UK Ranks Alongside Russia and Mexico in Confidence in Democratic System After Decade of Tory Rule

LONDON, ENGLAND - AUGUST 25: People wearing masks featuring Britain's Prime Minister Boris
Leon Neal/Getty Images
Kurt Zindulka

Only one in six people in the United Kingdom are confident in the democratic process in their country, putting it on par with the likes of Russia and Mexico.

After over a decade of Tory Part rule in Britain, a survey conducted by the Policy Institute at King’s College London in conjunction with the World Values Survey (WVS) found that just 17 per cent of Britons are highly satisfied with how democracy is functioning. Meanwhile, nearly double that figure said that they were dissatisfied with the political process of the country.

The results put the UK on par with some of the lowest-ranked countries including Mexico at 17 per cent satisfaction with their democratic system, Nigeria at 15 per cent, and Russia at 16 per cent, Sky News reported.

Although Britain ranked higher than France at 13 per cent and Italy and the United States at 12 per cent, it still ranked well below other Western nations such as Canada and Germany at 36 per cent and Norway at 41 per cent.

The survey in Britain was conducted during 2022, a particularly volatile year in Westminster, with both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss being forced out as prime minister within just months, and the installation of Rishi Sunak in Downing Street, despite Conservative voters expressly rejecting him in favour of Truss in the leadership race to replace Johnson.

Despite all of this, the British public still backs the concept of democracy overall, with 90 per cent saying that it is either a very or fairly good way of organising the country, an increase from 76 per cent in 1999.

Commenting on the results, Professor Bobby Duffy, director of the KCL Policy Institute, said: “Support for the idea of democracy is extremely high and rising in the UK – but we are much less convinced by how it is working for us right now.

A key component to the British people’s mistrust in their government is perhaps a result of consistently voting for the measures to reduce immigration, such as voting for Brexit and for the governing Conservative Party, only to see numbers, both legal and illegal, continue to rise.

According to the latest polling from YouGov, just nine per cent of the public believes the government is handling the immigration situation “well” compared to 82 per cent who believe it has handled it badly.

In 2019, Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party pledged to the public that, in addition to getting Brexit done — nearly four years after the EU Referendum — the government would finally seek to cut immigration by introducing a points-based system supposedly crafted to resemble the Australian model.

However, crucially this did not include a hard cap on the number of migrants allowed in per year, thereby opening up the doors to a drastic increase in immigration, with the policy being credited with the record 1.1 million visas being issued to foreigners in 2022, alone. In addition to waves of new legal immigrants, the government has also let in nearly 100,000 illegal boat migrants over the past few years, with very few actually being deported.

The Tories had long promised to cut the number of migrants allowed into the country “from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands” in their 2010, 2015, and 2017 election manifestos, yet this was never been fulfilled. In 2017, former chancellor George Osbourne admitted that the party leadership never actually intended to keep their promise to the public to reduce immigration and that in private they did not even believe in the policy.

This disconnect between the British voter’s desires and the government’s actual policies has also been evident in other areas, with the Conservative government taking a leftward lurch on issues such as taxation — which has risen to the highest level since the Second World War while embarking upon high spending on green agenda policies favoured by leftists in Brussels and Washington.

Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka

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