Screenshot. Nick Clegg at The Convention, May 13, 2017.It’s a delight to be here on a Saturday morning in the middle of possibly one of the most listless, soulless and dreary general election campaigns I can ever remember (applause). The title of your session, ‘What do we do about our democracy?” is very timely and in the short time available to me I shall try to explain to you the three principal crises in our democratic system as I see them, and then three possible suggestions about how we can remedy those problems.
So first and foremost I think it is important to be very unblinking and very candid about quite how stuck and paralysed British democracy has now become. Let me put it this way. Any democratic system relies above and beyond everything else on those in power constantly looking over their shoulder, worried that someone else is going to take power away from them. Without competition, democracy is nothing. Without the pendulum swing of electoral contests in which one lot win one election and another lot win the next, democracy is not worthy of the name. And that is what has happened in our country. Without competition, democracy is nothing.
It is very important to understand that there is no single party now in British politics, not a single party in British politics, who now on their own can wrest power away from the Conservative Party. It is not a conspiracy. It is a set perhaps of accidents: the dominance in Scottish politics by the Scottish Nationalist Party that has knee-capped the Labour party; the electoral system flatters the Conservatives – they have got this cabal in the rightwing press who clear their way for them – whatever the reasons, the outcome is remorselessly the same. The pendulum has now got stuck. No one, no single party, can now compete for power with the present incumbents in Number Ten. So that is the first crisis… that the ebb and flow of democratic life in this politics has been arrested. And I sometimes think that it is important to be more candid and blunt in spelling that out.
