Governance of Britain

There should be an English citizen’s jury to deliberate on how devolution-max, dependent on the outcome of the Calman Commission, impacts upon England. More power moving away from the UK Parliament will damage English voters even more.

Citizens of England also need to discuss the Government’s attitude to England. The Scottish claim was signed by all the Scottish Labour MPs, apart from Tam Dalyell. In 1997, with the advent of the Labour Government of the UK, one third of that initial cabinet (8 out of 24) had signed the Scottish Claim of Right and were thus pivotal in influencing the Labour UK Government, which issued the white paper, the Scotland Devolution Bill 1998.

Is it wrong for those MPs that signed the Scottish Claim of Right to now deny that same sovereign right to the people of England?

Let’s discuss that!

It seems sensible. But it also seems sensible to acknowledge that it is the people, not the Government, that are sovereign - as happened in Scotland.

If we want to get down to brass tacks we should begin at the beginning: For whom are we doing this, and who should be the final arbiter?

The answer in both cases must be “the people”.

At the moment the dead hand of Gordon Brown and a necrotic government weigh heavy on our shoulders. Citizen juries or summits are essentially “focus groups”, and they are no substitute for a constitutional convention with a view to referenda.

Forgive my scepticism but I have little faith in the Establishment to take any notice of any idea that they don’t like the sound of.

The whole concept is a waste of taxpayers money and should be abolished.

This site and this debate has NOTHING to do with justice, it is a party political exercise with the sole purpose of bolstering the Labour party’s unionist agenda in response to electoral advances made by the SNP and Plaid Cymru.

This site shows that the true definition of “British” is being bullied and cajoled into denying your identity as a Welsh, Scottish, English or Cornish person.

The Calman Commission has been axed due to lack of interest.
The Governance of britain project and the Calman Commission are both projects that were set up to guide people away from the main questions.
I notice that the meetings in the video clips around the country(England only) are not well attended.
Any recommendations from the governance of britain project can be rejected by stormont, the scottish parliament and the welsh assembly, although their mp’s might be inclined to vote any measures on England only.
The truth of it all is that the establishment want England and England only to be britain at all costs.

These “techniques” you want to discuss will only apply in England.
When in England I get Britishness rammed down my throat. When I cross a border into Scotland or Wales I get my Englishness rammed down my throat.
What “techniques” do you propose for that problem in order to build a “framework for Greater Citizen engagement”?
I have disengaged with Britishness and the wallet-emptying, sporran-filling United Kingdom.

The main issue which would benefit from Citizens’ Summits and Citizens’ Juries is of course the English Question. Unlike Scotland,Wales and N.Ireland England is denied its own assembly/parliament where the views of the people can be expressed through their elected representitives.
MPs seem incapable of doing this, constrained by British party politics etc. etc.
English people should be asked their views on this matter?
Clearly English Elected Regional Assemblies are a no go. Why not consider the need for a referendum on an English Parliament?

I notice the sub headings at the top of this thread are ‘Democracy’ and ‘Public Engagement’ - both of which are sorely absent from England.

Democracy - in the true sense of the word, means some sort of national representation. We do not have that in England. And having no national representation automatially excludes the English public from any meaningful ‘engagement’ whatsoever.

Citizens Summits and Citizens Juries certainly will not promote democracy or public engagement with the people of England. For a start, who makes up these quasii quangos, and how they operate will be of critical importance. My guess is that they will contain the usual suspects, the busy-bodies and the yes-men that habitually seem to get involved in these committees - and they will inevitably operate within a bubble of self importification. One thing is for certain, they will not be made up of ordinary men and women - because if they were, then the Government might not like the answers and suggestions they receive. Administrations in power have an habitual tendency of ignoring suggestions they don’t like - and of stage managing any ‘consultation’ they profess to engage in.

To illustrate the point, I am reminded of the great ‘Ordinary Blokes for the Lords’ initiative - soon after Labour won power in 1997. To a tumult of a working man’s cornet and a black pudding supper, a grand committee was set up to select ordinary people to accept the ermine and take a seat in the Lords.

Ordinary blokes were asked to write in, fill in the questionaire and submit themselves for selection to the first tranche of 20 odd newly created ordinary Lords….

We waited, expectantly. Would the local lollipop man be selected? What about the Dinner Lady - or maybe that bloke that fixes your car?…..

And then the great day arrived. The Committee chair stood up and said that the ordinary people who had applied, were just ‘too ordinary’, He said he was worried that if these ordinary people had been accepted, they might be totally overwhelmed by the Lordsy experience. So instead, the chairperson selected some not-so-ordinary people for the first battalion of ordinary Lordy people. He selected such ordinary people as Sir Paul Condon, the recently retired Commissioner of the Met’…

After that first, initial induction of not-very-ordinary blokes into the Lords, the idea for ‘common Lords’ was quietly dropped by Tony Blair….

I have a feeling the Citizen initiatives will be going the same way.

Elspeth,

Your most recent comment demonstrates the point that I made at the top. The Scots are debating their own fate through the National Conversation and the Calman Commission, and what do the English get?…..A Governance of Britain roadshow!

The blinkered focus on Britain and Britishness obscures the fact that the British identity is multi-national, one of those nationalities being English.

To be British is to be English……. as the Welsh are allowed to be Welsh, the Scots allowed to be Scottish and the English allowed to be regionalised, under the name of British.

British ideas of ‘Fairness’ as good old Gordie will tell us are important to the ‘British’. So why are the English not treated fairly by this Government? How come the Welsh and Scottish have their own parliaments, but the English do not??

Devolution, if it needs to exist, should exist FOR ALL!!!

I’d suggest that the right people won’t turn up because there is no coherent ideology behind this project.

It doesn’t start from the principle that the people are sovereign, it won’t produce a recommendation that begins “We the people”.

It fails to inspire. Like the Calman Commission in Scotland it is top-down. Brown, Straw and Wills are uninspiring Establishment figures who have contributed to the diminuition of Britishness and under whose tutelege Britain has become more centralised and authoritarian.

What we need is a people’s convention that recognises the sovereignty of the people. Something anti-authoritarian and radical.

Just look at this website. It has a British flag and it’s called “Governance of Britain”. It starts from a position that sovereignty should lie with Britain, and rolls out a load of Brits and government ministers to reinforce that position.

What if I disagree; does that mean that I’m not one of the “right people”? What if I say that sovereignty should lie with the people of England, Scotland and Wales and should be willingly ceded to a confederal Britain, rather than assumed by an imperial Britain; is it heretical to suggest that sovereignty and democracy should flow upwards from the individual in a way that reflects and represents their identity, rather than have sovereignty begin with the state and handed down?

The very philosophy of Gordon Brown is authoritarian. He’s not the man for this job of rediscovering Britishness because he’s already so deeply entrenched in his very whiggish inhibiting idea of Britain.

I propose that enshrined within the constitution of the United Kingdom should be the following. The right of a UK citizen to raise a petition ( of a yet to be determined sufficiency of citizens within an agreed period of time) for a referendum of the UK population to be taken against the imposition of or repeal of an act of parliament or other legal instrument that does not enjoy the popular support of those signitures to the petition. The intent of my proposal is to provide a means by which citizens can curb the excesses of what has been described in the past by others as the elected dictatorship of Great Britain by all powerfull executive government.

In addition I propose a system of primary elections for members of parliament in which the whole of the electorate within a constituency can participates in the selection of all candidates for all of the parties contending the election. The intention of this proposal is to ensure that contestants enjoy the popular support of the electorate and not just a very few party activists. It’s further intention is to give members of parliament a more democratic mandate from the electorate and thus arm them against a dictatorial party machine and government executive.

Yours sincerely

David Farmer

To get an idea of what a large-scale citizen’s summit might be like, and what kind of thing it could be used for, take a look at http://www.americaspeaks.org/ and its 21st century town meetings and summits. To get a feel for them, look at the videos (http://www.americaspeaks.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=page.viewpage&pageid=665).

Once you have 6000 people (at tables of 10) discussing what to do with the twin towers site in New York, or the rebuilding of New Orleans, there is no way a government can control what comes out of it. Of course, they can refuse to implement the recommendations, but then, under normal citizens jury rules, they have to publicly give detailed reasons why not.

Such large samples of the population are not quasi-QANGOs, selected like the people’s Lords. However, to ensure that they are a diverse sample, it needs to be an independent organisation that publicises the event and recruits participants.

Continued discussion on the National Framework for Greater Citizen Engagement? Is this some sort of joke?

Try this as an idea. When the people of one of Europes REAL regions produces a petition with 50,000 signatures on it calling for the devolution of powers down to a body governance for their region how about you listen to them and engage in dialogue as opposed to sticking the petition in the bin?

Cornwall Council’s Feb 2003 MORI Poll showed 55% in favor of a democratically-elected, fully-devolved regional assembly for Cornwall, (this was an increase from 46% in favor in a 2002 poll). In 2000 The Cornish Constitutional Convention launched a campaign that resulted in a petition signed by 50,000 people calling for a fully devolved Cornish assembly. The campaign generated support from across the political spectrum in Cornwall and to date has been the largest expression of popular support for devolution in the whole of the United Kingdom.

So far the UK government has ignored all requests for greater Cornish homerule and instead, along with the Lib Dems, has forced an unwanted Unitary Authority on Cornwall.

If the challenge is to engage (or re-engage) the democratically distant and disinterested then we must consider the nature of engagement; for what purpose and at what stage of the policy/legislative cycle is government engaging? What expectations exist on the part of both government around levels of engagement – both qualitative and quantitative. Realistically, what can we actually expect of citizens who are time-poor and have more immediate concerns about their own and their families day to day lives?

There are many factors impeding effective engagement. Some of these are short term, others are not and require a more strategic and long-term approach to resolve. If greater citizen engagement is a pre-requisite for a more democratic society, then the barriers must be overcome and the degree to which this happens will determine in part at least the degree to which democracy can be revitalised.

For many, engagement often starts with something issues-based and close to home. The reality is that by-and-large people are more interested in what directly affects them and their neighbours than in the macro issues – local issues are real! A positive experience here can and does lead some to feel motivated to further engagement (and vice-versa!). Effort concentrated on making local consultations effective will pay dividends for engagement at higher levels.

Second, trust is a key factor. Research shows that citizens do not trust politicians and feel disconnected from the policy loop. Without trust, constructive engagement is difficult if not impossible. Re-building trust is not a short term matter but it would be helped by an attitude of openness and accountability in engagement and by government being able to demonstrate that engagement leads to results. Hansard Society research on online engagement shows that openness and clarity are vital to a successful outcome (www.digitaldialogues.org.uk).

This leads to a third consideration of the barriers that prevent effective engagement taking place. Time and space are clear, but our own research (Hansard Society’s Audit of Political Engagement) shows also that there is a worrying trend whereby many ‘ordinary citizens’ do not feel that they are competent to take part. This is concerning and perhaps the result of a rise of the technocratic elite. Despite pro-engagement rhetoric governments actually value expert opinion above those of citizens. In some instances, citizens can in fact be seen as problematic by government and this does not motivate people to get involved.

Solutions lie in many areas: a cultural shift within government such that the views of citizens are not only sought but valued and given equal status, secondly the removal (or reduction) of barriers through the use of new digital media to promote any time, any place engagement alongside (not instead of) traditional face-to-face engagement tools. For this to occur democratically there must also be a requirement on government to overcome the digital deficit that is creating an underclass and further disadvantaging those who are already the most disadvantaged in our society (and the least likely to partake in democracy).

Consider also that outmoded models of governance look stale and out of touch in the digital age, where content is user-generated and viral networks are more effective than top-down control. In this age, engagement might not start with government and government needs to be equally comfortable following as well as leading.

Holding all of the above together and making it possible (in this simplistic version at least), is the long-term need to promote education, not only in democratic processes, values and engagement but also in information literacy so that all citizens can be active and informed participants in their own futures.

In short, the solution is two-fold: increase the motivation to participate and reduce the barriers to that participation.

Andy Williamson
Director, eDemocracy Programme, Hansard Society