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IAA Festival: Referendums, people power and open society

30 August 2018

Join UCL's It's All Academic Festival on Saturday 15 September and find out why the will of the people isn't what you think it is...

Will of the People
 The trouble with the concept of the will of the people is that it can easily be misused to strengthen the unaccountable power of governments

 In the past two years, the phrase ‘the will of the people’ has been widely bandied about, dropped into expressions of injustice or discontent with current government and politics. However Albert Weale, Professor of Political Theory and Public Policy at UCL and author of a new book The Will of the People: A Modern Myth, believes the concept isn’t what the general public believes it to be. 

Debate the will of the people with Professor Weale at UCL's It's All Academic Festival on Saturday 15 September - find out more and book your free place

Brexit means… 

Professor Weale's first book, his PhD thesis Equality and Social Policy, was published in 1978 and since then he’s gone on to publish, edit and co-author 15 books in the fields of democratic theory, health policy and environmental policy.

He says: “I have been working in the area of democratic theory for decades. So I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what you can and can’t do with majority rule. 

“I think most people hold the same beliefs as I do, that making decisions by majority makes sense and it’s generally a fair way of deciding on issues. However it starts to become much more complicated when you get into voting on decisions that aren’t the ‘simplest choice’. I think that’s one of the things that got lost in the public discussion around the Brexit referendum.”

Professor Weale found himself incensed by many different aspects of the recent debate, but in particular the misunderstanding of how a democracy works by the media. He says: “Take the Miller judgement for example [the High Court ruling that Parliament had to legislate before the Government could invoke Article 50, triggering the UK’s department from the EU]. After the High Court gave its judgement, both The Daily Mail and the Telegraph went down a route of ‘The Judges vs The People’ in their reporting. I saw the phrase ‘the will of the people’ used wrongly so many times that I couldn’t ignore it. 

“If we care about democracy, we should really give up on the phrase 'the will of the people'.  Life’s much more complex. That’s when I decided to write the book, to provide the public with more clarity on what democracy is and that the will of the people is really a myth.”

Disdain about democracy? 

Since the Brexit referendum, the headlines in many of the papers, both tabloid and broadsheet, would have you believe that we’re now a more politically divided nation than ever before. However, in a 2017 survey by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen), over half of the British public (56%) say that they do not feel any of the political parties represent the views of people like them.

Professor Weale says: “This is called ‘partisan dealignment’, which is where people no longer identify very closely with political parties. Political parties tend to be the great intermediaries between the affairs of state and all citizens, so when they aren’t functioning well it creates turmoil in a lot of people. 

“The concern about the disillusion with democracy is that there are plenty of people around who want to reduce the scope of democracy. Unless citizens take an active interest in this and find vehicles in which their active interests can be expressed, then I think life does become problematic.” 

What is ‘the will of the people’? 

At UCL’s It’s All Academic Festival, Professor Weale will dissect the idea of ‘the will of the people’, showing that it relies on a nostalgic view of participatory democracy. He’ll cover the topics that he believes have been clouded by the recent referendum to help us all start to think about the UK’s political landscape with more clarity. 

He says: “Firstly, there’s a certain sort of nostalgia that people have when they’re thinking about democracy, and I want to try and get that out of our minds. You can’t look back to ancient Athens as an example of democracy, remember only one in seven people who lived there actually got a say in the political process. 

“Secondly, I want to remind them that the idea of ‘a people’ needs very careful handling indeed. What we count as ‘peoples of the world’ is not straightforward. Pretty much all peoples are basically an amalgamation of different historical groups that come together, including in the United Kingdom. 

“It’s worth remembering that the UK in its current political form has only existed since 1922, which is something that people often forget when they talk about ‘1,000 years of history’. 

“The third point is the most difficult, but it’s around the theory of voting cycles and how working out what a ‘majority opinion’ is can quickly become very difficult when you introduce more choices for the public. I’ll show how this is the case with the Brexit referendum too.”  

Join Professor Weale on Saturday 15th September from 3:30pm in the Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre. And don’t forget to tell us your views on social media using the hashtag #ItsAllAcademic.