Tom Griffin (London, OK): David Blunkett became the latest speaker to mark the 20th anniversary of Charter 88 on Wednesday when he delivered an Unlock Democracy lecture at Westminster's Portcullis House.
There was a certain mild irony, albeit a much appreciated one, as Mr Blunkett repeatedly ignored the division bell calling him to vote, in order to continue his speech on the case for organised politics:
One thing that has happened over the last two months is a resurgence of political democracy, of people suddenly rediscovering that politically elected representatives, that formalised political processes, can actually get a grip on, and be dominant in putting wrongs right
In other words, the property owning democracy promoted in the 1980s, the market economy, the voting by proxy in terms of how much wealth you have and how much wealth you can spend as a consumer, has suddenly met the buffers in a big way in the global financial crisis.
Blunkett acknowledged that he was as surprised as anyone else by the political turnaround that had accompanied the crisis:
I thought that in September people had stopped listening to the Government. They had just switched off. It didn''t matter what we said or did. They weren't listening. What's happened since has got people' s ear.
The problem is we've somehow got to communicate really difficult measures and really difficult issues, through a fog of words which mean very little. The whole business of derivatives, made so clear by Robert Peston that I have to switch off every time he comes on.
The truth is that you've got to speak to people clearly and they will understand. I am a little bit worried that since the pre-budget statement on Monday the world out there is more confused rather than less. I think we've got to draw breath between now and Christmas and explain something very fundamental: Not to take a decision is in effect to take a decision. Not to take action is in effect to leave people to struggle for themselves.
Blunkett was not making a simple case for big government, however:
I shall be publishing a Fabian pamphlet tomorrow about mutual action, about civil society, about the community and voluntary and third sector, about how different political parties grew in different ways. It's worth emphasising that out of all the major political parties, the Labour Party grew from the grassroots rather than a party in Parliament forced to seek an electorate.
He suggested that recent events had vindicated the argument of Bernard Crick's book In Defence of Politics. Crick was a key figure in Blunkett's move, as Secretary of State for Education, to bring citizenship into the curriculum. Blunkett put the opposition to that move into the context of a longstanding tradition which is suspicious of democracy and sees in it the danger of mob rule.
As one might expect from a former Home Secretary, he wasn't entirely at one with his hosts, describing Charter 88 as 'sometime adversaries' on the issue of proportional representation.
"I don't think PR would good for the electors of Sheffield Brightside because they'd be part of a larger amorphous whole and no-one would turn up on a Saturday and do an advice surgery," he argued.
On a more conciliatory note, Blunkett acknowledged that the Labour Government had never really decided "whether we really do want, and how do we want, to decentralise." If his vision of a strong civil society is to be realised, that is something that may have to change.
