Daniel Leighton (London, Power Inquiry): In today’s speech opening the political season, Gordon Brown called for a new politics in which “the democratic impulse needs to be strengthened to enable citizens to share in the decision making that affect them”…No sorry, I’ve got confused… that was in fact Tony Blair speaking in 1996.
It’s hard not to get confused with the vague and hopeful (but sometimes hopeless) formulations of ‘new politics’. These have been doing the rounds for over a decade now, promising 'new' experiments in participation and 'new' relationships between citizen and state. And so the Cabinet Office’s standing citizens panel was duly rolled out only to rolled back and stored safely away. The more we were promised the process would change, the more it seemed to stay the same.
What grounds are there to believe the new new politics just announced by Brown will turn out different from the old new politics? Well…. For one thing, the Prime Minister is now calling for his “new politics” after a decade of being in power. In 1997 systemic problems could be blamed on the failings of the Tory occupants rather than the power structure itself. However, in today’s speech Brown appeared to cling to that power structure in equal measure to his attack on it. Or rather, he lamented the flight of active support for traditional politics and highlighted the insularity of party perspectives and the paucity of participatory democracy at the local level. But his raft of proposals for creating a new politics of citizen engagement steered clear of how they would in fact affect decision making in any way. He proposed three kinds of change,
First, if we are to meet the challenge of engagement the old models of consultation need radical renewal.
My second proposal is that we set up new standing commissions where we can bring together not just people of all parties, but representatives from outside the normal party system to examine continuing issues of concern.
And then in order to address the problems of the political system itself, I want to revive the idea of a Speaker's Conference. A Speaker's Conference brings together all the parties at Westminster to look at issues that can only be dealt with on a cross-party basis.
You can see, the more the political process itself is at stake the less direct role there is for citizens.
Here I will just look at the first heading where the PM announced citizens’ juries on crime, the NHS and children, together with a proposal for “representatives assembled from every constituency in a nationwide set of juries”. We were told that they will “help government shape the policies in ways that people for whom they are created want”. It is clear that these “juries” will not be entitled to reach their own verdicts. Rather, with much emphasis on the need for consensus they will provide a strengthened form of legitimation for the government’s own decisions.
Few if any of the key questions about how the citizens juries will work, some set out by Nick Robinson, have been answered. Instead we are being asked to support them now when the first one will start... this week! Brown claims that there is much goodwill across the country towards widening the sources of influence on policy. If so, this approach risks squandering it. Lets hope some further information is made available asap.
Under the same heading of renewing consultation, the PM also announced that there will be a “citizen summit, composed of a representative sample of the British people” which will be asked to formulate the British Statement of Values proposed in the Green Paper. It will be “a living statement of rights and responsibilities for the British people”. But given only half a para within a long section on improving consultation it is most unlikely that it will have any constitutional force.
