Don’t listen to Nigel Farage. Our politics may be utterly confusing, but it certainly isn’t ‘broken’

Of course he would say that. But why are those in the centre and on the left joining in?

The same frustration is expressed at both ends of the political spectrum. That spectrum ranges from L to R – that is, from Leave to Remain these days rather than from Left to Right.

Nigel Farage says the Brexit Party is “about far more, now, than just leaving the European Union”. In Wolverhampton on Thursday night, he said: “This is about the very democratic system in our country. It is about the bond of trust that needs to exist between the governors and the governed for our civilisation to carry on with the underpinning that it has.”

His leaflets, posted through every door in the country, say: “Politics is broken. Let’s change it for good.” Where have we heard that before? On the R side of politics, that’s where. The Remainers in Change UK left their parties complaining that politics is broken. They too rail against the two-party system, even as the two main parties’ combined share of the vote in European election polls is now 34 per cent.

On the other L side of politics, the left-liberal side, the consensus is also that politics is broken. It was a powerful part of Jeremy Corbyn’s message when he was the future once. For many Corbyn supporters, “politics” is an elite conspiracy against the many that needs to be swept aside by radical forms of democracy.

The same theme animated the Extinction Rebellion protesters when they had a sit-in in Parliament Square. The government has done too little to slow down climate change, they said, so politics has failed. As ever, the problem with our democracy is that it is the wrong kind of democracy. Extinction Rebellion want a citizens’ assembly – a group of non-politicians chosen by lot to discuss the climate emergency. Once upon a time, “the Commons of England in parliament assembled” was a form of citizens’ assembly, but now the protesters want to tear it down and start again.

All these frustrations with parliamentary democracy are understandable. In particular, there is a strong feeling that the House of Commons has failed utterly to deal with Brexit.

This was brought home to me by a former Independent colleague, who said: “There are only three possible outcomes to the Brexit saga – Theresa May’s deal, no deal or no Brexit. The House of Commons could settle the whole business in a day by choosing between them in an exhaustive ballot. What’s stopping them?”

It is a good question. Does it not mean that our politics is indeed broken? I think the answer depends on which outcome you want. The reason parliament hasn’t solved Brexit is that it operates under yes/no rules, and MPs have voted no to each of the three outcomes. This has magically produced a fourth outcome, delay, which looks like an open-ended version of “no Brexit”.

To change the rules to allow an exhaustive ballot would require a yes/no vote. MPs would also vote no to that, because voting yes would in effect be voting yes to the deal: if there were to be an exhaustive ballot in the Commons, a no-deal exit would be eliminated in the first round, and the deal would defeat Remain in the second.

That is why Corbyn won’t agree to be bound by the results of a new set of indicative votes, which the prime minister may or may not propose this week: he doesn’t want to be accused by his party of facilitating Brexit.

There is probably a name for this paradox, by which a group of voters ends up with a less favoured option because it cannot agree the mechanism that would arrive at the most favoured one. But it is not necessarily undemocratic, or evidence that politics is broken.

As I say, that depends on what you want. If we had a parliament that decided things by exhaustive ballot we would have left the EU in March. Would Nigel Farage be happy? He would not. He would be up and down the country crying betrayal and “politics is broken” because he regards May’s deal as a way of staying in the EU in all but name. But I doubt if he would be drawing such big crowds.

And would Change UK be happy? They would not. They would be complaining that politics is broken and that we should have had a second referendum, but no one would be paying much attention to them either.

As it is, Farage has a simple message – and it will carry him to victory on Thursday. He said in Wolverhampton that “democracy only works if the losers accept the result”. But he didn’t accept the result in June 2016, when he thought Remain had won the referendum by a narrow margin. And if parliament had approved the prime minister’s deal, he wouldn’t have accepted that either.

“Politics is broken” is a powerful slogan, especially when parliament has failed to act on a referendum. But it is a dangerous one. Some of the alternatives to parliamentary democracy are less benign than citizens’ assemblies. Anti-politics sentiment can easily turn anti-democratic, and Farage’s opponents should be careful about feeding it.