Our Manifesto
The case for participatory democracy in Britain
About Participate UK
Navigation: Start Here | The Problem | Our Vision | The Path | The Evidence | Get Involved
Welcome to Participate
"Change the system, not the actors within."
Britain is tired. Not the ordinary tiredness of a country between governments, but something deeper - a slow exhaustion that has settled into the bones of public life.
The numbers tell the story. Real wages have stagnated for the best part of two decades. Rents and mortgages consume a punishing share of household income. Whole regions of the country have been told for a generation that their decline is somebody else's problem. Younger people work harder than their parents and own less. Older people watch the public services they paid into for a lifetime crumble around them.
A Decade and a Half of Failure
Consider the record. A Conservative government that brought us austerity, the chaos of Brexit, Partygate, a mini-budget that broke the bond market in days, and a procession of Prime Ministers - five in eight years. Then a Labour government, elected on the promise of change, that found itself unable to deliver it.
This is not a story about one party. It is a story about a system that produces the same outputs whoever is sitting in the chair.
Changing the Actors Will Not Fix the System
If a system keeps producing bad outcomes whoever you put inside it, the problem is not the people. It is the system. You can replace the players on a broken team as many times as you like. If the rules of the game reward short-termism, careerism, capture, and contempt for the public, then that is what you will get.
Change the system, not the actors within.
What is Participate?
Participate is not another party arriving with another slogan and another small adjustment to the same exhausted machinery. It is a demand for a new machine altogether - one in which decisions about how we organise our lives, share our resources, and steward our country are made not by a small professional class on our behalf, but by ordinary people, in deliberative assemblies, at every level of public life.
It is direct: people decide for themselves. It is deliberative: they decide with evidence, with time, and with each other. It is participatory: it is built into the rhythm of ordinary life, not squeezed into a single cross on a single ballot every five years.
A British Inheritance
There is nothing foreign about what we are proposing. Britain has been advancing the cause of self-government for eight hundred years. We extended the democratic franchise across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries against the resistance of every generation's establishment. We trust twelve random citizens, every working day in courts up and down the country, to decide whether another human being goes to prison for life.
What we are proposing is the next chapter of a British tradition, not a departure from it. The structural redesign of how the franchise is exercised is the next great democratic advance.
Next: Read about The Problem →