As a young student immersed in the Left, I could never fully grasp the socialist emphasis on small-d democracy. To some extent, I think the experience of campus politics may have been the culprit. Involved in various groups and campaigns in my late teens and early twenties, “democracy” in the colloquial sense was something I associated with frustratingly brief conversations on the doorstep, packed rooms in which people shouted at each other, and tedious public meetings where little got done, more than with any grand vision of a better society.

Small-d democracy, as I then understood it, basically meant a show of hands — and, since the loudest and most well-funded voices usually prevail in such a situation, the concept struck me as imperfect at best. It also, frankly, smacked of left-wing naivete: the implication of demands for more democracy being that a majority of people agreed with us already, which was rarely my experience canvassing in elections. (If so many were already onside, after all, why did we always seem to be losing?) While working for a local member of Parliament I met many inspiring community leaders, but also more than a fair number of cranks peddling petitions and championing causes you might diplomatically call quixotic. Wherever the road to a better world ultimately lay, it seemed, it couldn’t possibly run through that.

In retrospect, I don’t think my instincts were all entirely wrong (though they were incomplete).