We’re Liberals and Democrats, and we should be outspoken in support of both.  And both have to be fought for to prevent our country sliding back into illiberalism and authoritarian government.

At the end of the Cold War American liberals thought that democracy had triumphed, and that authoritarian states would move towards liberal democracy as they became more prosperous and more integrated into our open world society.  35 years later, things look far less rosy.  Orban’s illiberal regime in Hungary has thankfully just fallen, although it is still too soon to see how stable and constitutional its new government will be.  Trump’s second administration in the US has shown how easy it is for a populist leader to sweep past constitutional safeguards and create a corrupt and chaotic autocracy; we may at last see after the mid-term elections some belated resistance.  In France we are watching a surge of anti-constitutional violence, which may well lead to a hard-right executive presidency in their coming elections.   And we are witnessing in Britain illiberal movements on the left and the right, with Farage as a pluto-populist (a politician financed by the ultra-wealthy who claims to stand for the ‘people’ against the elite) and Tommy Robinson as a violent anti-democrat.

In the face of this, the current Labour Government is astonishingly complacent.  Manifesto promises to modernise the Commons have shrunk to a few measures to improve access; Burnham’s government payroll in the Commons is even larger than Starmer’s or Sunak’s.  Its changes to the composition of the Lords have been minimal, and a flood of new appointments is again leading to an oversized House.  The Representation of the People Bill passed through the Commons virtually unchanged; the Lords will do its best to regulate political finance and foreign interference more tightly than the government is proposing.   Behind Burnham’s rhetoric about changing the voting system many Labour veterans are denying the need for change.  David Blunkett, among others, has welcomed the troubles that Reform and the Greens now face as marking a return to our traditional two-party system.  Public trust in Westminster politics is low, and many young people are disillusioned and disengaged.

So what arguments should we be making about current threats to British democracy and ways to strengthen it?  First, we need to be clear about the difference between constitutional democracy – or liberal democracy – and popular democracy.  The populist right argue that Britain has been betrayed by its elites; that ‘common sense’ comes from the unfiltered voice of the people on any topic – meanwhile attacking the BBC and ‘the mainstream media’, and spending large sums fuelling popular grievances and putting out misinformation to win the public over to their authoritarian preferences.  Liberal democracy is about much more than elections and referenda: it’s about discussion and persuasion, about presenting hard choices to parliamentarians and public, and about building in safeguards against the abuse of power and the temptations of corruption.  It’s also about involving citizens in public life, through local democracy and public information – and public education about the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.

Democracy in the UK IS in danger.  We have a government elected on just over a third of those who voted, on a historically low turnout.  We’ve lived through the populist misgovernment of Boris Johnson and the corruption of the Covid pandemic.  We’ve seen local democracy squeezed and shrunk.  Labour seems to see the key to good government as delivering services to a passive public, not engaging citizens in sharing in public service provision; the Conservatives deny responsibility for the mess that Labour inherited.  The UK like other economies is facing low growth and rising demand to public spending, which makes political leadership more and more difficult. The next election could lead to a confused outcome, with anti-system parties of the right and left well-represented in Parliament.

Labour ministers are breathing sighs of relief at the difficulties the Greens and Reform are now facing, and hoping that politics can now return to ‘normal.’    But they are not at all normal.  Foreign interference, from ultra-wealthy Americans, Russian bots, Iranian proxies and Chinese agents flows though social media and party funds onto our streets.  Young people, in particular, fear for their futures and do not see Westminster and Whitehall as sources of support.  We are about to witness a budget process which will not address the underlying issues of technological and demographic change, alongside the desperate need to spend more on national security and defence – swamped by the confrontational style of Commons politics, with Her Majesty’s Opposition opposing whatever the government proposes.  A year after the Strategic Defence Review called for a ‘Whole Society’ approach to national security and resilience, with local volunteers for civil and homeland defence, no attempt to engage the public has begun.

Liberal Democrats should be calling for radical reform of Westminster and the style and structure of our national politics.  We should be talking about engaging our public, old and young, as citizens rather than as onlookers to the way their country is run. We should be attacking the over-dependence on mayoral authorities to deliver public services, and making our own proposals to revive local democracy.  None of this will be easy to get across to our disillusioned public.  But the alternative is to drift away from liberal democracy towards corrupt autocracy, or violent clashes between hard right and hard left, as we are witnessing in the USA, France and elsewhere.

* William Wallace is LibDem peer, a former vice-chair of the Federal Policy Committee and convenor of the party's 1997 manifesto team.