Parliamentary Democracy in the United Kingdom

Lord Frost Excerpts

Tuesday 25th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, for giving us an opportunity to speak on this important subject, even if I do not, I am afraid, recognise her bleak and at times rather fantastic and comic picture of what is going on in this country at the moment. I also look forward to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Lichfield’s maiden speech.

In the short time I have, I want to take a step back. As a concept, modern parliamentary democracy is linked to the concept of the nation state. They rose together. We saw the growth of democracies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, then again after 1990 as peoples found their independence and wanted to give it institutional form. So, although plenty of nation states are not democracies, there are, I think, no democracies that are not also nation states. That is not surprising. The nation state allows for the creation of a common demos, common loyalties and the readiness to settle political differences within an agreed set of rules.

It follows from this that, when the nation state weakens, confidence in democracy weakens. That is just what we saw in this country over the past nearly 50 years during our membership of the EU. Then, we were in practice only a limited democracy. Fewer and fewer issues could be settled in national elections. Policies on trade, agriculture, fisheries, the environment, employment, social issues, migration and citizens’ rights could be changed only by agreement in Brussels, whatever our national electorate said.

It is no wonder that people switched off and stopped believing that voting could change everything. Luckily, we have now escaped that, or at least, 95% of us have escaped that, since the Windsor Framework unfortunately preserves some of these weaknesses—I hope not for too long. Overall, we have brought politics back home. We have revived political life. We can debate and change everything again in this country. Of course, many people clearly are uncomfortable with that, and it sounds like the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, may be one of them. They call it populism when a democracy reflects citizens’ actual views but for me, it is a strength. Our democracy is healing. Politics is coming back to life.