Alexandra Marshall made a sharp observation this week, one that cuts to the quick of the modern democratic malaise. We are witnessing the emergence of a new class of politician, presiding over the disenfranchised mainstream taxpayer: a modern echo of the 19th Century ‘rotten boroughs’ where representation was untethered from reality.

The victims this time aren’t the traditionally marginalised, but the forgotten taxpayers: the people who fund the circus, sustain the tent, and yet find themselves increasingly barred from the performance.

The system that sustains the fake and hollow lives of the political class that has lost the ability to admit it is wrong but manipulated their propensity to milk the system they destroyed.

The Scientific Imperative: Kill Your Darlings

In science, self-correction is the entire point. Hypotheses are tested, battered, and discarded when they fail. Error is the fuel of progress. For centuries, Newtonian physics was the ultimate law of the land – elegant, predictable, and seemingly unshakeable. Yet, when the data stopped fitting the theory, science didn’t double down on Newton to save face. It allowed Einstein to shatter the glass. The transition from classical mechanics to the Theory of Relativity wasn’t seen as a ‘flip-flop’; it was a triumph of correction.

The same rigour defines the history of medicine. We moved from the superstitious fog of ‘miasma’ and bloodletting to the accidental discovery of penicillin. Alexander Fleming didn’t ignore the mould in his Petri dish because it contradicted his expectations; he investigated the failure. That ‘failure’ saved hundreds of millions of lives.

Modern medicine is essentially a tall tower built on the rubble of disproven certainties…

Contrast this with the modern legislative state. When a policy fails, be it a botched energy transition or a bloated welfare initiative, the political instinct is not to investigate the ‘mould’, but to hide the dish and demand more funding for the lab. Politics has abandoned the discipline of science for something closer to rigid theology. Our leaders treat their policies as infallible dogmas; to concede an inch is to surrender the fortress.

The Thucydides Trap of the Treasury

This refusal to self-correct eventually hits a fiscal wall. As the system becomes more rigid, it also becomes more expensive, buying off the dissent it refuses to address through genuine reform. This brings us to the grim warning often attributed to the historian Alexander Fraser Tytler:

‘A democracy … can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits … with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.’

We have replaced the ‘Rotten Boroughs’ of the past with a Rotten Treasury of the present, where the forgotten taxpayer is cannibalised to fund an administrative state that is insulated, slow, and largely unaccountable. In the desperate hunt for votes, both sides have entered a perpetual bidding war for ‘politically attractive’ policy. Meanwhile, the unfashionable essentials, infrastructure, defence, and competition policy, are left to wither.

The Circuit Breaker

So, what would a self-correcting democracy look like?

We needn’t look far. Switzerland has long embedded corrections into its DNA. Through referendums, citizens can haul legislation back to the starting line, forcing a vote on laws already passed. Policy there remains open to review, rather than being locked in a political vault.

We should go further. Sunset clauses should be the rule, not the exception. Major policies should carry an expiration date, requiring an active case for their renewal rather than drifting on like ghost ships.

The real opportunity, however, lies in technology. The ‘wisdom of the crowd’ has historically been too noisy for the mandarins in the capital to take seriously. The AI genie has changed that. We now have the tools to aggregate public sentiment at scale – to distinguish between a fleeting Twitter mob and a sustained, broad-based loss of legitimacy.

Not only this, but AI could overhaul the duplicity of legislation, remove the anomalies, and stream the basic intentions of the laws marinated in a broth of first principles rather than vested interest. The work of the law reform commission could now be done by AI agents tasked to bring the intention of legislation back core ideals and conventions: and delete the body of words that fail to meet the standards…

Disciplining the House

Imagine a system where a verified, persistent groundswell of dissent triggers a mandatory response: a parliamentary review, or a public referendum. Structured accountability is not mob rule. Mob rule is when there is no structured accountability.

Technology should not replace Parliament; it should discipline it. Just as a modern doctor uses real-time bio-feedback to adjust a treatment, a modern democracy should use these signals to adjust policy. It would give teeth to the old promise of continuous accountability, ensuring the public cannot be ignored for the thousand days between elections.

Don Chipp famously built a movement on ‘keeping the bastards honest’. In his day, that required a balance of power in the Senate. In ours, it requires a system that ensures pressure is released through our institutions before it explodes outside them.

We can design a democracy that learns and adapts, or we can continue to vote ourselves into penury until the public loses patience entirely. Accountable democracy is coming; the only question is whether the political class will embrace the correction or be broken by it.