More than two million people have signed a petition calling for an early general election. There won’t be one, but those who are interested in the health of British democracy should nevertheless be concerned — not least by the associated posturing of some politicians on the right.
As I write this blogpost, I am watching, in another window on my screen, the number of signatories to a petition calling for a general election in the UK tick ever upwards. At the time of writing, the figure stands at 2,151,485. By the time you read this, the number will no doubt be substantially higher. I leave it to those who are technically qualified to do so to comment on how many of those signatures are genuine, in the sense that they comply with the requirements set out on the UK Government and Parliament petitions website that only British citizens and UK residents can sign petitions, and can do so only once. However, for the sake of argument, let us assume that all of the signatures are genuine, and that there are therefore well over two million British citizens or UK residents who have signed a petition for calling for an immediate general election because they ‘believe the current Labour Government have gone back on the promises they laid out in the lead up to the last election’. What are, and what should be, the implications of that?
What happens next?
Procedurally, the position is clear and straightforward. As the petitions website explains, if a petition secures at least 10,000 signatures, it will get a response from the Government. And if it gets at least 100,000 signatures, the petition ‘will be considered for a debate in Parliament’. The website goes on to say that petitions that reach that threshold ‘are almost always debated’. However, whether a debate actually takes place is a matter for the Petitions Committee, which is a select committee of the House of Commons made up of 11 backbench MPs from the Government and opposition parties. The Committee sets out on its website how it goes about making decisions about whether petitions should be debated.
There is certainly precedent for petitions of this nature being debated. For instance, in 2023, a petition calling for an ‘immediate general election’ in order ‘to allow the British public to have their say on how we are governed, [because] we should not be made to wait until January 2025 [by when an election would have had to be called]’ secured 288,042 signatures. It was debated on 29 January 2024, prior to which, on 18 October 2023, the Government issued a response, which read (in part) as follows:
Britain faces long-term challenges that need us to put the national interest first. Rishi Sunak and this Government are doing just that and it would be wrong to call an early general election now … The Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, is making the hard but necessary long-term decisions for the future of the UK, unlike the politicians focused on the short-term and lacking the backbone to make the big changes Britain needs … The Government is putting national interest over self-interest, and is doing what is right, not what is easy. The process for calling the next general election is clearly set out under the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act 2022. It would not be right for the country to call an early disruptive general election now.
The terms in which the present Government responds to the current petition remain to be seen. However, it would be unsurprising if its response took a very similar form to that issued by the Sunak Government in 2023. The petition might well, therefore, trigger a debate in the House of Commons, but it is plainly not going to result in an early general election.
Is ignoring the petition undemocratic?
When, following the petition, no general election is forthcoming, there will inevitably be howls of outrage in some quarters about ‘democracy’. Elon Musk has already taken the petition as evidence that ‘[t]he people of Britain have had enough of a tyrannical police state’, while the petition has been shared online by some Reform and Conservative MPs. If so many people think that the Government has ‘gone back on the promises’ it made during the election campaign, does not democratic principle require a fresh general election? The answer, of course, is ‘no’, but the fact that that needs to be spelled out is itself extremely telling.
It is trite to observe that many countries around the world, including mature democracies, are living through a period in which populist authoritarianism presents an unprecedented threat to democracy. And while signing a petition hardly compares to the storming of the Capitol, it would be dangerously naïve to ignore the fact that each of those phenomena occupy positions on the same populist continuum, whereby legitimacy is judged not by the quality of democratic process but by the extent to which the outcomes of that process align with populist tastes.
One of the staples of the populist playbook is to ignore or undermine existing institutions and constitutional mechanisms as part of the creation of an overarching narrative that pitches ‘elite’ institutions against ‘the people’. A petition calling for a general election only a few months after an election that was unimpeachable in terms of its compatibility with relevant legal and democratic values is fully of a piece with this. In particular, it speciously attempts to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the recent general election while eschewing reliance on existing mechanisms of accountability. After all, that some people experience ‘buyers’ remorse’ after a general election, regretting that the new Government has not immediately done exactly as they would have wished, is a phenomenon as old as democracy itself.
As a mature democracy, the UK has extensive mechanisms for holding the government to account between elections, including legally (via judicial review) and politically (through parliamentary debates, ministerial and prime ministerial questions, and select committee inquiries). Meanwhile, the ultimate tool in the constitution’s accountability toolbox is the need for any Government to maintain the confidence of the House of Commons — a requirement that goes to the very heart of the nature of parliamentary democracy in the UK.
General elections are, in the final analysis, about electing Members of Parliament, and are only indirectly about determining the composition of the Government. While MPs owe their places in the House of Commons to their constituents, the Government derives its authority — along with its democratic legitimacy and so its right and ability to government — from Parliament, by virtue of its majority in the House of Commons. Consistently with that framework, a mechanism (of recent vintage) exists whereby voters in a given constituency can, in limited circumstances, ‘recall’ their own MP, triggering a by-election in the relevant constituency — an arrangement that properly reflects the relationship between MPs and their constituents. But the British constitution knows no meta-version of this arrangement whereby the electorate can sack the Government between general elections, and nor, once we properly factor in the nature of parliamentary democracy in the UK, should it. Against that background, the willingness of some MPs — who surely understand these basic facts of British constitutional life — to promote the petition is particularly disturbing.
In many respects, then, the current petition (which, since I started writing this post, has gained an additional 30,000 signatures) is an irrelevance. It has no formal standing save that the number of signatures is sufficient to require a Government response and trigger the possibility of a parliamentary debate, while it rests on an implied premise that ignores the nature of the relationships, under the UK constitution, that exist between Government, Parliament and the electorate. However, culturally and politically, initiatives of this type risk being high corrosive, for they form part of an insidious, populist agenda that is antithetical to democratic principle — a point that applies even if, as seems likely, some (perhaps many) of the signatures are not genuine, given the willingness of some politicians to attempt to capitalise on the petition as part of their wider populist project. The Prime Minister is therefore, of course, right to have said that he will not be calling an election as a result of this petition. But he, along with all of us who are concerned for the health of democracy in the UK, should worry about the underlying forces that fan the flames of such initiatives.
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