Changing how democracy is done, with Yuan Yang MP

This interview was first published in the UCL Policy Lab Magazine 10, in September 2025.

It’s a scene played out across the UK’s 650 parliamentary constituencies – constituency workers unstacking chairs in a hall. The MP’s constituency surgery is the bedrock of our democratic process, the quintessential moment where local concerns can be transmuted into national representation.

However, at this coffee morning in Reading, something different is afoot. Gone is the usual roster of one-to-ones with the MP; instead, the session opens with a group Q&A before the community breaks off into smaller discussion groups.

What’s most striking to Yuan Yang, newly elected MP for Earley and Woodley, as she relays this story to me, is how quickly these breakout groups of citizens move towards problem-solving.

“I’ve always been really fascinated by how people become political, or how they become organisers. Part of that is the collective consciousness of, I’m having this problem, Sam is having this problem, Rihanna is having this problem, so we get together and we talk about how we solve our collective issues.”

It all follows from Yang’s commitment to democratic engagement. She wants to move beyond the traditional MP role of taking an individual’s problem away to Whitehall, and towards bringing citizens together, building community and helping people feel they have the collective power to get answers.

As Yang puts it, helping her constituents feel more able “to get together with other people and organise, would make my job easier in representing them because they would be able to present collective demands, but I think it would also improve their experience of living in the area and the feeling that they have community”.

As Yuan shares this tale of innovative local democracy, you can tell that this is a new MP determined to shake up how politics is ‘done’. When asked about how she’s adapting to the casework demands, particularly the pressure on MPs’ inboxes generated by the bedding in of social media, she gives a typically nonconformist response.

“Counterintuitively, one of my aims in my office is to increase the level of casework and emails that we get from constituents, because many parts of the constituency, particularly more deprived parts, are underserved by their democratic representatives.”

In this, you see a new MP willing to question long-held orthodoxies whilst keeping sight of fundamental values. It’s perhaps this reforming zeal that unites much of the new intake of MPs from all parties.

When you consider Yuan’s story so far, this knack for conserving the core spirit of our democracy whilst critically reappraising how the practice of it can be reinvigorated, is perhaps unsurprising.

She started her undergraduate degree in economics in 2008, at the height of the financial crisis. But despite this context, Yuan found that critical reflection of where economics had gone wrong hadn’t cut through to her curriculum.

“I felt like I was being pushed back into a quite naive modelling approach to the world rather than the engagement that you’d expect when you come of age and go to university. I did philosophy and economics together. In philosophy, you were taught to question and ask difficult questions; in economics, however, we were not taught to ask difficult questions. At a time when the profession was going through some very difficult challenges.” Elsewhere, UCL’s Wendy Carlin and the CORE project were seeking to rethink how economics was taught.

Yang considered dropping economics, but her concern that it was these courses that gave economists the credentials to wield significant technocratic power in the civil service and beyond led her to collaborate with others to found Rethinking Economics. Starting with a provocative workshop with the Bank of England, asking if economics degrees were fit for purpose in preparing economists for employment, the resounding answer was no.

She committed the next few years of her career to getting economics students and departments to reappraise the orthodoxies of their discipline.

“I think the basis of that is whether economics students are taught to be critical about the theories that they’re learning, to see it as a social science and therefore to have an appreciation of the contest of ideas.”

This leads us to perhaps the most consequential question for British politics, the search for a new economic model. After over a decade of stagnation, the question of delivering a fairer and more productive economic system consumes much of the Labour government’s thinking. I ask her whether centre-left economics is ready to provide alternative solutions.

On this, she is optimistic, highlighting the exciting new economic thinking that is seeking to address the UK’s productivity and innovation crisis.

“I left journalism to go into politics because I think publications like the FT produce really good ideas. However, the politicians and leaders we’ve had over the last decade and a half haven’t listened to the best ideas. I think I’m pretty optimistic and respectful of the idea-generation part of our society. I think it’s the political leadership part that needs to change.”

She’s also keen not to be stuck in the world of theoretical abstraction. Yang points to the Preston model of community wealth building that was briefly popular in the 2010s as an example of economic innovation on the ground. She sees one of the key tasks for her party and the new government is turning council finances around, so that councils once again have the capacity f or local experimentation.

This belief in the transformative power of people coming together in their local communities, and the intermediary institutions that facilitate this, whether it’s local councils, charities or wider civil society, that lies at the centre of Yang’s politics.

I ask her what drives this focus on civil society and what lies between and beyond the state and the individual.

“I think it’s generational. I left university at the start of the 2010 coalition and that was a stripping away of the ability of local councils and the national government to deliver services, and a lot of civil society organisations have had to fill the gap. I think that’s why I think a lot of MPs in the new intake, who came of age in the austerity era, see the increased importance of local community. I also think, even if there hadn’t been austerity and even if there had been healthy government provision, the government can’t and shouldn’t seek to do everything.”

It takes us back to those innovative coffee mornings and Yang’s commitment to supporting her constituents in building community power for change. For Yang, this is not an abstract prescription but also her personal journey to leadership.

“Getting interested in politics and getting politicised was for me a process of coming to understand the power I had to join with others to make things different and make things better. I would really like all my constituents to be able to go through that process. I think that they would find that process leads them to feeling like they have more control and exercising more control of their lives.”

It also speaks to her experience as a journalist in China and as Britain’s first Chinese-born MP. She recognises part of the joy of British democracy is that it’s “not just a technocratic civil service type system as you might have in any non-democratic country. It’s also the fact that people should and do expect participation”. It’s this vision of a renewed democracy, one that encourages collective endeavour, that sticks with me as I leave our interview. Much of British politics is gripped with arguments of ‘broken Britain’, state capacity and building a government that “delivers for working people”.

Yang and other new MPs from all parties – including Nick Timothy, interviewed elsewhere in this edition – offer an important corrective that the strength of the British state can equally be measured in its ability to help people come together and organise for themselves. That the answers to our problems lie in the passions of our communities and our ability to build a future together.