Jonathan Sumption: why voters have lost faith in democracy

Mistrust and contempt for democratic politics are growing in the West. A former Supreme Court justice tells Nick Spencer that the roots of the problem lie deep in culture, history and psychology

I speak to Jonathan Sumption in the kind of the room I would like to be resurrected in. We’re in the small, elegant study on the ground floor of his late ­­seventeenth-century detached house overlooking Greenwich Park in London. Sunlight scatters across the erudite volumes that grace the shelves that stretch from floor to ceiling. Even the loo is book-lined, biographies of Bach, Mendelssohn and the 29 volumes of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians laid out for curious privy-goers. It’s the kind of place where it feels natural to talk about elites.

“Professional politicians are necessarily an elite,” Sumption tells me. The anti-democratic sentiment of recent years has been powerfully anti-elitist. “They” – the credentialled, laptop class of which politicians are very much a part – do not get, serve or even like “us”, meaning “the people”? That’s far too simple, according to Sumption. “The truth is that you can’t have a democracy without politics,” he reasons, “and you can’t have politics without politicians.”

Sumption is clear-sighted about the challenges facing democracy in western countries, but he won’t suffer shallow answers. It’s too easy simply to separate the world into “us”, the people, and “them”, the politicians, and then to dismiss “them” as indifferent elites. “They”, for example, would include the House of Lords, where Sumption was appointed as a life peer in 2012. “The stand­ard of debate in the House of Lords, for those who’ve ever actually followed the House of Lords debate, is considerably higher than it is in the House of Commons.” The same can be said of the thoroughness with which the Lords scrutinise legislation. Much of the antipathy towards our parliamentarians is born of ignorance about what they do and how they do it, Sumption tells me. The truth is, he believes, democracies need elites.

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A cynic might echo Mandy Rice-Davies at this point. “He would [say that], wouldn’t he?” Sumption is about as elite as it comes: son of a naval officer, educated at Eton and Oxford, a fellow of Magdalen College before working for the Centre for Policy Studies, writing for The Daily Telegraph, retraining as a ­barrister, winning numerous high-profile cases – including the successful defence of the Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich against the billionaire oligarch Boris Berezovsky, for which he was paid almost £8 million – before (unusually) being elevated straight to the Supreme Court without serving first as a judge in lower courts. Since his retirement in 2018 he has become something of a public figure: he gave the Reith Lectures in 2019, and during the Covid pandemic he was perhaps the most prominent and articulate opponent of the government’s lockdown policies. Married with two children, numerous grandchildren and a chateau in the south of France, he’s also a prolific and highly respected historian, fellow of the Royal Historical Society, fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and a former director of English National Opera. It’s quite a CV.

To claim his defence of political elites is because he is among their number would be far too cynical, however, and to play the man rather than the ball. Sumption is exceptionally erudite and shrewd, bringing a capacious knowledge of history and familiarity with numerous European languages and cultures to bear on his enormous legal intelligence. I am struck by how much he fidgets when he speaks to me, but he nonetheless talks as if he is delivering a legal judgment, with clarity, control and palpable depth of consideration.

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He is not blind to what you might call the surface problems with democracy. In his new book, he is not afraid to point the finger at certain recent leaders who seemed to make a virtue of their disregard for political norms and rules. But there are more fundamental problems with our democracy, which suffers with both supply and demand. First, supply. Whereas once “[political] parties were genuine mass movements with vast membership roles”, recent years have seen them “delivered into the hands of their snarling fringe”. Social narrowing has run alongside ideological narrowing. Having once been relatively broad political churches, parties are now populated by the ideologically committed, true believers convinced by the truth and importance of their perspective, and inclined to see compromise as surrender. They’re the ones who get to choose the leaders, who then govern the other 70 million or so people in the country. It’s not a good formula.

There are other supply problems. “I’m no friend of Reform,” Sumption tells me, “but it seems to me that they represent a strand of opinion which many people agree with, and they are entitled to be represented in a democracy.” That being so, the fact that they outpolled the Liberal Democrats – 4.1 million vs 3.5 million – at the last election but ended up with five MPs compared to the Lib Dems’ 72 is, in his words, “a scandal”. No wonder people are disaffected with the system.

He makes a strong case for proportional representation as a means of addressing this although he is, again, open-eyed about its limitations. When I put it to him that all such technical responses to democratic disaffection – more transparency, more devolution, the ability to recall MPs, etc. – have effectively failed, he agrees. PR might make a small ­difference, but it is no panacea.

This is the heart of the problem and takes us from supply to demand. Increasing numbers are falling out of love with democracy because we demand too much of it. “Mass democracy provokes high expectations … of the state.” And the more we expect, the more we are disappointed.

The domestic political story of the last hundred years is the expansion of the state into areas of life that would have seemed either inappropriate or impossible to our forebears. The catalyst was war. “The transformation of the British democratic system into a temporary despotism for war purposes was accepted as being necessary at the time.” This momentum was then used to build a much larger and much more effective post-war state than had existed before.

Churchill won the war, Attlee sought to win the peace. The problem is that winning the peace is a somewhat vaguer objective. “‘Defeating Germany’ is a very simply formulated objective,” Sumption tells me. How you do that may be much more complicated, but it’s still straightforward compared to analogous peacetime objectives, such as achieving economic well-being, or indeed agreeing what economic well-being actually consists of. Scientific and technological achievements over the period have, paradoxically, made things more challenging. We are, technically speaking, able to treat and cure so many more illnesses now than ever before that we have come to expect health and longevity. Again, “the main factor in dissatisfaction with the NHS … is that people now have much higher expectations of it.”

This is further compounded by our growing unwillingness to compromise. When we are convinced not simply of the justice of our ­chosen cause but of its unarguable, overriding significance, we quickly become disaffected with politicians, processes and even fellow citizens who do not share our conviction or who insist on the need to compromise and negotiate. “Frustration at the failure of politics to achieve whatever object people hold dear has led them to look for other ways of making their views into law. One of them is clearly the intervention of law, the use of human rights and so on. Another is the propensity, increasing now, for direct action on issues like climate change and so on. These are all symptoms of a feeling that we must find some other way than politics to get our way, because politics hasn’t worked for us.” Cumulatively, frustration matures into contempt and contempt turns into rejection.

The rejection of democratic politics might be a growing concern in the UK; in the United States, it is a reality. “There have been plenty of would-be demagogues and would-be despots in the [American] past,” he says, citing the Democrat Senator Huey Long, the governor of Alabama George Wallace, Senator Joe McCarthy, and – less convincingly – Sarah Palin. However, “these people have been shouldered aside by the American electorate, which has for many years had the maturity to see through their claims.” But “something has changed”. The visceral tribalism of US politics has slackened one of the best-serving brakes on populist autocracy. The courts, Sumption explains at length and in typically forensic detail, have also been weakened. The result is that Trump, who has “established himself as a cult figure [with] a quasi-religious following” now “finds himself effectively in control of all three branches of government”.

This is the point in our conversation when I think it is time to pull out of the nosedive. “I’m not sure I want to end this on a kind of despondent note,” I say. Does he see any chinks of light? Some hope. “Well, I see very few. What we are witnessing in the United States is the cultural collapse – not the institutional collapse – the cultural collapse of the democratic spirit.” This is the heart of the issue. “Democracy requires for its survival not just a robust institutional framework, a sound constitution and so on. It requires a cultural attitude which values the political process.” However much we might tinker with technocratic solutions, “you cannot … legislate for public instincts and public attitudes”. That is what is powering this democratic nosedive.

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I would like to leave this intelligent man and this beautiful room in this impressive house feeling a bit more upbeat. It is true, he admits, that British institutions are stronger and more resistant than those of the United States. “A parliamentary system is much better at dispersing power than a presidential one … if you are going to trample over conventions, you need in this country to have to carry a lot more people with you.”

It’s not much of a straw to clutch at. “I do not see where the improvement is going to come from, because it seems to me that the problem lies in certain very basic characteristics of humanity which aren’t going to change notably,” Sumption says at the end of our conversation.

He would resist the idea, but it nonetheless haunts me as I leave. If the deep democratic disease of our age is not a political, or a ­legislative, or an institutional problem, but lies in the very basis of our humanity itself, perhaps it is in fact a religious problem?

The Challenges of Democracy and the Rule of Law by Jonathan Sumption is published by Profile Books at £18.99 (Tablet price £17.09).
Nick Spencer is senior fellow at Theos.