We need to break political tribalism to improve democracy

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IT IS fashionable to reflect that politics is broken. Whether you are chatting to millennial socialists, populist nationalists or frustrated centrists, the idea that democracy in the West is malfunctioning is likely to be acknowledged without hesitation. But it is not true. Politics is not broken—it is working in the same way it has for generations. What it actually needs now is to be broken.

The problem is that the adversarial nature of the system is increasingly polarised at a time when the most pressing problems require ever-greater political co-operation. This conundrum bedevils many democracies, but it’s particularly distressing in Britain.

The parliamentary system pits party interest against national interest, and career advancement against evidence-based policy. The tribal nature of party life discourages pragmatic consensus. The tumult of the ballot box means short-term thinking trumps long-term initiatives. No new political party, however well intentioned, is likely to change this.

Political parties served 20th-century liberal democracies admirably. Now, although the parties have been broad churches, the classical left-right divide is no longer people’s lodestar. Popular opinions are more likely to be grounded in broader values and visible in questions over how we wish to interact with the world, whether we welcome cultural change and how secure we feel in the economy.

Now that political fault-lines have changed, it is no surprise that political parties seem like a spent force. Many MPs are frustrated by the bind in which they find themselves: either surrender free-thinking for party loyalty, or vote on individual conscience and be cast into the wilderness of the backbenches. Citizens are forced to buy in to the party platform in its entirety, which does not feel like a very modern way of doing things, like having to purchase the whole vinyl record album to get the song you want, rather than rip, mix and burn the tracks for yourself.

This highlights the problem with the idea of new political parties in Britain. The proponents of a new centrist party assume that people just want a better political party. In fact they do not. They want something different.

I know this first-hand; I worked inside the Westminster bubble for years. When I finally stepped out, I realised how absurdly artificial the party boundaries look to most people. Politicians and party apparatchiks hold up political parties as the only vehicle by which ideas can be turned into policies. Not only is that plain wrong but it also undermines democracy, by failing to serve the majority of the public who do not strongly identify with a party.

It was my frustration with the shortcomings of the political system that inspired me in 2016 to create a nonprofit group, More United. The aim is to foster cross-party co-operation on specific issues that are chosen and funded by the public. People can sign on to a specific campaign, which signals to Westminster what issues have a groundswell of support. People can also donate, so we can channel those funds to MPs who agree to work with their counterparts across the political aisle to achieve reform.

Since we launched, more than 150,000 people have donated or joined a campaign on issues like the NHS, plastic pollution and immigration. In the general election in 2017, we crowdfunded £500,000 for more than 50 candidates across five political parties. In some ways, it is a pittance. But in other ways, it is a stunning demonstration of the public’s thirst for cross-party co-operation.

In April, More United established the first, permanent network of MPs committed to working cross-party in Parliament. Some 54 MPs from seven parties have committed to working together on a range of issues (particularly those ignored because of Brexit, such as mental health, climate change and poverty). It pushes MPs beyond the traditional, single-issue committees that tend to stifle policy imagination.

In one project, three MPs from Labour, Conservative and the Liberal Democrats jointly surveyed almost 20,000 More United members on immigration to identify programmes that enjoyed wide public support. We uncovered more common ground than the public debate suggests. For instance, both pro- and anti-immigration adherents agree on the same policy: extra support to the areas most affected by immigration. The group took these findings to the Home Secretary with a request to take it into account in modifying the policy, as he had previously done with a More United campaign to end a health-care charge on foreigners.

Behind our activities is technology. The web lowers the cost of finding supporters, co-ordinating their activities and collecting contributions. It is impossible to imagine being able to do this just ten years ago. And we are not alone: other charities aim to reform British politics, such as the online petition sites 38degrees and Avaaz.

What this points to is an opportunity to rethink politics for the digital age. Last year some 14m Britons signed an online petition—that’s more than one in four adults. It is easy to sneer at so-called clicktivism but it demonstrates that the “currencies” of engagement, compassion and hopefulness are still in ready supply. The critical question for democracies is how we provide people with new ways to spend it.

On the surface, the tech makes the issue of awareness, public participation, fundraising and tracking politicians’ performance easier. On the back-end of politics, this sort of cross-party working has the potential to pass legislation in a way that might be harder under the current bare-knuckle system. And it delivers an important message about the public’s interest in co-operation among MPs to the government of the day.

At a time of voter dissatisfaction with the main parties and a political environment infused with technology that pulls people towards the extremes, the ability to find ways to bring people together and rebuild a political centre is crucial. The focus has to be on breaking politics as usual—that is the only way we can repair it.

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Bess Mayhew is the co-founder of More United, a non-partisan political group in Britain, and steps down this month as its chief executive. She worked for the Liberal Democrats from 2011 to 2015, managing online communications, digital campaigning and fundraising. More United’s staff is drawn from Britain’s main political parties.