voting system, there seems to be a more profound disillusion with democracy. Losers’ consent has become ambivalent, whether the attempts at overturning the 2016 Brexit vote or Donald Trump supporters’ refusal to accept his loss to Biden. The turmoil in France was created by similar attempts to block the popular will. President Emmanuel Macron’s snap legislative elections seemed driven by a desire to thwart the success of Marine Le Pen’s right-populist National Rally (RN), while the disparate ‘coalition of coalitions’ that followed was formed specifically to ensure that the RN – regardless of voters’ wishes – could not form a government.

More broadly, democratic accountability is becoming increasingly ring-fenced away from the electorate as decision-making is outsourced to unelected quangos and law courts and reined in by transnational bodies and treaties. Such encroachments are mirrored in extra-parliamentary activity that sees democracy as a barrier to getting its way. Pro-Gaza activists took to the streets during the UK election to menace and intimidate any candidates who did not denounce Israel as guilty of genocide. Just Stop Oil disruptions are justified because the electorate refuses to listen to their claims of impending climate catastrophe. Some argue the riots were an inevitable reaction to democratic failure on, for example, dealing with the small-boats crisis.

Does this pincer movement of top-down disdain for the demos and bottom-up populist and activist disenchantment with elected politicians seriously threaten democracy per se? How best can we restate the case for the radicalism of democracy and the ideal that all citizens must have the equal right to determine the affairs of the nation, that everyone’s views – from banker to builder, from corporate CEO to care worker – should be heard and responded to?