Any new prime minister is doomed if they don’t fix Britain’s democracy

Presented with Brexit, a political system apparently breaking apart and the central importance of online networks to just about everything, it is tempting to ignore the past and focus on what seems to be a very modern picture. It is always difficult to zoom out from the daily hurly-burly and understand the true nature of a crisis. But what is happening actually reflects a rule that dates back many centuries: that if an economic slump and its aftermath combine with deep social and economic disruption, people will usually start to loudly question the way they are governed – chiefly because insecurity and uncertainty always focus our minds on questions of control.

Of late, when not asking members of the public about their views on the Brexit mess, I have been rereading Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down, a masterful history of the ideas and movements that cohered around the time of the English civil war. For all that it describes an exotic world of Diggers, Ranters and Familists, its story has loud echoes now: the 30 years from 1620 to 1650 described “as economically among the most terrible in English history”, with the aftershocks of the Reformation and the first stirrings of the transition from agrarian feudalism to capitalism combining to drastically undermine England’s systems of power.

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Not that long ago, I was immersed in the era of the Peterloo massacre and early 19th-century radicalism, when the depression that followed the Napoleonic wars, accelerated industrialisation and the rapid growth of cities caused no end of social unrest, and began the long march to universal suffrage. Two centuries on, the politics of 2019, in the UK and elsewhere, are following a comparable plotline to both those eras: a decade on from the crash of 2008, huge social and economic disruption are once again changing our sense of who we are and what we want – our work, whether we rejoice in globalisation or fear it, and our dwindling levels of faith in government. The result is rising unease and outrage about broken systems of power, and established political organisations and institutions that are ceasing to function in any credible way.

A 19th-century Chartist would instantly understand one of the most blatant examples: the next prime minister being selected by 160,000 of the most unrepresentative people imaginable. Given the opportunity to meaningfully choose between an array of political parties, millions of us now jump at the chance – but our collapsing voting system still privileges two parties whose joint proportion of the popular vote peaked back in 1951. Not surprisingly, as most of us spurn any idea of loyally identifying with either the reds or blues, this iniquity feeds into the disaffection that is continuing to push Britain towards a seven-party system (Labour, Tories, Liberal Democrats, Greens, the Brexit party, the SNP and Plaid Cymru), only held in check by the miserable method by which we choose MPs.

Such is the British manifestation of a turbulence breaking out across the democratic world. Its arrival here preceded the 2016 referendum, but throwing a binary question into the midst of a body politic that was already brimming with resentment and disconnection was always going to make those things even more uncontrollable. And here we are. Against a backdrop of seemingly endless change, the fact that the online world offers people at least the sensation of voice and influence is cohering into rising hostility towards the very basics of representative democracy. Feeling the resultant panic, the mainstream of the Conservative party – the Conservative party! – has now found room for the belief that if parliament proves troublesome, it should simply be suspended.

Which brings us to another book: David Runciman’s recently published How Democracy Ends, which is actually a more nuanced read than its title suggests. “Representative democracy was intended to work against our cognitive biases, dimly though these might have been understood at the time,” he says. “It puts barriers in the way of immediate gratification and slows down decision-making … That’s what makes representative democracy so frustrating. It is rarely gratifying. It is not meant to be.”

The question of our age, it seems to me, is whether this noble, pragmatic ideal can hold, in the face not only of how technology affects our collective thinking, but also the associated fact that so many of us now feel a deep urgency about so many different things. The urge to get Brexit “sorted” and the machinations of our newly assertive parliament verge on the antithetical. Similarly, if you are alarmed by the climate emergency, or the toxic effects of inequality, the slow pace and eternal compromises of traditional decision-making may not be to your taste.

The same impatience, in fact, now runs through just about all the insurgent elements of our new politics. The Brexit party has clearly been a magnet for people full of the usual prejudices and bigotries, but go to their rallies and ask people why they have come, and you will hear a lot of loud complaints about the urgent need for systemic change. Platform speakers explicitly reject representative democracy, and Nigel Farage trashes MPs, the House of Lords and the civil service, while working behind the scenes on pushing for electoral reform – and/or a system of party supporters voting for policies online, taken from the Italian Five Star movement, whose logic Farage would like to apply to the our entire system of government. Comparable things sit at the heart of Corbynism: its endless claims of a “rigged system” and the promise of activists setting policy and deselecting MPs, rooted in an agenda that first surfaced in Labour in the far-off 1980s, but is now ideally suited to the digital age (something which, when it comes to Brexit, is creating difficulties for Corbyn and his advisers, people now hoist with their own democratic petard).

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It may be ludicrously optimistic to suppose that the basics of representative democracy can survive the current assault, but if we are not going to head towards the kind of dystopia that now haunts not just politics but popular culture (for the details, see Russell T Davies’s excellent BBC1 series Years and Years ), great alteration is imperative. As my colleague George Monbiot wrote last week, governments are going to have to embrace such innovations as citizens’ assemblies and participatory budgeting. The case for pushing control of health, education, transport and all the rest down to the most local possible level now feels both urgent and unanswerable. In this country, we will soon have to wave goodbye to insisting that whenever a general election comes round, a population now well used to choosing from a wide array of parties should choose from a shortlist of two, or effectively throw their vote away.

Anyone who aspires to power needs to understand these realities, or succumb to the fate that will meet whichever candidate for prime minister emerges from the Conservatives’ current farcical ritual – including the bundle of opportunism, vanity and nastiness who is the odds-on favourite, and has been trying to channel the chaotic public mood to his advantage for the last three years. The inevitable awaits Boris Johnson as surely it once awaited absolutist monarchs and the representatives of rotten boroughs. He will triumphantly strut around for a week or two, before standing revealed as one more hapless pretender, tossed into a ferment he will have no hope of controlling.

• John Harris is a Guardian columnist