The problem is easy to state, but tricky to solve. Turnout in elections and referendums is often so low that the legitimacy of the result becomes open to question. When the United Kingdom voted three years ago to leave the European Union, Brexit was backed by 52% of those who voted – but just 37% of the total electorate. Should a major constitutional change be waved through without the explicit approval of almost two thirds of us?

Now consider the last general election to have produced a majority government. In 2015, David Cameron’s Conservatives secured an overall majority of 12 with the support of 37% of all voters – and just 25% of all electors. A combination of low turnout and our first-past-the-post system for electing MPs meant that three quarters of us were ruled by a party for which we had not voted.

The arguments about our voting system are discussed elsewhere in this series. So my concern here is the issue of turnout. How can we persuade more people to vote, and therefore to imbue the result of any electoral contest with greater legitimacy?

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Let's replace the Lords with a House of Lobbyists

By Peter Franklin

The most obvious answer is to make voting compulsory. Just as jury service is an obligation that we have as citizens if we are summoned to do it, so voting in elections and referendums could be considered a similar compulsion. This is the case in about 20 countries – the precise number depends upon how one classifies countries where compulsion in theory is seldom enforced in practice.

The case for compulsion is clear. It is not just that turnout would rise sharply, though it would. Going by the experiences of countries that have already introduced compulsory voting, it would rise from less than 70% in each of the last five UK general elections, up to something like 85-90%. (It is never 100 per cent: the electoral register is not perfect; electors die, fall ill, face family crises, are stranded away from home, or have some other legitimate reason for not voting; and some people are happy to risk the modest fine that might, or might not, be levied on non-voters.)

There is, though, more to the case for voting compulsion in Britain. Parties these days are more anxious to be generous to older folk such as myself – because we vote – than to young adults, because they are more likely to abstain. Poorer families living in bad housing with lousy local schools would get more attention and public money if they voted in similar numbers to comfortable middle-class home-owners.

More generally, a higher turnout would incentivise parties to campaign with more integrity. Elections today are largely cynical, mechanical exercises in mobilising each party’s base – aimed at firing voters up to make sure they vote rather than discussions on the country’s future in any meaningful sense of the word. If millions more people were certain to vote but were not sure how to go forward, the pressure on parties would be to devote their energies more to political conversion, which would require at least some element of proper, authentic, debate.

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By Peter Kellner

Against all this there exists one powerful argument that cannot be ignored. We live in a free country, and many would argue that the freedom not to vote should command as much respect as any other freedom does. True, people in compulsory-voting countries can spoil their ballot paper: the law dictates that they turn up to vote, not that they mark their ballot paper in an approved way (or, indeed, at all). But if someone wants to stay at home rather than trek to a polling station, should they not have the freedom to do so without breaking the law and incurring a fine?

All of which leads me to my proposal to square this particular circle – to secure the benefits of compulsory voting but without the compulsion. I propose inverting the financial incentive inherent in compulsory-voting countries. Instead of fining people for not voting, provide them with a cash incentive to play an active part in their democracy. The financial “cost” of not voting would be the same, but it would be a foregone payment for exercising the right not to vote, not a penalty imposed by the state for breaking the law.

Let’s put some numbers to this. A £10 voucher would be roughly the equivalent to the penalty for not voting in Australia (it is AUD$20 for first-time non-voters). Assuming a turnout of 90% in a UK general election, that would represent a cost of slightly more than £400 million to the British government. It would be a relatively modest outlay to improve our democracy – an increase of well below 0.1% in government spending in general election years.

However, there is a good chance that even this outlay could be reduced, even eliminated. Here’s how. Invite big companies to fund the vouchers – say Tesco, Lidl, Boots, Marks & Spencer, Amazon, and BP (for use at their filling stations). Given the beneficial publicity that companies could attract for participating in the scheme, it might even make the government a profit. For example, it could be granted to one company in each sector through an auction. Tesco might compete with Sainsbury’s, Boots with Superdrug, BP with Shell and so on. Given that many people going into a retailer to spend their voucher will spend a lot more, the true cost to each company will be far less than the initial outlay of £10 per person.

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The process of issuing the vouchers would be relatively simple. Each ballot paper would have a tear-off voucher attached. After casting their vote, each voter would write their name on the voucher. The retailer could, if they wished, verify the identity of the voucher-holder. In any event, by restricting the use of the voucher to one per transaction, it should be fairly easy to minimise misuse.

One further possibility would be to allow vouchers to be donated to a charity. This part of the cost would be borne by the government, unless a major bank, or consortium of financial businesses, stumped up, again in return for the public-spirited publicity they would receive.

These details are not designed to be prescriptive, but to illustrate some of the possibilities that would open up if we used our imaginations and recognised that the practical benefits of such a solution would far outweigh the drawbacks that could offend purists. Once we agreed that this was worth exploring, a host of detailed options could be investigated.

Let us address one likely criticism head-on. We shall be told that this would be a bribe, and that bribery has no place in a democracy. To which my response is this: what on earth are election campaigns all about anyway, if not a proffering of competing bribes in the form of promised policies?

There is a more principled answer. Many people, especially among the less well-off sections of the electorate, abstain from voting because they perceive little benefit to them. Whether you call my idea a payment, incentive, compensation or bribe, the result of this reform would be to encourage millions more of our fellow citizens to engage in our political process, taking more interest in the choices placed before them.

These citizens would, to a large extent, be those who most needed our politicians to enact laws, levy taxes and direct public spending in ways that reduced inequality and increased social harmony. At stake is not merely the legitimacy of our election and our referendum outcomes, but also the quality of the decisions that flow from those outcomes. It could deliver a more meaningful future for those with the least prospect of one.

Click here to read our series of answers to the question: how can we fix our democracy?

Signs of the malaise can be clearly seen in an exclusive survey for UnHerd conducted by Deltapoll. It shows a remarkable lack of faith in both main party leaders, not just by voters generally but by high proportions of their own voters. Loyalties are being tested as never before.  

In the past, one party leader has occasionally had a shaky reputation among their own supporters on one or two characteristics. In the early 1980s, many Labour voters thought Michael Foot was weak; towards the end of her premiership, many Tories considered Margaret Thatcher out of touch. But I have never seen so many supporters of both parties simultaneously hold such low opinions of their own leaders across the board.  

Here is the evidence. The following table shows the main findings. 

Consider first the two columns, in black type, showing the responses of all voters. Both leaders have strongly negative ratings on all counts. That is unusual enough. But when we look at the blue figures, showing how Conservative voters view Theresa May, and the red figures, showing how Labour voters view Jeremy Corbyn, the scale of the drama becomes clear. The positive scores for May range from 57% of Conservative supporters who say she is strong, down to 40% who back her on Brexit. Her average score among Tory voters is 45%. Labour voters give Corbyn positive scores ranging from 64 to 38%; his average is 50%. Among all voters, the averages are, of course, even worse: May 26%, Corbyn 28%. 

To put these figures in context, a successful leader would expect average scores of around 80% among their party’s own voters and 40% among the general public. For both leaders to fall so far short of these figures should set off alarm bells in both parties. 

Here, though, is the paradox. Precisely because both leaders have terrible ratings, the scale of the problem is less obvious than it would be if only one was doing badly. In that case (as when Foot led Labour and towards the end of Thatcher’s premiership), their party would have support well below 30% in the polls and facing a landslide defeat. Instead, nothing much seems to have changed since the 2017 election. An average of recent polls shows the two parties still close together, and with almost as many supporters as 18 months ago. The high commands in both parties, though plainly struggling over Brexit, see no wider reason to panic. 

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By James Kirkup

In truth, they should be terrified. For the poll shows that the disenchantment with the main parties and their leaders has spread throughout Britain. Within Westminster, it is rare to find any backbench Labour or Conservative MP who, giving their candid views in private, will say their leader is any good or that their party is in anything other than deep trouble. But some hope this despair is a feature of the Westminster bubble, and that real voters away from London have not changed their views of politicians and parties that much. 

In fact, it is increasingly hard to avoid the conclusion that millions of voters Left and Right are losing faith in the people who either govern us today or aspire to do so in the future. 

Which brings us to the possible long-term consequences of current public attitudes. In any country with a different electoral system, the chances are that support for both Labour and the Conservatives would have crashed by now. Across Europe, countries with more proportional voting systems have seen the traditional big parties slump in recent years – even with leaders less widely derided than Britain’s.  

Here, first-past-the-post creates a huge barrier to entry. Elsewhere, small parties ranging from the Greens to the far right have obtained a foothold in their parliaments with as little as 5% support, and then managed to increase their credibility. Here, they can’t. In 1983, the Liberal/SDP Alliance won 26% and only 23 seats; in 2015 Ukip’s 14% gave them just a single seat.  

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By Henry Olsen

The party that might have benefited from the Tory and Labour travails is the Liberal Democrats. But they paid a heavy price for their role in the 2010-15 coalition government. While their support has picked up a little in recent months, they are still scarred by decisions they took almost a decade ago. 

It is, of course, possible that when the Brexit drama has played out, normal service will resume. Perhaps May and Corbyn will both be replaced by leaders who have greater personal appeal to the electorate. 

I am not so sure. My reason is that May and Corbyn’s truly awful ratings do not flow solely from their personal attributes. Both lead deeply divided parties, and these divisions are unlikely to disappear anytime soon. The faultlines will remain: inward-looking nationalism versus outward-looking enterprise with the Tories; ambitious socialism versus progressive capitalism with Labour. A leader that combined the strategic ability of Napoleon with the genius of Einstein and the moral courage of Mandela would still struggle to win public approval if they could not reunite their parties. The Deltapoll figures providence symptoms of a deeper crisis. 

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The political void that Labour needs to fill

By Paul Embery

In short, both main parties are more fragile and less stable than for many decades. First-past-the-post could save both Labour and the Conservatives from the consequences of their current divisions. But it is no longer ridiculous to image a different future. Once the adhesive glue of our electoral system starts to crack, things can change with bewildering speed. A century ago, amid the stresses of post-First-World-War Britain and the divisions within the Liberal Party, realignment happened quickly. Labour climbed from fourth place in 1918 to government in 1924.  

Will Brexit end up having the same glue-cracking effect? And if it does, will the beneficiaries be existing herbivores such as the Liberal Democrats and the Greens; or some new centre party created by disenchanted Labour and Tory moderates; or carnivores on the outer fringes of Right and Left? Is the century-long dominance of Britain’s Parliament by competing forces on the centre Right and centre Left about to end? 

Ask me again in 10 years’ time and I shall tell you. Meanwhile I wouldn’t bet a great deal against changes that could be immense, and which not everyone will like.