Discussing democracy

x Sponsored content on Research Live and in Impact magazine is editorially independent.
Find out more about advertising and sponsorship.

“I’m leaving Brexit for others to deal with,” says Polly Mackenzie, chief executive of the cross-party think-tank Demos. Politicians are “unbelievably preoccupied by Brexit... and it’s worrying how many important issues are being sidelined”. She doesn’t want to fall into the same trap: “I want to work on the rest of the stuff.”

Mackenzie has been described as having ‘a brain like two planets’. A regular face on current affairs programmes such as Newsnight and Question Time, she skewers what she sees as the simplistic arguments of politicians from both sides – Jacob Rees-Mogg and Ian Lavery being just two. She enjoys these platforms, but finds the politicians depressing: “Their simple, 10-word answers can be very effective in hiding the truth and complexity of real life. But it’s the job of those of us who disagree to explain our ideas in a compelling way.”

A Cambridge graduate who used to write about housing policy for Property Week, Mackenzie went into politics “temporarily” to help her make the transition from business to political journalism. “But I found I valued taking action, not just writing about things, so I stayed.” Recent Demos reports on issues ranging from trust in a digital age to the concerns of Britain’s rising numbers of self-employed are testimony to this purview.

But as a former policy adviser to Nick Clegg – before and during his time as deputy prime minister in the coalition government – and a passionate advocate of engaging with citizens to inform and drive policy, Mackenzie is brimming with views on why the country is in the mess it’s in, and what it will take to get us out of it.

Arrogance, complacency and a woeful lack of understanding of citizens was at the root of the vote to leave the EU. “The referendum was driven by politics, not insight,” she says. “David Cameron thought he would win, and believed it was a way to heal Conservative party divisions. Well, that’s worked well, hasn’t it?”

While a lot of politicians were out of touch with just how frustrated and angry people felt in some parts of the country, Mackenzie thinks the tactic of frightening the public with what would happen if we left the EU was ill-advised. “Now, very realistic warnings about what would happen in the event of a no-deal Brexit are discounted, because people already have this logic of ‘project fear’ in their heads. Like ‘fake news’, it inoculates people against paying attention to those warnings.”

There is also an intrinsic problem with putting complex issues into referenda, particularly in an era when political communications have undergone a sea change. “Because you can now micro-target people digitally, you can offer them any Brexit they want – but you can’t deliver it,” Mackenzie says. “We have been over-promised on democracy. You can go to the supermarket and get what you want, but in a democracy, you get what people collectively decide – and, for most people, that’s not what they want; it’s a compromise.”

As in the consumer world, brands that over-promise and under-deliver are penalised – hence the current widespread disaffection among voters of all hues. This was the subject of a paper Demos produced for the Information Commissioner’s Office, which concluded, unsurprisingly, that there needs to be more effective regulation of political advertising.

“If I were to do an ad that said this herbal treatment will cure cancer, it could be taken down, because it is demonstrably not true,” says Mackenzie. “There is no mechanism for doing that in political advertising.”

Extreme views

While ‘the truth’ in politics is more subjective than in consumer goods, “in political campaigns up and down the country, lies are put out there, and there is no recourse”.

Mackenzie is interested in the growing partisanship in politics, influenced by social media. “It is now possible to threaten to kill a politician directly, in a way that it wasn’t previously – though people might have been saying it in the pub before.” The reward mechanisms of social platforms foster the tendency to express extreme views, she adds. “When you say something extreme, it is more likely to be shared, which offers people this kind of endorphin kick.” This encourages more extreme political views, with fewer people than ever likely to describe themselves as centrists, says Mackenzie.

What does she think of Clegg’s decision to join Facebook, as its head of global affairs and communications? “I think it’s the right choice for Facebook, and an opportunity for Nick to make a huge difference if the company really does change in the ways it should. We are increasingly asking our large tech companies to take decisions that would have been the preserve of nation states, so it makes sense for them to turn to people with experience leading countries.”

The new political divisions are determined more by age than by class or traditional party affiliation. Overwhelmingly focused on their own internal politics, however, the parties – at least until the recent defection of a number of Labour and Tory MPs – don’t seem to be listening to what citizens want. Are they listening to Demos?

“I’d like to think so,” says Mackenzie. “Politicians lack two important things: time and freedom. A role that think-tanks play is to have the time to think big ideas about where the country is going.”

Rebuilding legitimacy and belonging

The big idea Demos is focusing on is how to rebuild legitimacy and purpose for public institutions – including government – through listening and engagement. Mackenzie believes right and left are united in “quite a dark view of human nature”.

“There is a sort of centrist view that you can’t go around asking people what they think because they’re all a bunch of low-minded, racist nationalists who need to be told what’s good for them. Then you have a bunch of populists who think that people have terrible instincts, but that we should pander to them – that we should punitively tax the rich and chuck out the immigrants. I’m exaggerating for effect, of course.”

Her experience at Demos, however, is that by speaking to people patiently and deliberatively, they are able to navigate the complexities of political decisions.

This insight is manifested in two recent pieces of Demos research on nostalgia and optimism. The appeal of ‘a glorious past’ has been prominent in European and US politics in recent years, playing to those who have felt so alienated by economic, social and cultural change that they are unwilling – or even unable – to look to the future.

“Vince Cable was, I think, rightly criticised for his phrase that people are nostalgic for a time when faces were white,” says Mackenzie. “People are nostalgic for a time and – at that time – most faces happened to be white.” What the research showed was that people were actually nostalgic for “a time of working men’s clubs and neighbours sharing their eggs” – for a sense of place, community and belonging.

Apologising for using a “terribly pretentious and think-tanky word,” she believes the way to preserve the best of the past while moving forward and rebuilding legitimacy in institutions is to be ‘iconoplastic’. “Things need to be radically transformed, but that’s not the same as smashing them to pieces,” she says.

Mackenzie’s proposal to relocate parliament to Manchester is a case in point. “Yes, parliament has always been in Westminster, but it’s changed – and, for all the rhetorical nonsense about ‘the mother of parliaments’, we’ve had proper democracy here for less than 100 years.”

Moving parliament would help to address the problem of distance, disengagement and disconnection that people in the rest of the country feel from London. It would also offer the chance, she believes, to “press the reset button” on politics and the economy.

Forging a new national identity

Mackenzie and her team started to ask what it would take to cut through the outrage and intolerance – much of it driven by gloom about our prospects – and restore a sense of national optimism. The intention wasn’t to gloss over difficulties, but to acknowledge them and find a way of coming together in common cause.

The first wave of the Optimism Project, for which Demos partnered with Opinium, polled more than 2,000 UK adults and found people were more optimistic on a local than a national level. Free healthcare, education and our heritage were the things most valued about Britain, with diversity also ranking highly. What depressed participants most was political disagreement – 76% wanted to see politicians of different parties collaborating more to solve issues.

“There aren’t many policy problems that aren’t helpfully informed by a deep conversation with the people at the ‘pointy end’ of it,” says Mackenzie. It’s obvious, for example, that Universal Credit would be working much better if it had been deeply informed by an understanding of claimants and their lives.

University tuition fees are another example. While great policy from an economic point of view, “something emotionally doesn’t work – and young people feel very burdened by the idea of £50,000 of debt. So, politically, it is a disaster.”

Engaging citizens in decisions

The way to give people back a sense of agency is not with referenda, which force binary decisions on complicated issues, but by bringing people together to think through the trade-offs that need to be made and come to joint decisions, Mackenzie believes.

She cites citizens’ juries – such as the Citizens’ Assembly on the future of social care convened by Totnes MP Sarah Wollaston last year – as a good example of how to do this. While the recommendations made were not the most progressive, she says, they – and the process – have some legitimacy.

So was Michael Gove right in his judgement, during the 2016 referendum campaign, that Britons have ‘had enough of experts’? “I am not ready to give up on the enlightenment values of evidence gathering and the idea that there is, in most spheres of human knowledge, something that we might call ‘truth’,” says Mackenzie. “I believe experts should very often be listened to – but it can be hard for people to absorb evidence when it feels disconnected from their personal experience. People’s day-to-day life is informed by narrative and emotion. If you just rely on experts to come up with ‘the best system’ and then go and tell people about it without taking them through a process, they’ll be pissed off.”

It’s a lesson she learned after leaving government in 2015, when she accepted personal finance journalist Martin Lewis’s invitation to set up and run the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute, a charity working to break the link between financial difficulty and mental health problems. She learned a lot more from this direct engagement with people than she ever did “looking down on services from above”.

Mackenzie doesn’t wear her intelligence lightly, which makes her quite difficult to interview. A common response to my questions is to reframe them: “I think the question is....” She certainly gets her ideas across in a compelling way, but she reminds me of a politician herself, determined to communicate her own agenda. She admits her main weakness is impatience – which might explain why she doesn’t fancy going into politics. Also, she says: “I have a young family, and frontline politics sucks too much out of you.”

Arguably, Mackenzie can have more impact in her current role than she could in politics. She is driven by trying to find better ways to do things. “I like designing creative solutions to problems; I hope, sometimes, I can help make change.”

Her nine years working for Nick Clegg taught her “you can make more of a difference in an hour [when you’re in power] than you can in a decade in opposition”.

Mackenzie joined Demos in January 2018 because she wanted to be part of an organisation that “understands change”. She believes the think-tank’s emphasis on understanding people’s ‘lived experiences’ is becoming ever more critical, “because when people are frightened and feel they are not being listened to, they will go to the extremes”.

She is optimistic, however. In a recent comment piece in London’s Evening Standard, she launched a rallying cry to swap despair about UK politics for positive action: “Brexit will probably be a disaster for Britain. Let’s not compound it by giving up on everything else.”

We can rest assured that Demos will be leading the charge. As Mackenzie says: “We are just unbelievably interested in people.”