One In Five Are Happy With MPs - How Is It That High?

So, who thinks British politics is working well? A breathtakingly high 17 per cent of the population, apparently. According to a survey by the Policy Institute at King's College London, this level of customer satisfaction places the UK right on a par with Russia, where large numbers of voters are currently being forcibly sent to their deaths carrying sleeping mats they've had to buy themselves.

- Tom Peck

Obviously, the first question is how on earth is it so high? That one in five people think UK politics is functional is a remarkable outcome. The underlying data does not reveal whether researchers accidentally placed one in five of their research calls to the same tea-drinking cartoon dog inside a burning house. The figure of 17 per cent also ranks the UK well ahead of France, on 13 per cent, where people are rioting in the streets, and the USA on 12 per cent, where the former president has been charged with 34 criminal offences - which so far don't even relate to his role in an attempted coup in which a police officer was killed.

It hardly needs to be stated that democracies only work if people believe in them, so it is a relief to see that the UK, generally speaking, is not tired of democracy itself; it's just tired of how it's working. And it must be said, who can blame them? Five prime ministers in seven years, only one (or arguably two) of whom the people actually voted for. It feels like every summer contains a Potemkin election for a new government, complete with hustings events and televised debates, but at the end of which the viewers realise the only people who actually get a say are a rapidly diminishing band of the very elderly, the vast majority of whom are personally responsible for all of the enormous problems the country faces.