Melissa Lane's blog

Melissa Lane joins the discussion of the possible strategies for democratic reform post-expenses launched by Anthony Barnett in his recent post.

Anthony Barnett > Peter Oborne > Melissa Lane

Anthony's 7 options is an excellent clarification of the choices we face.  I also agree with Peter Oborne that the rehabilitation of parliament is critical.  Attacks on parliament as a meaningless charade from both the left and the right were a key part of the delegitimisation of liberalism in the Weimar Republic, echoed contemporaneously in France and Italy especially.  If people give up their faith in parliament, right-wing 'solutions' will be quickly offered.  

So the question is how to go forward: how to combine a meaningful expression of public opinion with the prospect of real change within the actual system.  I would argue for an iterative process: start with a series of citizen juries, say one per region, to generate a shortlist of ideas to feed into public meetings, and then synthesize those results back into a citizen jury panel. Or, start with just the pure local meetings, but then work up from the first round to a more focused agenda for the second round.  As Philip Pettit has pointed out, people can participate as 'editors' as well as 'authors': forms of participation will have to be diverse if the whole process is going to be both inclusive and productive.

This is a talk given by Melissa Lane at the session on Liberty, sovereignty and republicanism - Can the Leveller tradition be revived in the 21st century? at the Convention on Modern Liberty

Melissa Lane (King's College, Cambridge): The panel has already brought to light many of the major themes connected with the Levellers: freedom of religion and toleration; liberty from oppression, which is viewed as tyranny and slavery; popular sovereignty, or government as based on the ever-revocable consent of the people interpreted broadly, including the ordinary poor.  Indeed, against longstanding assumptions that the Levellers were little educated or more saintly than followers of Machiavelli, the humanist, radical, popular nature of Leveller republicanism has been well established by S.D. Glover.   To what has been said so far, focusing on the control of the executive, I would add the important Leveller preoccupation with the control also of the legislative or, in their terms, the ‘Representative’:  a Commons (parliament) which is free from the negative veto of Crown and Lords, but which is also controlled in its exercise of power by annual or biennial elections and a quiver of classical devices such as the rotation of offices, term limits, removal and scrutiny, designed to check ‘corrupt interests’.  Not only the fact of control by elected representatives, but the nature of that control, is a major Leveller concern which has clear ramifications for politics today.