I HAVE just heard a new use of the word “democracy” in politics.

It was during the small hours of yesterday morning. The broadcaster Matthew Bannister was chairing a small poll-watching panel for BBC Radio 5 Live, from Derby, and I was one of his guests. As we waited for results, Bannister filled in the time by going over to representatives of the various parties across the nation for thoughts and news.

I took no note of the name of the Liberal Democrat spokesman whom Bannister asked about the prospects for the British National Party, but the answer astonished me. He lamented the possibility that the BNP might win anything as “a bad night for democracy” if it were to happen. Everyone round my table, including a Conservative European candidate and a Labour council candidate, nodded caringly.

“A bad night for democracy.” A bad night, that is, if in an election held by secret ballot on a universal adult suffrage, a small party advancing opinions held by many but with which the major parties disagreed, were to gather votes? A bad night for immigrants, certainly; a bad night for liberal values, too; but a bad night for democracy?

What then would be a good night for democracy? How are Labour, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats using the word “democracy” if when they see the number of voters holding an opinion translated into the election of candidates who share that opinion, they think democracy is under threat?

What is under threat is the received wisdom of the political class, which increasingly represents (as Peter Oborne argues in The Spectator) a professional priesthood affronted by a challenge to its monopoly.

Nor was this Lib-Dem spokesman alone in drawing up his skirts against what sounded like an infestation of rats. One caller suggested that if increasing the voter-turnout by new voting systems resulted in small “single-issue” parties doing better, then this attempt to make democracy work better had “backfired”.

Down in the 5 Live studio in London, a Labour spokesman remarked that there wasn’t much that he and his Tory counterpart would agree upon in the long hours ahead, but both would regard the rise of small extremist parties such as the BNP as a tragedy.

There is one circumstance in which the election of a party could fairly be called a bad night for democracy. If that party was itself opposed to holding further free elections then electing it might, perversely, be the end to democracy. But the BNP proposes no such thing. It has administrative proposals for immigration and emigration. I disagree with it. But no theory of democracy of which I have ever heard disqualifies others from taking a different view.

Later I listened to Liberal Democrats fulminating against the Green Party as though any advances the Greens might make were a kind of mischievous impertinence, contrary to orderly public administration. And everywhere we hear Conservatives talking about the United Kingdom Independence Party as if it were an impostor to the democratic process and somehow cheating: stealing support which should rightly go to Tory candidates.

When I woke up later that morning it was to hear Radio 5 Live still broadcasting, the results thus far being chewed over by the Tory spokesman, Caroline Spelman, and the Labour Minister, Hazel Blears. Both women would, from time to time, desist from bickering among themselves to murmur a shared and pious concern about parties like the BNP.

Do you not get the impression, as I do, that the three largest parties in England regard the representation of the people as a kind of closed shop: theirs by right? We hear all three of our mainstream parties openly and without shame discussing what system of voting, weighing votes, funding political parties and requiring deposits from candidates, will be best calculated to prevent the rise of small or “extremist” parties.

Such calculations are disgraceful. If a belief runs strongly among the public at large then a democratic politician should either adopt it, or make his case against it honestly and with what force he can muster. To treat the new force as though it were some kind of infection to the body politic, to be cast out and isolated, is tantamount to treating its supporters — our countrymen, possibly millions of them — as though they too were pariahs, beyond the reach of reasonable argument.

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