As a very young lawyer, one of the valuable lessons that I was taught was that a lawyer given the task of solving a difficult or confusing legal problem should not rely on the views of the writers of textbooks alone. It was always important to go back to the source of the relevant law itself, whether it be an Act of Parliament, a court decision or a regulation, and read it. I was told that, amongst other things, reading and understanding the original source would give a basis of knowledge on which, with the help of writers of the textbooks, a view or solution could be built.

We have heard a lot about democracy in recent weeks. In our recent election, a split of the right of centre vote between the Conservative Party and Reform within our first past the post system resulted in the Labour Party achieving a towering Parliamentary majority which was markedly disproportionate to the percentage of votes cast. There has been much comment since on the nature and strength of the Labour Party’s true mandate.  I make no comment on the first past the post system or its impact in 2024, since it is the result of a long established voting system which all of us and our political parties are familiar with. It is also a system that we had the opportunity to change in 2011 via a referendum, itself a markedly different democratic process.

Then there has been the saga of the recent French elections. Sparked by the result of elections in France for the European Parliament based on proportional representation, the President surprised everyone by exercising a right reserved to him alone to dissolve the democratically elected National Assembly. This in turn led to another voting system swinging into action. This one, because it has two rounds, enabled the parties opposing the far right to analyse the results of the first round and to minimise the impact of a split vote between them by tactical placement of candidates in the second round. As a result, the President’s play worked and the far right remains in opposition. The far right has denounced the whole process as undemocratic.

And so to the USA. Donald Trump, the man charged with various offences relating to his unwillingness to accept the result of the last presidential election, tells us that he took a bullet wound to the ear in the defence of democracy. Joe Biden tells us that he has given up his campaign in the interests of saving democracy, the implication being that Donald Trump is not its defender but its biggest threat. Kamala Harris has, she tells us, taken up the campaign in part to defend democracy. And because Kamala Harris has not been chosen by Democrat Party primary elections, the Republican Party has angrily denounced her candidacy itself as undermining democracy. All this has happened in the context of the campaign for a presidential election which uses an electoral college system which many of us find it hard to fathom.

So who’s right? If we go back to the source, the word democracy emanates from the Greek words demos, meaning people, and kratos meaning power, so at its simplest, it means power of the people. The word has come be used to describe a system of government in which the government is in place at the will of and subject, at some point, to the judgement of the populace by the exercise of voting power. Not all places where there are votes are truly democratic. Napoleon Bonaparte, who could only ever be described as a dictator, knew the power of giving a right to vote on foregone conclusions via plebiscite as a means of bolstering his popularity, but those votes were never democratic because they exercised no power over government. Presidential elections in Russia are engineered to return only one candidate and, as such, are not truly democratic no matter what claims are made for the mandate that they give. But quirky though they may be, British first past the post, French two stages and the USA’s electoral college are all systems that can be properly described as democratic within its accepted definition.

If you ever meet anyone brought up in a dictatorship and are drawn into talking about politics, they may well tell you just how valuable the right to cast a meaningful vote is and that, whilst at times it may not feel like it, the power that our votes give over government are priceless. It’s a sobering analysis of something that we often take for granted. 

It is also something that our politicians have a duty to respect and nurture, both for now and for future voters and politicians alike. And if there’s anything which is concerning about the mutterings or, in the United States, strident declarations, about democracy, it is that they are self serving statements to achieve short term effects which are capable of undermining the credibility of democracy itself. In a world which feels more dangerous than it has for some years, that’s something which we can surely do without.