From dysfunctional democracy to contribution society

I woke on Christmas morning feeling positive. I had had a vivid dream.

It started after some community incident - vandalism or an attack on some youngsters . People came from all sides galvanised by a desire to give what each could give to make their community better. Everyone was asking what they could contribute. They weren’t waiting for help: they were mobilising and discovering  what power they had. Leadership came from different sources. School students who had been challenged to come up with improvement ideas; teachers sharing knowledge of what had worked elsewhere. Migrant workers offering ideas from their own community traditions. Entrepreneurs and craftsmen offering skills or unsold products. Artists and musicians entertaining the growing crowds.

Everyone was contributing something. No-one was complaining, blaming or sniping from the sidelines. A range of very different people were converging in pursuit of the common good.

Why this dream now? One reason, is that I had been listening to the 2025 Reith Lectures by historian Rutger Bredman. In the second of these Bredman had talked about the most effective movements for change and how a small group of determined people could make a big difference. In the first he  captured the ways in which our society had become a spectator society,  busily commenting on social media while levels of volunteering and citizen involvement had dropped. 

For more than a year I had been noticing the way politics gets discussed in language better suited to plumbing or groceries: elections have become full of sweeping claims that a party will be the best choice to ‘fix’ problems and ‘deliver’ solutions. As if any complex or persistent problem could be diagnosed in such facile terms, with voters treated as passive consumers of these efforts.

My dream might also reflect the work Tomorrow’s Company has started through its  ‘Can Do’ programmes. I have seen for myself the impact when students first break away from the tyranny of exams and are invited to explore their own potential to start enterprises and contribute solutions. This experience, offered within the timetable, often prompts previously disengaged students to reinvest themselves in classroom study with a real hunger for learning.

In his book ‘Utopia for Realists’ Bredman deploys the conclusions from empirical research to offer an agenda that might unite most of us. It tackles inequality; prioritises entrepreneurship and wealth creation over the trading of assets; addresses the fundamental challenges of work and leisure in an AI world and puts  anxieties about migration into proper perspective by linking it to the serious shortage of younger people that our ageing societies now face.

To be effective, this agenda would need to be evolved out of a process of dialogue and consensus-building, and could only bear fruit after consistent pursuit over more than one decade. It could not survive the crazy steering and screeching U turns so common in adversarial party politics.

As currently operated, our system of democratic politics isn’t fixing or delivering anything. It is becoming a delusional race to the bottom – a competition devoted to indulging short-term expectations with little analysis of the fundamental problems and no consistent strategy to resolve them. By its nature this competition drives wedges between people who could, in different circumstances be working together for enduring improvement. 

Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country said US president John F Kennedy in 1960. Idealistic? Certainly, but an essential antidote to the consumer politics that is dragging us down into cynicism.

We need democracy, of course and even debased democracy is better than dictatorship. But instead of condemning or blaming politicians we need to build back our sense that the quality of our lives depends on what we do ourselves for our communities. The role of government is to underpin and facilitate this communal self-help. We need to re-establish ourselves as a contributing, participating society, not simply a grumpy electorate. And we need to spend more time rediscovering the things we can all agree on. 

The BBC World Service runs a marvellous series which is called ‘People Fixing the World’. Every week in its programmes one can hear about people of all ages tackling a problem that is close to home and fixable. Citizens fishing rubbish out of the sea; prosthetic limbs for victims of the Gaza war: a school in Thailand where major decisions are taken by the elected school council; a children’s nursery located within a home for the elderly creating intergenerational dividends.

Bridget Phillipson, the Secretary of State for Education has required OFSTED to start assessing schools on the extent to which they are enriching the life skills of their students. That is a welcome first step. Imaginative leaders in schools and Academy trusts could build on it, and introduce into the school their own version of ‘People fixing the world’. That would lay a real foundation for the contribution society that our democracy needs to become.  Tomorrow’s Company can testify from its own ‘Can Do’ programme that it is possible, within the timetable, to awaken students to their potential to make a difference in the communities in which they live and study. 

That Christmas dream has helped me understand the link between two problems –  disillusionment with our dysfunctional democracy and demoralisation amongst youngsters discarded by our diploma driven education system. If within the school curriculum those young people could have an early experience of making things around them better, what a tone that would set both for their own future and that of our democracy. 

Mark Goyder is Founder of Tomorrow’s Company and Senior Advisor to the Board Intelligence Think Tank.  With the support of the Telos Foundation, Tomorrow’s Company is pioneering a growing range of projects for secondary school students.