There is a deeper problem with the current political order than most mainstream commentary is willing to name. It is not inefficiency. It is not incompetence, though there is plenty of both. It is that the governing systems of this country have been shaped, over decades, to serve the interests of those who benefit from extraction rather than those who bear its costs.
Extraction here means something specific. Not just wealth transfer, but the design of systems that lock the public into choices that consistently disadvantage them while rewarding concentrated interests - and that do so in ways that are difficult to see, difficult to challenge, and almost impossible to reverse through conventional political means.
The food industry is the clearest example. Ultra-processed food dominates supermarket shelves not by accident but because it is profitable at scale. It is engineered to be compelling - high in salt, sugar, and fat - and government regulation has remained timid for decades. Voluntary sugar reduction targets were introduced and then quietly missed. Proposals to restrict advertising to children, mandate reformulation, or subsidise fresh food supply chains consistently hit political walls. Meanwhile NHS diabetes services are overwhelmed.
Finance follows the same pattern. Banks extract wealth through high interest rates on personal debt while paying next to nothing on savings. The Bank of England's own research documents the implicit taxpayer subsidy that flows to financial institutions through too-big-to-fail protections. Attempts to impose windfall taxes or restructure financial markets are met with warnings about instability and capital flight. So we stabilise the system for them, not from them.
Foreign policy is even more insulated from public scrutiny. The UK licensed billions in arms sales in recent years, much of it to governments with records of internal repression. These decisions are not subject to democratic debate. There is no mechanism for citizens to weigh in on whether Britain should supply weapons to a particular regime. The decisions are made behind closed doors, described as matters of national interest, and the profits flow to a small number of companies.
When political figures have tried to challenge these arrangements - from either direction - the response has been instructive. Redistributive proposals from the left are painted as dangerous and unworkable. Disruptive proposals from the right that threaten the same concentrated interests meet similar resistance, dressed in different language. The political class does not want challengers. It wants continuity.
The underlying system is working exactly as designed - for those it was designed to serve.
Direct digital democracy does not fix this overnight. Nothing does. But it offers something the current system structurally cannot: a mechanism for making these arrangements visible, for giving citizens the tools to interrogate not just the outcomes of policy but the interests behind them, and for building - slowly, imperfectly - the collective capacity to demand something different.
We are not waiting for the system to reform itself. We are building the means to reform it from outside.