We should all be worried about the democratic malaise that is setting in - Kenny MacAskill

Rishi Sunak’s anointing as Prime Minister’s a further hollowing out of democracy. It’s far more than simply the selection process which was tawdry enough. All the main parties are culpable, and the result is the public are disengaging from politics. And that’s the real worry for our democracy.

Democracy is about participation, but we’ve gone from Johnson with an electoral mandate, albeit obtained on lies, to Truss in office for just over a month on votes from a few thousand Tory members to Sunak reduced to 200 or so Tory MPs. No wonder election turnouts are

decreasing.

Where’s the democratic legitimacy for his appointment? Tories say it’s the party not the PM who are given the mandate. But even accepting that, the manifesto upon which they were elected, vacuous though it was with “Get Brexit Done”, has vanished.

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Instead, Sunak will unleash Hunt to impose austerity as we’ve never known it, all brought about by the failed Truss economic experiment. At least in wartime there was a recognition that a “People’s War” required fair shares of misery and that a brighter future for all needed to be provided. From the collective struggle under conscription, rationing and enduring bombing, came the welfare state and the NHS.

But not now. This time it’s the poor who’re to suffer most and the rich who’ll continue to gain. It’ll all be blamed on global factors and the need to ensure market stability. But it’s a political choice, even if Truss showed that markets have a role.

They most certainly do, and governments need to be wary. But as governments in the UK have shown before, along with social democracies around the globe, markets can be tempered and socially just policies can be delivered.

But where’s the democracy within parties or the challenge to the markets? Labour has basically signed up for the Hunt/Sunak agenda with Starmer accepting the need for austerity. Vote for us and we’ll do the same, just not be them. As with Biden in the USA, who succeeded not on his policies but by not being Trump, that may well be enough, such is the contempt that people now have for the Tories. It wasn’t a positive vote and neither is Starmerism.

A jubilant Prime Minister Rishi Sunak arrives at No10 Downing Street, but his appointment reflects the democratic malaise infecting our political system, writes Kenny MacAskill.
PIC: Simon Walker/ No 10 Downing Street.A jubilant Prime Minister Rishi Sunak arrives at No10 Downing Street, but his appointment reflects the democratic malaise infecting our political system, writes Kenny MacAskill.
PIC: Simon Walker/ No 10 Downing Street.
A jubilant Prime Minister Rishi Sunak arrives at No10 Downing Street, but his appointment reflects the democratic malaise infecting our political system, writes Kenny MacAskill. PIC: Simon Walker/ No 10 Downing Street.

If you can’t challenge the markets or change society, why bother participating at all? Where Labour has Rachel Reeves, the SNP have their

updated Growth Commission. Neither inspire folk to get out of bed, let alone go and vote.

Worsening that, both now have a political class that runs their party at all levels with activists booted out or leaving of their own volition, internal democracy eroded and a top-down approach imposed. The next election may well be conducted by party leaders in a few TV debates, with little activity on the ground.

Will voting pay the electricity bill or put more food on the table? If folk decide it won’t, then they might not bother. That may well be the view of many, and the outcome might well be a disengagement from democracy. Or worse a lurch to anti-democratic parties, as in Sweden or Italy.

The democratic malaise’s deeper than Sunak’s appointment. Passion and belief, internal party democracy and most of all an alternative are all required.

Kenny MacAskill is the Alba MP for East Lothian