The UK's score on reported "democratic wellbeing" is extremely low, says Carnegie Trust. We have answers for that...
We post occasional reminders - to you and ourselves - of the trouble that our existing political system on these islands is in, particularly with those citizens needed to legitimate it. The above graphic is from the Carnegie Trust UK’s Life In the UK 2023 surveys (briefing pack here), conducted with the polling organisation Ipsos. The distorted four sided shape in the middle is shaped by the four “wellbeing” indicators around it:
Social wellbeing (“We all have the support and services we need to thrive” highest at 72%,
Economic wellbeing (“We all have a decent minimum living standard”) at 71%,
Environmental wellbeing (“We all live within the planet’s natural resources”) at 63%
But political wellbeing (“We all have a voice in decisions made that affect us”) is a far-off 41%
On the last indicator, the main report notes;
The score for democratic wellbeing is substantially lower than all other wellbeing domain scores and brings down the overall collective wellbeing score for the UK considerably.
Given the pandemic, the health and social care crisis, the cost-of-living crisis and the climate crisis, it might seem surprising that democratic wellbeing scores are so much lower than the other wellbeing domains. But the democratic wellbeing score represents people’s assessment of how government is responding to these crises. And on this assessment, most people have concluded that governments across the UK are failing.
Our findings reflect others (like the IPPR’s) that show low voter turnout. In 2022, just 6% of voters thought that their views influence decisions made by government ministers, and the majority of people felt that politicians did not understand the lives of “people like them". Loss of trust in government has been a staple news item in relation to the behaviour of senior politicians and others in positions of responsibility during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The report goes on to urge that “it is essential that those in power work to build trust with the UK: a failure to address the root causes of discontent with the political system will threaten the foundations of democracy.”
Our response in these pages has been to suggest that “those in power” need to be dealing with a strong community-led counter-power - or what we are terming (after Vaclav’s Havel and Benda) a “parallel polis” - where collective will and vision is formed in a “cosmolocal” spirit. Come to our incubator on a New Political System to explore this with other co-cocreators.
[Also worth noting from the report: the lower levels of wellbeing among the young, in comparison to older generations]
