Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tolhurst, and this week as we head into a general election year,

we're taking a look at the state of democracy in the UK, from the campaigns to alter our

voting system to controversial new rules on voter ID, changed on how much parties

can spend, transparency and what can be improved before Brits head to the polls sometime in

2024. With me to look at all that and more, I'm delighted to be joined by Dr Jess Garland,

Director of Policy and Research at the Electoral Reform Society, Naomi Smith, CEO at the Campaign

Group, Best for Britain, and Alistair Carmichael, former cabinet minister, a Liberal Democrat MP.

So I'll start with you, Naomi.

I'm going to ask each of you really what the kind of key area of kind of democratic deficit that you guys are interested in

and what you think needs to be really improved before we get to an election at whatever time of the year we do end up going to the polls.

I can't be quick with that answer.

Okay.

There are so, we need so much democratic renewal.

There is often a very big focus on the voting system and Best of Britain has campaigned for a change

to that to something that makes votes a little bit more equal than they are at the moment,

but it would be a necessary but insufficient

part of the whole scale constitutional reform we need at the moment.

Trust in politics is incredibly low.

And in no small part, that is related to things like unelected power, dodgy money being poured

into our voting systems, et cetera, et cetera.

So PR proportional representation is a big area focus for us, but it is by no means the only

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