There’s a reason why only 9% of us trust our politicians to tell the truth. We know something is severely wrong, but our system encourages blame of individual politicians (many of whom deserve it), without looking at the structural problems that underlie them.

The evidence of the structural problems are everywhere. Our leaders – both in power and in opposition – are incredibly unpopular. Parties change the rules whenever it suits them to get the results they want. Turnouts are declining, which together with the ability of a party to win power with barely more than a third of the popular vote, means that in every election more people don’t want the government we get, than do want them. All of this is baked in to the system – it’s a feature, not a bug.

Our democracy is broken, and if it continues this slide, we’re in trouble. But it’s also the silver bullet to a fairer society. If we can fix it, we can fix everything.

No. Unequivocally not.

Our electoral system encourages short-term thinking. A policy that takes 10 or 15 years to come to fruition does nothing for a politician who has to win an election in 4 or 5. But all good policy takes time.

If we remove the relentless electoral cycle, it will free policymakers to start making decisions based on what’s best for the country over short-, medium- AND long-term.

This feels intuitively true. Good industrial strategy or energy policy takes a generation to implement – and affects generations when we get it wrong. We need to be building houses or roads for where the population is in 10 or 15 years, not 3 or 4. Knife crime isn’t solved by putting more police on the streets or further criminalising disenfranchised young people: it’s solved by giving them hope and a reason not to carry knives.

We have to end policies that treat the symptom while ignoring the cause. That can never happen under the current system. It can under ours.

But you only need to look over the prior experience of our current and former Cabinets to know that we aren’t losing expertise of any value. Politics teaches people to do one thing well: be politicians, which is to say, persuade, cajole and occasionally bludgeon into holding the party line – in itself, the opinion of usually a handful of people – without necessarily paying attention to what the evidence suggests.

Expertise comes from study and/or years of experience. If politicians have expertise in something, it’s largely incidental to their policy briefs.

And we have a very pure recent example of when policy was taken out of the hands of politicians and left to the experts. At the height of the pandemic, we had no policy on producing a vaccine and administering it to the whole country, because we simply hadn’t foreseen the need.

So we handed over the vaccine production and rollout to our medical experts, and it was an unqualified success. This is what can happen when the politicians are pushed to the side and intelligent, qualified people follow the evidence. We’re trying to make sure those same people have a mandate to do this more.

That depends on your perspective.

Viewed from the state of our current democracy, these do seem like big changes. But all we’re really advocating for are changes that should have happened over a number of years.

The basic structure of our democracy was laid out in the early 18th century. In 1700, 30% of the population could read and it took ten days to travel from Edinburgh to London. Our system made sense then.

But our society is totally different now – that’s obvious. The structure of our democracy should have changed as society did, but it hasn’t. We’re just proposing changes that really should have already happened, and there’s nothing radical about that.

Because they’re bad for our democracy. This is going to be a long answer.

They made sense at one point, but the world has changed beyond all recognition since then. Ordinary people are now highly-educated by 18th century standards. On a daily basis we’re also exposed to a wider range of views and arguments than would have been possible in a lifetime when our democracy began.

Against this background it seems absurd to suggest that any of us would agree 100% with any other of us on every issue, but having a two-party system forces us to do exactly that, and as the parties have moved closer together, it’s given us even less choice. This is why so many of us feel politically homeless to a greater or lesser extent. It’s also why “tactical voting” exists, but we think nobody should have to choose between the lesser of two evils in an election. That’s just fundamentally undemocratic.

It’s also meant that individuals with one type of power – legislative – are targets for people with another type of power – financial. It’s a simple fact that money buys access, which buys influence, which buys results. It also buys peerages…

We think this is all widely accepted, but as far as we can tell, nobody has offered an alternative – until now!

We’re not sure, but we have some ideas.

One method could be, allowing an outgoing Citizen’s Assembly to shortlist leaders, who are then voted on at election. Another could be to make sure that leadership is baked-in to the PR system. There are more alternatives, and certainly some we haven’t thought of (yet).

We’re thinking about this, and when we win power, we’ll make sure we have a solution that’s as carefully thought-through as the rest of our platform.

One of the few strengths of the Westminster system of government is the direct link between constituency MP and voter.

We’re creating a new system. We don’t have to lose that.

It’s our intention that not only will the link between constituency voter and the democratically-elected member be preserved, but additional links between citizen and Citizen’s Assembly member will be available. We’ve been clear: this system is designed to make your voice more heard, not less!

Of course, we have opinions on the major issues facing our society.

But the mainstream parties’ positions on these issues are a product of the system. That’s why you won’t hear them making plans for ten or more years from now. We want to change that system, so it would be disingenuous for us to comment on the issues in the same fashion.

Where we do comment on issues, we’ll be essentially trying to do two things: to show how the approach of the main parties is a product of the system they exist in, and to highlight how different it could be if that system was changed for the better.

One of the advantages of our model is that it’s easily scalable and replicable. That means that, if the need becomes apparent as we work out the details, we could place the same model throughout equally-divided regions of the UK.

The strengths of this are obvious: it would mean that politics would become less London-centric.

We’re thinking carefully about this, and will provide answers when the time arises.

We have an expectation that politicians need to have everything worked out when they announce a policy.

But that isn’t the way life normally works. We have an idea; we refine it; we draft it; when we enact it we correct the bits that don’t work, and strengthen the bits that do; and we go through the whole process again.

This is one of the reasons politicians fail so often. We won’t make the same mistake.

We won’t enact any of this without the best route forward for each of these details, but that’s still some way off. As our momentum grows, we’ll start to work out the details. But that takes time, money, expert thought – and YOUR input!

Yes!

In fact, we’d argue, not only would they have more of a say in Westminster politics, it would address the Independence movements’ fundamental grievance: they’d have just as much of a say as everyone else.

We honestly believe that this model would make sure we keep the Union together (and make it stronger).

We’d planned to launch mid-2024 for an Autumn election, but Rishi Sunak threw a spanner in the works with that!

We’re enormously unprepared for the challenges of the future. The effects of climate change have barely begun, and most of our politicians don’t even really understand what AI (or AGI) is, let alone the impact it could have on our society. And that doesn’t touch on the mainstream issues that parties have consistently failed to solve over extended periods.

We have to be ready, and the main parties have proven time and again that they can’t be. So the question should really be: why hasn’t all of this happened sooner?

A variety of places. Much of it comes from looking at the systems of government around the world and noticing the correlations between the really successful ones. Other aspects come from theories advanced by political scientists, and from the ideas of existing pressure groups for PR and Citizen’s Assemblies.

All the most successful democracies have some form of PR system in place and a high level of civic participation from their population – for instance, the Scandinavian countries or New Zealand. We’re just copying that.

Citizen’s Assemblies have been used to tackle issues in various countries, and almost invariably have been unqualified successes. They’re well-established and scalable. If you’d like to read more about them, we’d recommend Open Democracy by Professor Helene Landemore; or take a look at sortitionfoundation.org

As far as we know, though, these ideas have never been combined in this way before, and no-one has ever stood for election on this platform.

We hope, eventually, as little as possible.

We’re all sick of repeated meddling in our lives every time a policy reverses the previous one. That’s a product of lack of strategic thinking, but that’s inherent within the system.

Our plan is: get the right policy in place, and course-correct as necessary. Eventually, we hope – Government will only need the lightest touch, because we’ll have arrived at the best possible outcome.

The intention is, that if we can get this right, Government necessarily becomes light touch.