Should We Be Worried That Over a Third of Young People Want to Live Under a Dictatorship?

Dorothy Byrne, former Head of News and Current Affairs at Channel 4, caused a minor ripple in the news pond last week when she made public reference to the Open Society Foundations’ recent democracy barometer of 2023, which had found that faith in democracy was plummeting among the young. According to the Foundations’ survey, 35% of 18-35 years-olds around the world say that having a leader who “doesn’t bother with parliaments or elections” is a good way of running a country (the highest of any age group). An article in the Times reported that Byrne cited these figures in the James Cameron Memorial Lecture at City University (sadly, no recording or transcript exists) which seemed to indicate that the figure for the U.K. specifically was 29%.

This is, of course, concerning if true. But it is perhaps more concerning that Byrne – ostensibly an intelligent person who is now President of Murray Edwards College at the University of Cambridge – is so incapable of thinking through exactly why this cratering in support for democracy might be taking place among the young. In this, of course, she is not an outlier (she is entirely emblematic of her class), and perhaps it is unfair therefore to single her out. But it is useful to do so all the same, because her analysis is so illustrative of the failures of our ‘thought leaders’ to actually think very hard about very much at all.

In Byrne’s world, you see, the problem is really all about Boris Johnson. She has form in this regard, having publicly denounced his “lying” before. But in her lecture at City she seems to have – without naming him – given him centre stage. The reason why young people have lost faith in democracy, she tells us, is “dishonest politicians”. And this means that the issue is fundamentally (yes, you’ve guessed it) inadequate fact-checking by journalists. What we need, she tells us, is for media outlets to inform us when politicians are “lying”. It is only then that faith in democracy will be restored.

It’s all about Brexit buses, in other words: the founding myth of Remoanerist-centrist-dadism, in which everything in the world that has gone wrong since 2016 is the fault of a disputed figure on the side of a campaign vehicle, and in which the only way to fix everything is for journalists, academics and right-thinking politicians to make sure that the stupid proles are never duped into voting for anything so silly as Brexit ever again. (The American equivalent, one presumes, is Donald Trump’s compendium of ‘lies’, handily put together for us by the Washington Post.)

The holes in the argument are, of course, big enough to drive a truck through. It assumes that politicians and spin doctors have not been publicly and notably ‘lying’ for a very long time. It imagines a fantasy world in which the public expects politicians to tell the truth and is violently disillusioned when they don’t. It conveniently ignores the fact that if the proportion of British young people who have no faith in democracy is 29%, this is actually a lower percentage than the international average, suggesting that if anything our politicians are considered somewhat more trustworthy (hated less, might be the better way of putting it) than they are elsewhere. And it entirely overlooks the fact that for older age groups – also exposed to Boris’s ‘lies’ – the percentages of people lacking faith in democracy are lower.

But much worse than the flaws in Byrne’s argument are the many other variables it overlooks, and which a thoughtful person ought really to have picked up on. Just off the top of my head:

There’s the fact that our elected politicians essentially suspended ordinary democratic processes for the duration of 2020-21 and ruled by executive decree – advised by unelected ‘scientific experts’ – on the basis of there being an emergency, and presented this as a perfectly natural and indeed necessary way to solve problems.
Then there’s the fact that whichever party gets elected we seem to get more or less the same suite of policies in relation to all of the issues that matter – tax, immigration, national debt, the NHS, benefits, Net Zero and so on.
And then there’s the fact that when the electorate voted to leave the European Union in a national referendum, journalists and MPs lined up in their droves to tell people they didn’t know what they had voted for, and then connived to their utmost to overturn the referendum result on the basis that voting only matters when votes are cast the right way.
Then, while I’m at it, there’s the fact that whenever a politician, anywhere in the world, strays a millimetre to the Right of centre, his or her legitimacy – and by extension the legitimacy of the process which got him or her elected – is immediately called into question by journalists labelling him or her ‘far Right’.
And then of course there’s the fact that whenever U.K. or international courts rule against an elected decision-maker, they are cheered to the rafters by the ‘thought leaders’ of the day, no matter whether that decision-maker is attempting to implement a policy which the electorate have explicitly voted for – and, indeed, often in spite of that fact.

Given all of this, is it any wonder that our young people’s faith in democracy is flagging? Whichever way they turn, they are being told firstly that when voters vote for anything they choose badly; secondly that it is perfectly legitimate – and indeed desirable – to ignore voters, all things considered; and thirdly that the best way to solve problems is through Government ruling by decree on the basis of the advice of experts, and thereby circumventing democratic oversight entirely. Put that way, it’s remarkable, quite frankly, that well over half of youngsters still exhibit basic faith in the democratic process despite its flaws – and this, in its own way, puts a somewhat heartening spin on the entire daft story.

Why does Byrne overlook all of this? Boris Derangement Syndrome is an easy answer, but probably doesn’t entirely capture it. The truth, of course, is more simple yet: as a terribly clever TV exec and now terribly clever Oxbridge college President, it’s probably been a while since her views have really been challenged. In this, she acts as a microcosm for our ‘new elite’ establishment – invincible in the belief that they know best, but constitutionally incapable of looking beyond their own class interests and thereby taking into account what is actually going on in the society ‘beneath’ them. The truth of the matter is that this disconnect between the governing classes and those they purport to govern is the beating heart of the problem when it comes to decaying faith in democracy. But good luck getting any of them to face up to that. Far easier to blame Boris – and far easier to indulge in the fantasy that it’s journalists and ‘fact-checkers’ who can get us out of the quagmire.

Dr. David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. He is the author of the News From Uncibal Substack.