We've gone from that to the rise around the world off the three p's of polarization, populism and pessimism in the disaster of Brexit, with the basement levels of approval for our major party leaders unprecedented in modern times andan the sense that government is unable to tackle some of the most important issues we face.

I think we in England and in the UK have our own version off these democratic ills.

Inequality is entrenched, social mobility has stalled, public services are crumbling and all around us are signs of social stress, from violent crime to higher levels off mental illness.

I think whatever happens now with Brexit, there is little evidence that the underlying anger and resentment that fueled it has subsided.

Things are bad, but with the effects of Brexit still to play out with the wounds of this appallingly handled process, still raw with the underlying cause is still untouched on with right wing populists ever ready to exploit the situation.

I fear that things could get even worse.

So they seem to be two main ways that commentators have responded to the problems besetting liberal democracy on the first is to treat it as little more than a bump in the road.

For liberal warriors like Steven Pinker, who spoke here at the R S a last year, it can seem that we have nothing to be worried about but worry itself.

People are healthier.

They're better off their more tolerant, more peaceful than at any time in our history.

To overcome public disillusionment, we merely need to reassert the benefits of market democracies and stop listening to self serving critics and populists.

And in a way, that's not a view that should be ignored.

In many ways, people today do have opportunities and a quality of life that a few generations ago would have been viewed with amazement by many.

If we want to have hope for the future, it's clear that we do need to acknowledge the progress off the past, and in particular, I think we should recall the achievements of the post war era when brave governments rebuilt nations out of the ashes of war.

When they increased living standards, they grew modern welfare states and laid the foundations for the personal freedoms and legal rights.

But we now cherish, but nevertheless I reject the implicit complacency of that view and its lack of ambition.

It misses out the plight off the world's poorest billion.

It misses the way our own and other liberal democracies have in recent decades, and particularly the period since the credit crunch been scarred by entrenched inequality by rising insecurity on the devastation of our public services.

But also I rejected, because this story of continuous progress has a cruel twist.

The growing and devastating impact of market led economic growth on our environment and the looming climate crisis.

The alternative view is more gloomy.

It sees no way back for liberal democracy.

It predicts the future, which involves ever greater polarization and social conflict, leading eventually to some kind of breakdown.

One, perhaps, in which the role of democracy has downgraded and society is increasingly run by a technocratic elite who may or may not have benign intentions a kind of one party rule by Google or Facebook if you like.

And indeed there are some in the environment movement itself who watch the growing commitment of China to tackle environmental harms and climate change, and then in despair, tender eyes across the Atlantic at a country that increasingly accepts the reality of climate change but has put a proud deny it in office now.

The evidence used to suggest that democracies were lower emitters, that they were better at taking steps on climate change, them authoritarian regimes.

But recent research from the University of Gothenburg argues that that's only the case in well functioning democracies free from corruption.

So the point is that it's not simply being notionally democratic.

That is enough.

It's also the quality of that democracy that matters.

And that's why I adopt a slightly different position on the crisis off liberal democracy.

I think the way to save it is to keep its core principles, of course, free and fair elections, the rule of law, freedom of speech and association, but fundamentally to change the way it works.

My anxiety here is that the great success story off liberal representative constitutional democracy organized around professional political parties, offering programs using mass communication and organized around elections, the 20th century success story of democracy.

One of its great merits was that It serves really effectively as a warning system when things were about to go wrong.

So these dump democracies aren't always the best coming up with the right solution first time, round or even second time around.

But they're very, very good hearing the bad news faster than any rival system.

Famously, you do not get famines under this kind of politics.

I'm not sure this challenge the climate emergency fits that model.

The information is all out there.

We know it.

And here we are, behaving like this.

And like this, I mean our politics.

What if the warning signals aren't working?

What if we could carry on like this long past the point where we needed to act?

I completely recognize the need for all the things that Caroline talked about.

This system needs all of that.

But extinction rebellion poses a different kind of challenge about other forms of democratic politics which are much more radical and much more direct.

And I think we have to be open to that possibility to that as we move forward through the next generation or more.

There are points at which we mustn't think that democratic reform is all about rescuing this woman politics.

We have to be open to the possibility that the 2.5 1000 years stories still got a long, long way to run on.

We can be collectively masters of our own fate.

But even the 250 year story and certainly the 50 100 years story at some point will need to be replaced with something else, Theo.