Trevor Smith (York, House of Lords): I read the Anthony King article from Prospect blogged in OK after writing about the need for reformers to get Brown to deliver on his reforms. King likes to tease, he asks questions and points out weaknesses and vagueness but himself is hardly specific about what should be done or how it should be run by way of ratification and consultation. He does alert us to the fact that not much is actually slated to happen in the Green Paper itself. But he is a very "top down" type of "realist" (e.g. US Constitution was drafted by the great and the good and this is taken as axiomatic as the best way to do things at all times in all climes. Well, it does not take an original observer to point out that the result is a very old, inflexible and creaking constitution where the Presidential candidate who gets most votes loses, the Supreme Court is highly politicised, and big money has bought the Senate. We can do much better.)
The big question is how to have a constitutional convention alongside a national debate. Indeed, this is probably THE most pressing question reformers should address. The mechanics of the exercise is an essential prior question to getting the new constitutional settlement Gordon Brown has called for. King may be right about who turns up a local/regional "consultations"; audiences can be both derisory and totally skewed. But this is not true of juries where citizens take real decisions.
