Crisis in Democracy

According to Hewitt (2011) “the European Union's finest hour was when it stood as a beacon for democracy, the rule of law and a civil society and enticed the peoples of Eastern Europe to embrace freedom.” Despite such a rich tradition of democracy, the burning question which has been recurrently on the lips of renowned academics and political thinkers/actors is whether or not Britain is facing a crisis in democracy, with some responding to this question in the affirmative. It has therefore been argued by critics such as Willy Brandt who is reported to have declared that “Western Europe [had] only 20 to 30 more years of democracy left in it, after that it will slide, engineless and rudderless under the surrounding sea of dictatorship” (as cited by Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki,1975, pg. 2 ). Thus, after more than thirty years since this assertion, it has been contended that in the United Kingdom, democracy has deteriorated so much so that it has elapsed into a state of crisis. The term democratic crisis connotes the break down or deterioration of Britain’s political system as we know it. It therefore suggests a state of affairs in which Britain’s parliamentary democracy is on the brink of collapse which presages a context where the state dangles precariously on the edge of authoritarianism, which by its very nature is the extreme opposite of democracy. However, in order to definitively state that Britain is experiencing a crisis in democracy, the state of their political affairs will have to exhibit patterns which are antithetical to the tenants of democracy; essentially it has to fundamentally contradict most, if not all of the acknowledged core principles of democracy and proponents of this supposition will have to demonstrate that these contradictions are unique to democracies themselves and not merely a residual effect of governance in general. It is upon these bases that it will be argued that what Britain is experiencing is merely challenges to its