A People's Assembly can heal the wounds
This article was originally published on The Guardian.
Case study
The Guardian view on Britain's broken politics: a people's assembly can heal the wounds.
The next government should act upon calls for a constitutional convention to reform our flawed democracy.
The world needs a wash and a week’s rest,” wrote WH Auden in his 1947 poem The Age of Anxiety. It has certainly felt that way in Britain at times, during three and a half years of frenzied stalemate over Brexit. But instead of a time-out, the country faces the first December general election for almost 100 years. As voters are called to the polling booths once again, a third national vote in under four years points to a democracy in crisis rather than one in rude health.
The shortcomings of our political culture and institutions have been brutally exposed since 2016. An adversarial system found itself unable, in a hung parliament, to resolve a nation-defining issue that transcended normal party politics. The flames of discord have been fanned on social media and public opinion has become dangerously polarised. The courts were obliged to intervene as a prime minister lacking a popular mandate played fast and loose with the constitution.
Brexit is not the only area of paralysis and dysfunction in the body politic. Successive parliaments have shown a shaming inability to find cross-party unity in dealing with the crisis in social care, which will deepen as the population ages. When it comes to the climate emergency, optimistic dates for achieving net-zero emissions targets have been set by all the main parties, but the roadmap to that outcome remains vague at best. Meanwhile, our first-past-the-post voting system continues to distort election outcomes, creating seats so safe that the vitality is sucked out of local democracy and parliamentary majorities are delivered by a minority share of the vote. Online, hopes that the digital age might unleash a new era of participatory democracy have given way to concern over the bullying, violent tone of much debate and the effect of unregulated political content on Facebook and other platforms.
Confronted with huge challenges, Britain needs a better, more inclusive and less polarised debate. The call from organisations across civil society to rethink and reform the way we do politics, published in the Guardian this week, is therefore welcome. The signatories, including the Equality Trust and the Electoral Reform Society, advocate the formation of a special people’s assembly – a citizens’ convention – after the election. Its members would be selected at random, as for jury service. They would convene over the course of two years, before making proposals on democratic and constitutional reform. Parliament would be mandated to act on their recommendations.
The merits of this kind of approach have already been demonstrated in Ireland, where a randomly selected assembly of 99 citizens met over an 18-month period and came to a consensus on the first reforms to abortion laws for 35 years. Their proposals were accepted by parliament and eventually endorsed by the public, in a referendum notable for the civility with which it was conducted.
Ruth Fox, the director of the Hansard Society, has warned that “the public reputation of parliament and MPs is at a nadir”. A special assembly, running in tandem with the new parliament, could help detoxify troubled times and provide a bridge between Westminster and the public. Most importantly, by creating the circumstances for informed dialogue between people from diverse backgrounds holding different views, it could showcase the political virtues of tolerance and compromise. MPs have already committed to part-funding a citizens’ assembly on the climate emergency next year. The next government should go further and take forward the proposal of a constitutional convention.
Featured News
See all news >
Degrowth on the way to a steady state economy webinar recording
25 February 2022
Our first webinar in the Economy of Enough 2022 series featured Hugh Ferguson presenting on ...
Read more >

Biocapacity: living within our local limits webinar recording
13 November 2021
The recording for the November 2021 webinar with Dr Ella Susanne Lawton on Biocapacity: livi...
Read more >

Renewables a placebo for climate change
06 November 2021
Our collective belief that renewable energy is the cure for fossil fuels may well turn out t...
Read more >

The fossil fuel discussion we’re not having
30 October 2021
Let’s stop pretending that a fast enough transition away from fossil fuels is actually under...
Read more >

How much money is too much?
30 October 2021
OCD core group member Jack Santa Barbara weighs the value of natural capital against financi...
Read more >

Climate change’s biggest myth
15 October 2021
Our Climate Declaration core group member Pat Baskett explains why - if we want even a chanc...
Read more >

The climate clock is ticking
29 September 2021
New Zealand is dragging its feet taking action on what's supposed to be an emergency. Our Cl...
Read more >

Managing without growth: slower by design webinar recording
26 September 2021
Peter Victor, author of "Managing without Growth. Slower by Design, not Disaster", is Profes...
Read more >

NZ’s dairy problem: Growing crops to feed animals to feed humans was never economic
09 September 2021
Dairy farming is NZ's biggest climate change problem, and was never a cost-effective way to ...
Read more >

What's wrong with NZ's electricity set-up?
22 August 2021
The reason for the recent electricity black-out has deep roots. Our Climate Declaration core...
Read more >