As the dis-United Kingdom was preparing for life as an ‘Independent’ outside of the European Union, its publicly owned media channel -the BBC – was circulating a report on the state of democracy.

As Prime Minister Johnson attempted to bring some sense of shared patriotic excitement to a moment that crowned the most profound of social divisions – largely generated by his own political party – 61% of the people were reporting a deep dissatisfaction with the machinery of power.

Of course, these two events are not necessarily directly related. Almost half the population gave this government the thumbs up to go ahead with Brexit after all. In a modern democracy it’s common that a minority wins the right to lead the way. The onus is on them to keep winning over other minority groups that make up the rest of the nation.

Yet in this case, the just-over-half who voted against are now rendered completely powerless, unable to influence even the terms on which that new independence is established. Because of the first-past-the-post electoral system, the new government has an 80 seat majority and can do as they wish without consultation. Our friends at Make Votes Matter were quick out of the gate after the General Election, howling at the unfair political system and demanding Proportional Representation.

But it’s complicated. Many of those who voted in favour of this outcome were themselves voting about the unfairness of a system that took three years to deliver on what was, in fact, a fully proportional referendum.

In that three-year period – the same period that The Alternative has been going - so much has been revealed about the inadequacy of the relationship between the people and power. Could it at least be seen as a good learning journey?

So what does this report reveal that can help us? Not that much, as it turns out. The Cambridge Future of Democracy think tank attempts to account for the sharp rise in dissatisfaction in all but the early years of the 21st Century (when satisfaction peaked) as follows:

While it goes beyond the scope of this report to explain the cause of this shift, we observe that citizens’ levels of dissatisfaction with democracy are largely responsive to objective circumstances and events – economic shocks, corruption scandals, and policy crises. These have an immediately observable effect upon average levels of civic dissatisfaction.

These reasons have an uncanny correlation to the headlines in our mainstream press – the complaints that we are already familiar with. All suggest an unhappiness with existing hard power institutions rather than with anything else – for example, the opportunities for active citizenship. But even if that list could accurately account for our malaise, we’ll never know if it does, unless we inquire further. When people reply to your question in predictable ways, you might be framing the question too narrowly to allow more generative data – opening new, fertile ground - to appear.

A similar but differently oriented inquiry – or maybe exposition – was taking place in Manchester the same week. Co-hosted by the Departments for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and Housing, Communities and Local Government, together with global impact investors Luminate, a conference called Innovating Local Democracy attracted about 100 participants to the People’s History Museum.

Director Katy Ashton framed an investigation into the state of our democracy from a wholly different starting point: “The role of democracy in creating a healthy society” (if you’re reading Katy, can we have a transcript?).

The two days that followed were largely sharing practice around experiments in new forms of local democracy – many of which we have blogged on the Daily Alternative. For example, the Preston model, Flatpack Democracy, Participatory City, Alternative Camden, devolved responses to climate emergency and Peter MacLeod’s Deliberative Democracy practices in Canada.

There was also an un-conference - opening up spaces to the audience for other suggestions on how we should develop local democracy. One that came from the Future Democracy Hub was “How is the upsurge in climate activism creating a new energy for better democracy?” All good stuff.

Imagining yourself adequate

Yet, as we suggested in last week’s Editorial, there is still a big question over how much democracy is still being defined by policy – and by implication, party political – frames. Does local democracy only ever add up to tasks for local councils to tackle? Or should it, as Katy was pointing at, begin and end deeper in human and social causes and effects? And that, in turn, begs the question: what is the idea of human and society we are interrogating?

Over these past three years, The Alternative UK has been opening both physical and on-line conversations that attempt to re-orient the inquiry into democracy. How can we make the issue of democracy more relevant to more people? When energy erupts in the public space for a cause, for example, how can we reveal the democracy deficit within it? While intersectionality does an important job of showing overlapping interests in different interest groups, our aim would be more essential: to reveal an inadequate democracy as the cause of our great crises.

When we joined with others in initiating the Future Democracy Hub within Extinction Rebellion, we sensed it would be a very fertile ground for bringing together the equally potent – and generally discrete - domains of climate and democracy.

Rather than start at the top of the power structures within the locality – usually councils without the resources to tackle the problem - most of the tools and practices we’ve brought attention to have been offered as ways of engaging those generally absent from community discussions. Without a much broader and diverse input into the conversation, no new energies emerge.

That doesn’t only mean adding the least privileged – though they have the least access to public spaces and will always be the focus of inclusion practices. It also means those who are too busy, less interested or bothered about democracy. Their absence may be because of the party-political link.

Or maybe, deeper than that, the importance of democracy doesn’t ring any bells at all. If democracy is something you have taken for granted all your life, is depicted as a mostly a problem for ‘rogue’ nations rather than our own, why think about it?

In contrast to the broader disinterest, the democracy activists we meet on our travels - many who have appeared offering tools and training on the XR FDH site - do see our democratic deficit as directly implicated in all the crises we face. Not only in relation to our political voting system, though that plays a vital part. But in more essential ways, to do with the lack of public community space in which the demos - all people - can express themselves fully.

That lack is not something that can be easily fixed. It points not just at new kinds of places to gather, but also at fine tools and highly skilled facilitators to make those places safe and open for anyone to speak freely.

Some people might find that hard to accept: after all, aren’t pubs or even street corners safe and open public spaces? Maybe, but only as long as groups are self-selecting for shared values and ways of being together.

But when people are trying to meet across those boundaries, it’s not so easy. The divisions and caricatures of groups instigated by our media and political culture often cast people not in our immediate social circle as ‘untrustworthy’, or opposed to us. Even within those boundaries, those who are not comfortable with speaking up are censoring themselves all the time, imagining themselves inadequate in innumerable ways.

A whole new concept of democracy

In that sense, the true life of the demos – what we collectively think about, imagine, desire – has probably never been heard or witnessed at all. Even if we think our arts sector might be an environment in which full and diverse human expression is a norm, check the complaints against Hollywood for poor representation of colour and women.

Alongside the Future Democracy Hub, an FD Advisory Group meets regularly to discuss the new ways of talking and thinking about a true democracy that they are encountering and championing. They are all long-standing practitioners who have been engaged in exploring and prototyping around the world. They range from innovators in community organising, on-line decision making, facilitators of new publics to tech designers and entrepreneurs, a psychotherapist and a writer.

We talk on Zoom using deep listening skills and technology. Sometimes the group is responding to challenges arising in the rapid acceleration of community democracy initiatives. Other times it is simply actively listening to itself as a group, evolving its collective understanding.

What’s implied there is a very different concept of democracy than the party-politically defined one. It starts with an idea of the human being as mostly unknown, complex, waiting to be discovered for their unique contribution to a newly emerging public sphere.

The public space that they are shaping as they appear and contribute won’t be familiar - because it’s original, authentic. The wants, needs and desires that are coming to be expressed cannot be anticipated. The future they might look forward to has not yet been offered by anyone.

To get to this space in any gathering, there should always be a process of dynamic facilitation that sees the often disconnected, apparently random ways of thinking that we all practice. It must be able to capture the diverse forms of data in ways that give rise to a coherent vision and strategy for that community. If you are interested in that practice, put the weekend of the 21/22 March in your diary when Rosa Zubizarreta, founder of Diapraxis is visiting from the USA. More information soon.

Dynamic facilitation suggests more complex emergence

Rosa’a recent work in Vorarlberg, an Austrian state which has hosted 35+ ad-hoc Civic Councils date, focused on “maximizing creative tension while minimizing interpersonal anxiety”.

“Contrary to conventional wisdom”, continues Rosa, “it is possible for critical thinking and creative thinking to co-exist. Through empathy-based group facilitation, supporting collaborative sense-making processes, the individual and the collective need not be locked in a zero-sum game”.

What would happen if this kind of work starts to transform community spaces? When a whole new concept of democracy begins to arise amongst the people? Expressing and capturing their deep individual and collective desire across the towns, cities and regions in which they live? It’s worth imagining.

Our guess is that it would cause only further dissatisfaction with Westminster and the party-political culture and structure. That would soon be called out as not very democratic at all. Which brings us back, full circle to the question we initiated this platform to address: if politics is broken, what’s the Alternative?

As Big Ben didn’t bong on the first day of the UK’s ‘independence’ (not enough people agreed to crowd-fund that level of celebration) are we any closer to answering that question? Categorically yes. And on our own third birthday on March 1st we hope to share with you a better idea of what that may be.

Alternative Editorial: Not Satisfied

Imagining yourself adequate

A whole new concept of democracy