Democratic Institutions: Threats

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, for securing this debate—there could hardly be a more important one. It might surprise noble Lords to hear me say that. In this unprecedented heatwave, with the people and infrastructure of these islands melting around us, noble Lords might expect me to say that we should talk about the climate emergency and particularly climate adaptation. I often do just that, especially having just come off the number 390 bus. I am speaking about political resilience today precisely because it is a crucial part of climate adaptation.

Whatever the specifications of our rail lines, the designs of our school buildings or the nature of our food system, the single most important thing for the coming difficult decades—this age of shocks, in which climate is just one of the seven planetary boundaries we have burst through, to which geopolitical and health shocks, for starters, can be added to the tally of threats—is the resilience of our politics. That includes the trust and empowerment of individuals and organisations to make decisions under life and death pressures as well as during the daily grind. The ability to prioritise and make the right survival choices is crucial. That means a functional politics, starting from the smallest village and progressing up to the giant, fragile city of London and the national scale. That means a functioning democracy, in which everyone can contribute, have a say and share their knowledge, skills and energy.

The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, gave us a starter list of subjects for today on the growing threats to democratic institutions. The first was disinformation. We have already heard—and no doubt will hear a lot more—about social media and the terrible lies and slurs to be found on it. That is all true, of course, and the people who profit from it—the handful of Silicon Valley billionaires and their friends, with whom our Government are all too often cosying up, inviting them in closer with lucrative contracts, giving them effective control over vital public infrastructure—present a problem of political trust. But that disinformation is widely spread across traditional legacy media as well. This week I heard a noble Lord suggest that we should put “mainstream newspapers” into schools to inform the pupils. Well, no thanks: we do not want the racism, sexism, transphobia and other prejudices found in many of them—directed by the handful of right-wing media tycoons who own them—to be fed to our pupils, at least not without far better critical thinking and media literacy education than we have now.

Another subject is foreign interference. We get the politics that the few pay for—and it is no wonder the people do not trust that, wherever on the planet the money comes from. There is no doubt that we are in a grey-zone information conflict with states that have one interest: destabilising us. Those tech bros are again providing convenient tools for that form of warfare and profiting from it. But we are creating fertile conditions for those seeds to sprout and grow. After all, we read the reliably reported news today that the current Chancellor is asking big business and its representatives to lobby the person presumed to be our future Prime Minister to keep her job.

The final subject on the list of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, is declining trust in politics, which is what I want to mostly focus on. I do not think I have yet mentioned in the Chamber that a have a new book out, titled Green Thinking. Its subtitle begins with a word that needs to be inserted into all our dialogues and thought: unlearning. It is the systems of thought and approaches to life, from anthropocentrism to reductionism and neocolonialism to growthism—the ideology of a cancer cell—that got us into this state, and we need very different thinking to get out of it.

One thought pattern—and I will not single anyone out, but we have heard a great deal of it today—is that we were on the right path around the 1990s and we have strayed from it, and that we had democratic institutions and, somehow, lost them. The suggestion is that we need to get back on the path. That is a profound fault in thinking. Thia overheated, globally unstable and unhealthy planet is the product of the 20th century, the result of 40 years of extractivism, toxic growth obsession and trickle-down theories of well-being. The profound mistrust is the result of our political institutions and structures.

Francis Fukuyama was only reflecting the general thought pattern of the 1990s in saying that we had reached the end of history and the peak of human achievement in our political and economic systems—what we were always meant to get to. That thesis looks pretty silly now, but at the core of it was liberal democracy and the electoral politics of majoritarianism—the people of these islands and the world being told that they had only one role in politics: to decide who ran the system, to turn up and vote between two choices occasionally. They were not to even think about having the agency, the power or the right to change the system to make different economic and social choices collectively in their communities.

So, what to do? I look around the Chamber and I see many noble Lords who were not here at the start of the Covid pandemic. As the Covid inquiry has shown, there were huge failures of leadership then and a deadly lack of seriousness in our Government. There was also a demonstration that in an emergency there are existing tools for the Government to act fast. We are, as the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, said, in a democratic emergency, so we need to tackle the threat to the political systems by making them far more democratic.

I have heard people say that we cannot change the voting system or the constitutional arrangements now—that we have to wait years for an election for a mandate from voters. There is no alternative, they say. Oh, yes there is. We hear from the man who we assume will be the next Prime Minister about the plans to devolve power out to the regions. That would be great, but what we most need to do—the single key step in this democratic emergency—is to ensure that in the next election the people’s voice and views are represented in Parliament and that we have a fair, proportional voting system. As the brilliant organisation Make Votes Matter says, make votes match seats.

In the May council elections in Birmingham, a first past the post election, a Green was elected with 20.5% of the vote. Of course, I am glad the Green won, but I feel for the other people in that ward. Let us fast-forward to the next general election and imagine similar results up and down the country. Democracy would be a good idea, and having a genuine democracy would create a far more resilient society for this very difficult age.