Recovering the good life: enhancing the underlying political determinants for social rights enjoyment in the UK

In the UK, rights of political speech and freedom of expression have become antagonistically subversive of well-being, diminishing rather than assisting in the improvement of the life chances of voters and others. These rights have become separated from their original rationale, as the vital oil in the machine of representative democracy, and become instead wild actors existing outside the framework to which they belong and to which they should be subjugated. Pulled away from their function in this way and reified into decontextualised unchallengeable goods, such rights have become the creatures of depoliticised material power. The change is the result of structural defects that have been intrinsic to the UK political system since the onset of democracy. These vulnerabilities were held in check during the Cold War, but have exploded into view in the decades after its end in 1989. The problem is now so severe that it threatens the UK’s system of parliamentary democracy.