It’s pretty clear that things are not going to plan. With the help of a corrupt, vain and intellectually unambitious and mediocre ruling class, Britain’s democracy has wedded together a previously inconceivable couple, stagnancy and unpredictability. Given the magnitude of our situation, it is tempting to blame this ruling class – and there is some merit in doing so. Its idea of solutions to Britain’s leading problems are the four horsemen of political risibility – Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer.

But although these politicians clearly don’t deserve to rule the country, complaining only gets you so far. As a country, there are more pressing, introspective and painful questions that we need to ask. Britain as a political, democratic and social entity is crumbling – and the British, as a people, have let it happen. More than that, the whole of the political system has been offering poor solutions to the wrong questions for a good twenty-five years. Self-awareness often comes as several disappointing, half-truths before the whole damn thing unravels. I don’t know if we are anywhere close to finding it, but merely tearing away the rotting wood is no longer good enough. In some important way, we need to be radical – we need to break from the past.

One way of conceiving of our crisis is one of prosperity. In important ways, prosperity has changed early to mid-20th Century democracy for the worse. The reason: prosperity gives us a false sense of independence in a world that necessarily requires interdependence. In the mid-20th Century, the majority of the population could see that they were reliant on others in important ways. Poverty means that the volume of luxury consumption tends to be low. If luxury consumption is low, avenues for enjoyment tend to be communal. The worker could find enjoyment through going to the pub with friends or watching a game of football. The worker also saw, in a political sense, how his fortunes were tied to other workers – because only through strikes, i.e. collective action, would his lot get better. Workers cared about the lot of a large group of similarly minded people, whose life-rhythms, priorities and problems were shared.

Today, things are different. The working class – or whatever name we give its husk - are still relatively poor, but they are not absolutely poor. They have some luxuries and gain satisfaction from the private consumption of them. Televisions bring entertainment into the house, rather than as something that is enjoyed with others from different family units. Most live in private houses distanced from other private houses. And jobs tend to be intensely personal affairs – the route for improvement tends to be conceived of as promotion at the expense of others, rather than collective betterment. The need to interact with others is there, but it fulfils fewer and fewer functions in aggregate.

But our world is still a shared enterprise. The reason you have your cup of coffee in the morning is something that can be answered only through reference to a highly complex supply chain. The man who picks the coffee sells it to a man who bags it who sells it to a man who ships it who sells it to a man who brands it who sells it to a man who sells it to you, who uses another man to deliver it to your door. What modern capitalism, or whatever you want to call it, does is make these connections hidden. It’s like the classic case of the kid who is amazed to learn that eggs come not from Tescos, but from a chicken – the cues to remind us of our inter-reliance are obscured, because we don’t see the man who picks our beans or packages the coffee. Human psychology is well designed to take visual information and apply it to problems, but when this information is abstracted, the skill becomes ineffective. This is why your classic student Marxist is wrong – division of labour, the bedrock of capitalism, divides labour so far as to mean that the whole system becomes an abstract entity, incomprehensible for any normal working person. If capitalism falls apart, it will be because it consumes itself, rather than any direct act of human agency.

An important upshot of this is that all the good that comes from the prosperity and stability created by state-led capitalism is taken for granted. This leaves a vacuum. Humans become fatalistic – the system seems to be a self-contained machine that works and exists separate to us. The people that make up this machine get on with their little worlds, unconscious of how they slot into the bigger picture. And so, apart from a select few who have very specific incentives, there is no reason for most people to enter politics or engage with broader questions of our shared life.

This is most clear in the case of local democracy. Local democracy provides a great example of this in action because, the discrepancy between what politics says it does and what it actually does is greatest when politics gets closest to the people. Local democracy incidentally also provides a good example of why it’s not just the political class that’s broken – but, rather, it is a more general problem, that’s partly the British people’s fault.

Local democracy, you might reasonably point out, is boring. And, in a way, that’s the point. Local democracy, a vital mechanism for controlling the space that we inhabit through control of local schools, roads, transport and housing, is no longer meaningful to the average voter. Without the simple narratives of modern politics that use key figures with colourful personalities to get most people interested, it turns out that most don’t care about governing their shared life, even if it costs barely half an hour of their time once every few years. The numbers speak louder than I ever could - only 35% of voters bothered to turn out in the 2018 English Local Elections. Those that do, I hazard an educated guess (I have canvassed before…) are either voting on flagship local policies or voting out of party loyalty. Hence, at a local election, constituency-based local parties will look to find strongly aligned voters and ask them to come out to vote, rather than attempting to convince the wavering.

This is no debate based off an informed voter base that know their priorities and how to achieve them. There is no community who have a sense of what they are after and why. Instead, there exists a loose agglomeration of voters, who largely either don’t want to vote or alternatively, need to be convinced to do so. To reiterate, the debate is held on whether the person should vote, not who they should vote for – there is nothing democratic or legitimate about this.  

Besides this, other problems are pretty considerable. Any form of real activism or involvement outside of a party is impossible and a wall of bureaucracy prevents anyone apart from big companies with lots of lawyers and lots of time from making any meaningful policy impact that differs from a local party’s line.

Those that do have an impact are highly unrepresentative. The 160,000 or so members of the Conservative Party are most well known as kingmakers after ritual Conservative Prime Ministerial defenestration. But these people (plus their equally strange equivalents in the other major parties) – a highly unrepresentative coalition of the old, the venal, the ideologically driven, the lonely and the weird – are basically responsible for most of local government. A normal person could not be convinced to do a job like this, so you’ve got to ask yourself, what are these guys’ motivations? And should these people, whose very small number indicate that they are basically abnormal, represent normal people? The answer, quite clearly is no.

Local democracy, a vital connection between politics and the people, is in crisis. On the one hand, people don’t care about local democracy and on the other, those at the local level have a series of warped incentives that don’t obviously maximise welfare.

The crisis does matter in itself – it is absolutely insane that power, given to the people, is not being used by those same people. But it also matters because it signifies something else. The breakdown in recognition for the ways in which our life is a shared creation is slowly making the cogs of our political system rusty. When truth separates from perceived reality, things start going wrong. And when things start going wrong in this way, the problems get worse as attempts to make things better use the same faulty language that made the political system fail in the first place. This is where we are – and that’s no good thing.