Politicians being nice to each other won’t rescue our democracy – but civility empowers us all

One of the memorable takeaways of election night was the exchange between Carla Denyer, the newly elected Green MP for Bristol Central, and her defeated rival, Labour’s Thangam Debbonaire. It began at the count with Debbonaire paying generous tribute to Denyer as she acknowledged her defeat, and continued on Sunday when Denyer retweeted a video of Debbonaire’s speech and praised her predecessor’s record.

The courtesy was important. But it was more than that. The two women embodied the idea that the essence of democracy is to honour the motives of those with whom you disagree. “Democracy is so special,” said Debbonaire. “We must always treasure and respect it.”

There was a sense that this election campaign – with its vapid slogans, the rise of Reform and the rage over Gaza that fuelled the bitterness of some local contests – revealed a newly fragile democracy. But a line was drawn in the sand with Rishi Sunak’s Downing Street departing speech, in which he paid tribute to Keir Starmer, the man he had been personally attacking for the previous six weeks. Starmer reciprocated with equal generosity. This peaceful transfer of power is, these days, precious, increasingly rare and frighteningly vulnerable in an age of political polarisation.

But the results also make democracy look enfeebled. The low turnout and fragmenting of support for the main parties, endowing Labour with a misleadingly inflated majority, illustrates all the weaknesses of an electoral system that is long past its sell-by date.

So what a relief that Starmer’s tribute to Sunak was followed by action: his tour of the nations of the UK, his appointment of non-politicians to his government, his emphasis on country not party. This is the best defence to the charge against Labour that winning barely a third of the vote threatens its mandate to govern.

But not even someone as naturally optimistic as I am believes this alone will shore up democracy. And because I am currently researching the politics of Britain 100 years ago – when Labour made its first breakthrough – it’s interesting to consider the present in the light of the past.

Between 1910 and 1923, Labour’s share of the vote jumped from barely 7% to 30%, winning enough seats to form the first Labour government. The Liberal party, facing extinction, failed to articulate its version of progressive politics in a way that appealed to the new working-class electorate. Tories might do well to think on the consequent collapse of that party.

But it might also study the career of the wily Tory leader Stanley Baldwin. After the 1917 Russian Revolution it was easy to portray Labour in the early 1920s as a stalking horse for international revolution. It was Baldwin who managed sinuously to imply Labour was a potential threat to democracy (he argued vehemently and effectively that the General Strike of 1926 was an attempt to subvert the constitution) while conspicuously engaging with Labour moderates, squeezing the Liberals as a progressive force out of the picture. At the same time, in lectures and speeches, he set about portraying an almost apolitical vision of Britain (think corncrakes and plough horses) that went a long way to shoring up Conservative support and paving the way for a small-c conservative Labour party.

The only political equivalence between Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour party and Nigel Farage’s Reform is that they were and are offering powerful challenges to the existing political balance. Baldwin recognised that democracy needs the protection of a kind of leadership that acknowledges the “restless and dissatisfied” spirit of the age, and that people are right to “hunger for better things”. An essential precondition to winning a hearing with people who see the world from a different perspective is recognising that they are neither evil nor stupid because they disagree with you.

Political leaders in the 2020s can only dream of controlling the narrative the way their predecessors could before the age of information anarchy. That makes rare occasions such as this, when most of the country is paying attention, all the more precious. It makes the exchanges between Debbonaire and Denyer, and those between Sunak and Starmer and the many other, less heralded gestures of cross-party respect, much more than mere courtesies.

But to make a real difference there has to be more. When more than a third of the electorate doesn’t vote, and more than a tenth of those who do choose parties outside the mainstream, politicians have to do better than managing voters’ anger and fears with impossible policy pledges. They have to respect the honesty of the motives of their critics and they have to respond not by shouting louder, but by engaging with the substance of their case.

• Anne Perkins is a former Guardian journalist. She has written a history of the General Strike and a biography of Stanley Baldwin. She is now working on a biography of Violet Bonham Carter.

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