Civil society is on the cusp of remarkable change. In its report, Making good society, the independent Commission of Inquiry into the Future of Civil Society in the UK and Ireland states that it is impossible to imagine plausible responses to the greatest challenges of our time – including political distrust, economic crisis and climate change – without significant input from civil society.

I went to the Compass 'What the hell do we do now?' conference on Thursday, aka 'Do you have a theory of change, please?' A lot of the discussions were inside the comfort zones of the left. But John Harris, a Guardian regular, had a sense of the chasm that's now opened up between the public and the political class.

A constitution for the UK may be emerging, typically in the form of an official manual.  But what if “We the people” were to begin from the popular end of the debate? Here, Andrew Blick reviews a brave book that seeks to initiate that debate; while below John Jackson enters a dissenting note. 

Gordon, Richard, Repairing British Politics, Hart Publishing, 2010, £17.95

Though it would be easy to miss it the UK is in the process of developing a written constitution – of a sort. The Cabinet Office are currently drafting a document – under the mundane title of the “Cabinet Office manual” – which will set out the conventions and laws which it believes comprise what might be termed the “higher law” of the UK.

According to Gordon Brown, the published document will be the first stage of a process leading to a full  “conversation” about the future of the UK constitution, involving all parties and thorough public consultation. It is possible to object to the first draft of the UK constitution being produced in this closed fashion, but if it leads to the promised wider discussion (subject of course to the outcome of the General Election), then this outcome would be desirable. If and when such a debate occurs, Richard Gordon’s Repairing British Politics will make a valuable contribution.

John Jackson on Repairing British politics: A Blueprint for Constitutional Change by Richard Gordon.

For me one thing leaps out of Richard Gordon’s interesting and thought-provoking book. It is the difficulty of reconciling the proportional representation of political parties with the representation of “us”, the voters, in a system which can be described properly as a representative democracy. The nature of the difficulty becomes apparent so soon as an attempt is made – as Gordon has done – to deal with it in terms of a written constitution. In setting the scene Gordon remarks “ – our current political system consists of, in essence, a struggle for power between the two main parties. The minority parties are squeezed out so that they lack any effective representative interest. The Conservative and Labour parties are engaged not in representative politics but in power politics”.

The situation is worse than that. It is not just the minority parties that are squeezed out: it is the electorate itself. There is no recognition in any sense of the sovereignty of the people. The power that is fought for derives from the system that is imposed on us and not from any form of delegation by “we the people”.

Home Office minister Meg Hillier took a leap into la la land on today’s BBC Daily Politics Programme, claiming that if the government stopped locking up asylum seekers and their children, then the price of trafficked children would rise, putting more children at risk of trafficking.

I am not making this up. 

Hillier, who has three young children of her own, said: ‘Now with children being detained I’m faced with a number of options. One is that we just stop it altogether, but then we would have children, I think, with a very high price on them, because we’d actually be saying, if you have a child you will never be detained to be deported. And I think that it would raise the risk of child trafficking and put a very high price on a child, so I’d be very reluctant to go down that route.’  

How should we vote? By 'we' I mean all of us who are democrats: women and men who treasure liberty, regard our fellow citizens as our moral and political equals, want honest government, honourable leaders and an economic policy not motivated primarily by the urge to make Britain fit for global finance. My answer: coordinate our voting to achieve two things: 1) defeat Brown and Mandelson, 2) frustrate Cameron and Company's desire to take their turn at exercising the monarchical power of the UK's 'to the victor the spoils' electoral system, that Labour tragically failed to reform.

We should "hang" the two main parties.

The New Statesman has given me the chance to spell out my view. I assess the character and New Labour roots of the Brown-Mandelson government under the headings of global capitalism, inequality, authoritarianism and deception. I look at the weakness of the opposition.  Gerry Hassan in an email cheerfully described my solution as a makeshift, DIY popular front: of Lib Dems, nationalists, Greens, independents along with Labour and Tory MPs who have had the gumption to rebel and even Farage.

It is not the Statesman's view. And it is great to see some audacious editing and a willingness to open up the space for debate and argument (including David Marquand's disgareement). Please comment on the New Statesman's website when the article goes live and meanwhile buy it for yourself.

My name is Denny de la Haye, and I'm running for Parliament in Hackney South and Shoreditch. My manifesto is a little unusual... I'm proposing that instead of having my own policies, I will hold online polls to determine how I should vote in Parliament (there are three exceptions, which I'll talk about a bit later).

I've been involved in politics since I was a teenager, but never with party politics. I've always been part of campaigning organisations instead, trying to get parties and politicians to notice and care about the issues that affect me. As long as I can remember I've wished I could vote on issues, instead of voting to select a representative.

As the Internet, and particularly the web, has grown in popularity and functionality, its application to this idea is obvious. I believe that we're now in a position where it should be feasible to let people make their own decisions on the issues they care about, instead of devolving their responsibility to a barely-accountable representative who has to toe a party line in most of his or her votes.

Do we have to cut our national debt? our deficits? how fast? This is becoming one of the election issues - as opposed to leaders' wives - that is actually being aired.

Anthony Barnett on OK got taken to task in the comments for intuiting his way to the economic sense of the different parties comments on the deficit, and Rosemary Bechler's defense (in a comment) was an outright rejection of Micawberism.

So here are some very basic clarifications.

One of openDemocracy's key projects is to strengthen the global public sphere by “bringing people and ideas together". The most vibrant, successful and scaleable of our activities of the past year has been to bring together published web content with live meetings: authors with micro-audiences; groups that meet regularly to discuss material published on openDemocracy. These decentralised initiatives powerfully create a culture of serious deliberation extending into a social sphere what the web has already initiated.

I have a post up on the Left Foot Forward blog looking at the leaked proposals to abolish the Lords and replace it with an elected "Senate":

How should reformers greet the government’s proposals, leaked to the Telegraph last weekend, to abolish the House of Lords and replace it with an elected “Senate”? The full details of the plans are not yet known, but justice secretary Jack Straw is expected to propose a senate of 300 elected members who must be resident in the UK for tax purposes and can be ejected via a US-style “recall” ballot.

They will serve terms of 15 years with a third of the senate elected at one time, by a proportional voting system, on the same day as elections to the Commons. The Conservatives have condemned the planned announcement as a pre-election manoeuvre designed to present Labour as the party of “reform” and cosy up to the Liberal Democrats in anticipation of a hung Parliament, whilstLib Dem home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne accused the government of a “deathbed conversion”.

As with Labour’s last-ditch plan for an AV referendum, it is hard not to agree about the cynical nature of the timing, especially given Labour’s 13 years in office when they had all the opportunities they needed to reform the Lords.

Arundhati Roy is an inspirational writer and campaigner. Winner of the 1997 Booker Prize she is perhaps now best known for activism on issues of social justice and economic inequality, in her home country India but also worldwide. Philosophy Football have turned Arundhati's vision of another, feminised world into a T-shirt. Available from www.philosophyfootball.com we have 5 to be won in our March competition.

What was the name of Arundhati Roy's novel which won the 1997 Booker prize?

To enter email your answer with name, preferred T-shirt size and full address to admin@philosophyfootball.com No purchase necessary to enter, entries close 31 March 2010.

Congratulations! To Naveen Kumar, Rosanne Purnwasie, Bronwyn O'Keefe, Alex Rhys-Taylor and Paolo Riva. All winners of a Free Nelson Mandela anniversary T-shirt in our February competition, also available from www.philosophyfootball.com 

I blogged recently (here and here) about Labour's wretched attempts to politicise the storage of innocent *ahem* "un-convicted" people's DNA, flaunting their violation of the European Convention on Human Rights as one of the top reasons to vote for them. Gordon Brown had accused civil libertarians who protest against keeping innocents' DNA on criminal databases of playing into the hands of rapists. And just when you thought the party couldn't sink any lower, this was swiftly followed  by a campaign video, blogged by Tom Ash, telling us burglars will vote Tory thanks to their opposition to Labour's DNA hoarding. (And to think ministers, like Michael Wills and Jack Straw, accuse the civil liberties lobby of being shrill and scare-mongering!). 

Now, via Alan Travis, we learn the government is planning to ditch a compromise with the Tories on DNA retention in the criminal and justice bill in order to make it an "election issue" and try and split the party.

I just listened to Nick Clegg on the BBC's World at One. I felt he was trying to be honest about the financial crisis the UK is facing. I don't understand what the deficit is we are all supposed to halve, who it is owed to, what it was spent on. I have a feeling that Labour's plans are not as Neil Kinnock put it in a letter to the Guardian, well "measured" and the Tories, I feel, are positioning not levelling.

Nina Simone must have been spinning in her grave. Her magnificent, impassioned  voice is now but a soundtrack to David Cameron jogging. This was not the only thing that jarred in the highly–trailed profile of the Tory leader, not so much being grilled but marinated, by Trevor McDonald.

This programme made by ITV in which Sam Cam, the wife and “the weapon” would finally talk was meant to do what exactly? To reassure us women that Dave is not perfect? That he makes a mess while cooking just like other men? That he is a policy–free zone?  It’s hard to say but after Brown was uncomfortably prodded open by Piers Morgan, the Tories clearly felt the need to stoop equally low.

Brown’s interview with Morgan is a sign of the times. Brown the grumpy, shouty bear was goaded and cajoled  by Morgan into showing  some  kind of emotion. It was not enough for us to know that he suffered when he lost a child, it was felt that we needed to see actual tears, some indication that Brown is recognisably human. His wife, an ex-PR pro remember, was there to remind us of Brown's softer side. She functions to normalise him. We may think is a raging sociopathic control freak but look he has feelings after all!

The Future of the Left is one of those perennial subjects that run through time memorial, from the crises of how to deal with Nazism and fascism in the 1930s, to the problems of Stalinism in the 1950s, affluence in the 1960s, and Reaganism and Thatcherism in the 1980s.

On Friday I contributed to a panel discussion on this subject which also included Tariq Ali, the historian Tristram Hunt and Chris Mullin MP and was chaired by journalist Ruth Wishart. This was part of ‘Aye Write’, Glasgow’s successful and vibrant book festival, now in its fifth year, and took place in the Mitchell Library in front of a packed audience of 450 people.

This showed an eager interest in the subject and any conclusions, and the first part of our discussion was dominated by ‘big’ subjects, the legacy and debris of New Labour and the collective hangover from neo-liberalism, but became much more passionate and controversial later on.

Civil society grew up in tandem with democracy.   For two hundred years we have learned again and again that the formal apparatus of elections and parliaments only works if it’s complemented by a vigorous informal world of activism, argument and campaigns.  Indeed it’s through civil society that societies experiment and adapt, imagining different futures and trying them out.

According to A. J. P. Taylor, in 1934 Oxford University Press commissioned its History of England series on the basis that ‘England’ was still “an all-embracing word”. It meant “indiscriminately England and Wales; Great Britain; the United Kingdom; and even the British Empire” (A. J. P. Taylor, English History, 1914-1945, OUP 1965). Looking back from the 1960s, AJP still believed this to be the appropriate historiographical perspective to take, and in private correspondence he made this very clear. “I am obsessed with England”, he wrote to his editor G. N. Clark in 1961, “to hell with Scotland, Northern Ireland and still more the Empire!!” (A. J. P. Taylor to G. N. Clark: 20 May 1961, Clark Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford, MSS Box 30.). One wonders if he thought Ireland even worth sending to hell.

Taylor never sought to conceal his Anglocentrism. He revelled in it. But having penned the fifteenth volume of the History of England series, he was far from being alone in assuming that England – its people, economy, government and monarchy – provided the central storyline for the history of these islands. The assumptions of English dominance inherent in J. R. Seeley’s famous lectures on The Expansion of England have resonated across the last century of historical writing. In fact, although a follow up series to the one begun in 1934 was commissioned by OUP – with the first volume appearing in 1992 – the editors still plumped for the title New Oxford History of England.

Professor Brian Harrison’s Finding a Role? The United Kingdom, 1970-1990 is the latest volume in that series, and – as the title implies – the story of the United Kingdom is central to the period in question, covering as it does the beginnings of the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland, the development of Scottish and Welsh nationalism and the entry of the UK into the EEC in a supposedly post-imperial age. Harrison’s book provides an admirable synthesis of the cultural, social, economic and political history of the period, but this is not ‘four nations’ history. Although the constituent parts of the UK do feature, England remains the central reference point.

For many professional historians then, England has, and often continues to be the primary historical mover and shaker in the history of these islands, and hence by implication the history of the expansion and contraction of the British Empire.

I went to launch this evening of Keith Ewing's important new book Bonfire of the Liberties and the Institute of Employment Rights new booklet Ruined Lives on blacklisting in the UK construction industry, also written by Ewing. I was expecting the usual drinks party. But no, it was a serious meeting of trade unionists at the NUJ headquarters. We heard from Henry Porter, who I find it hard to disagree with. He talked about the expansion of what he called "State patrolled space" and how each one of us is being made to feel that both we and everyone else are persons who may "harbour bad intentions". (Or, as John Berger

One of the really insistent questions raised throughout the Convention of Modern Liberty one year ago was the one Anthony Barnett signalled in his opening invitation to participate: " What is the problem to which the database state and the surveillance society is... the solution?"

I made this the first real article in the CML book because it struck me that the rest of the book (and the event itself) is really a set of different attempts at an answer, coupled with some early exploration of what to do about it. Anthony kicks off with a list of potential candidates. Helena Kennedy puts it differently - "What do they put in the water in the Home Office? ". Simon Jenkins asks what happens to perfectly reasonable liberal types when they get into high office... etc. etc.

Maybe Simon Jenkins gets close to the truth with the shocking passing reference to the fact that, 'We now apparently spend more money on surveillance equipment of all sorts than on arms." If you have quarter of an hour this week, I recommend that you listen to this aptly named, undersung BBC 4 radio programme called Thinking Allowed on the theme of "military futurology" while it's accessible.  

Today, it is all too easy to call yourself a ‘politically engaged person’ and to walk around without a care for the fact that a general election is on its way with no sense of a contradiction. The televised cross-party debates are set – not that anyone is looking forward to watching them – and the papers are publishing daily pre-electoral polls – not that anyone is at all inspired by any of the three horses in the race.

It appears evident that the coming UK election lacks the excitement or intensity of last year’s stateside whirlwind. Without even the pretence of a British Obama it is tempting to write off mainstream politics as irrelevant, and take a ‘none of the above’ position; this would achieve nothing beyond feeding a pervasive anti-political cynicism.