A couple of years ago a small group of us were invited into parliament to discuss Labour’s plans for democratic reform. When we arrived we were handed a document containing the policies the shadow cabinet office team had managed to steer through the party machine. I read it carefully, then gave my honest response: “This is less radical than Blair in 1997.”

So it transpired. While Labour’s 2019 manifesto offered bold solutions to the economic and environmental crises, it had notably little to say about the deep democratic alienation felt across the country – the sense that politics is broken, driving so many to vote to “take back control”. A sense that was justified.

Travelling around the country before the election, it became clear that this constitutional conservatism was disastrous. Again and again, people would rail against elite rule. They would say “they’re all liars”, and “I don’t trust any of them”. But rather than voting Labour for a new politics, many were voting Tory to “get Brexit done”, to get politics out of the way.

Had Labour articulated this yearning for change by raging against elite rule and giving people the chance to vote against the hated political system, it could have won. Instead, the party promised to use politics to improve our lives – and millions simply didn’t believe it.

In a federal UK, sovereignty would lie not with the 'crown in parliament' but with the citizens of the country

In many ways they were right not to. Britain is the least democratic democracy in the western world. We have the most centralised government in Europe; a quasi-feudal voting system; a civil service that’s increasingly outsourced to the Big Four accountancy firms; and a network of overseas territories and crown dependencies that, along with the constitutionally absurd City of London, forms the plumbing of the world’s money laundry.

And that’s before I mention the embarrassment of the House of Lords, our mostly oligarch-owned media, the dark money shaping public debate, or the lack of a democratic codified constitution – a rare absence that puts us in the distinguished company of Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Where normal democracies recognise that sovereignty lies with the people, Britain has always located it in “the crown in parliament”, a magician’s flourish that allows the ruling class to quietly get on with the business of ruling over us.

Labour’s leadership hopefuls seem to agree that the party needs to up its democratic game. Having been rent asunder by Scottish independence and Brexit, only fools continue to chant the old Labourist mantra that people aren’t interested in the distribution of political power.

Clive Lewis went first and furthest, backing proportional representation, Scotland’s right to self-determination and a referendum on the future of the monarchy. He didn’t make it through the first round – partly because fellow MPs didn’t like his suggestion that they should face more democratic accountability, too – but he did set the tone. Lisa Nandy launched her campaign by calling for devolution of decision-making to “every town, city, region and nation in the UK”.

Next was Rebecca Long-Bailey, calling for “a democratic revolution to take power out of the hands of unaccountable elites”. “The British state needs a seismic shock,” she wrote in the Guardian, “to prise it open at all levels to the people – their knowledge, their skills, their demands.”

Then it was Keir Starmer’s turn to lament our broken political system: “We need to end the monopoly of power in Westminster … We need a new constitutional settlement: a large-scale devolution of power and resources. This will involve building a new long-term political and constitutional consensus. I believe that could best be built on the principle of federalism.”

The Labour leadership candidates , left to right: Keir Starmer, Lisa Nandy, Rebecca Long-Bailey and Emily Thornberry. Photograph: Getty Images

With a broad consensus that Corbyn’s economic proposals were mighty popular and with little difference emerging between the candidates on climate breakdown, it seems that any serious policy debate in this leadership election will be about the other great crisis we face: the death of democracy.

We’re not very good at this conversation in the UK. Whereas Victorian Britons proudly lauded our uncodified constitution, these days we pretend that we don’t have one, imagining it’s only Americans who do.

To work out what the contenders are saying, we must start with a simple question: are they trying to keep the show on the road? Or are they genuinely trying to democratise the UK? Are they proposing changes because they want to bend our ancient system to fit the modern age, demonstrating the centuries-old adaptability of the British ruling class? Or are they trying to actually end the elite rule at the core of our system?

Specific policies – on the Lords, or local government, or the right to self-determination, or proportional representation – are important. But the way to sort the democrats from the technocrats is to look at how the respective candidates understand power.

Each of the candidates has only given us a peek at their thoughts about democracy so far, and it will be interesting to watch the conversation unfurl. But there are some things we can learn.

In her comments, Nandy talks about “devolution” – which means lending power from above. “Power devolved is power retained,” as Tony Blair said, quoting Enoch Powell. Nandy refers to power “cascading down”, as though democracy starts at the centre.

This is really just an extension of the hodge-podge approach started by Blair in 1997 and continued by George Osborne when he created new mayoralties. As Margaret Thatcher showed when she abolished the Greater London Council, such constitutional tinkering can usually be undone from the top. “More devolution” isn’t a constitutional revolution, it’s another adaptation in the gradual evolution of a system that goes back to 1660. Nandy’s team tell me that they are currently debating how far her soon-to-be-released manifesto should go on this very question. If she really hears the rage against the political machine, she’ll go a lot further.

Starmer’s comments so far are more specific yet more confused. He talks both about devolution and “the principle of federalism”. But these are not different words for the same thing. They are fundamentally opposing principles.

Where devolution sees power lent out from the centre, federalism sees it rising up from the peoples. And so in a federal UK, sovereignty would lie not with the “crown in parliament” but with the citizens of the country. As such, it would have to be codified in a written constitution.

Long-Bailey hints at another approach. In her Guardian article, she said: “Politicians themselves will never upend the political system in the interests of the many not the few, but our movement can help the people of Britain make that change.”

She supports the right of the Scottish people to decide our constitutional future and has argued that the Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly should be “on an equal footing” with Westminster – which means ending the principle of Westminster sovereignty, so unravelling much of our broken system.

A member of her team explained the broad approach. “Constitutional reform must be anti-establishment, not technocratic. [It] must speak to people’s lack of trust in the political system and the ability of politicians to deliver.”

Whether she will follow the logic from there to a fundamental rewriting of the rules of British democracy with a new democratic constitution fit for the modern era we will find out as Labour’s leadership election splashes along.

What should such a constitution include? That should be up to a constitutional convention to hammer out. But it shouldn’t preclude Labour proposing ideas. Rather than cronies in the House of Lords marking the Commons’ homework, why not appoint a jury of citizens to oversee each bill? Why not look to our European neighbours and enshrine power at the local level, making democratic participation part of our everyday lives, rather than a spectator sport? Why not learn from the successful experiments with participatory budgeting in Latin America, and allow citizens to decide how their city budgets are spent?

How can the UK justify refusing Scotland’s right to self-determination? Surely a union that is not a voluntary association cannot truly think of itself as democratic? If Brexit was a howl of unvoiced Englishness, why not let them have a parliament, and let them see how wonderfully diverse they are? The Cayman Islands became a British territory under the treaty of Madrid in 1670, and remains a British tax haven to this day. Why not force it – and the British Virgin Islands, Gibraltar and Bermuda – to accept UK corporation tax and transparency laws, or relinquish our military and diplomatic protection and become independent?

The UK could follow the examples of the world’s newer constitutions, such as those of Namibia and Bolivia, and enshrine the rights of our ecosystems. Or recognise the threats posed by mass surveillance and develop digital rights. How can we justify an electoral system that usually produces rightwing governments in a country where most people usually vote left or liberal?

If we built a political system from the bottom up today, it would look nothing like Britain’s. If Labour wants to look like a party of the future, it needs to start having this debate. Perhaps, though, this is the wrong question. The next Labour leader has five years of opposition ahead of them. As the SNP says, they won’t even be able to deliver a pizza. What they will have power over is their own party.

In the recent election Boris Johnson was seen to break the rules of a fusty institution to deliver the change people voted for. He prorogued parliament, dismissed MPs powerful in the previous regime, and demonstrated his will to “get Brexit done”.

Jeremy Corbyn, on the other hand, failed to seriously democratise Labour. He failed to end the party’s absurd assumption towards seats for life. If the next Labour leader wants to demonstrate a commitment to democracy, then they should ensure their party embodies the change it says it wishes to see in the world.

• Adam Ramsay is co-editor of openDemocracy.net UK and author of 42 Reasons to Support Scottish Independence