Democracy 2015: An update

Together with a team of interns, the founder of The Independent launched an exciting new political movement last week. Here's a report on their progress

Monday 10 September 2012 22:29 BST

Andreas Whittam Smith with members of the Democracy 2015 team. The movement aims to return political power to ordinary people (Susannah Ireland)

Your support helps us to tell the story

Support Now

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.

The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.

Your support makes all the difference.

Since the Democracy 2015 campaign was launched last Wednesday, some 660 people have indicated a willingness to participate - or, as they often put it, to help in some way. Many have observed that while the objectives are extremely ambitious, they are well worth working towards.

The age range of the respondents has been wide, from students to retired people and their occupations similarly varied, from nurses to engineers. A number of students have said that they want to promote the ideas through their university newspapers. The geographic distribution broadly follows the national pattern. Our single disappointment to date is that there has been an under-representation of women (23%).

There has also been a lot of activity in the social media. By last night, 15,300 people had seen our Facebook page. Many blogs have made comments and inevitably some of them have been hostile, accusing us of lack of realism. They don’t believe we can possibly achieve what we are setting out to do. Our point is that the only way to find out, is to get on with it.

We asked respondents which policy areas they considered most important. The top four were education, taxation, banking regulation and electoral reform. Through Twitter yesterday, we asked people to define democracy. One neat formulation was ‘Democracy, like freedom, is double edged but we must not be afraid to make it work. Honest representation for good or ill.’

http://independent.co.uk/democracy2015

http://facebook.com/democracy2015

http://twitter.com/democracy2015