Dan Leighton (London, Power Inquiry): In last Thursday's Times Peter Riddell posed an important if poorly formulated question: Does 'power to the people' mean democracy or just direct participation?
Gordon Brown has called for some new participatory processes. This raises the crucial question of the balance of decision making between citizens, representatives and government. Well done Riddell for highlighting a shift in political discourse, for the way we talk about politics. It raises all manner of questions about the the old and the new. Yet the way he poses it is wrong. It puts the argument in a straight-jacket if, as he does, you define ‘democracy’ as what happens inside representative institutions and counterpose it to ‘direct participation’, meaning citizens having decision making power.
I suspect the pull of a big conceptual issue, or rather Riddell's attempt to evade it, is behind this as well as other current commentary. All cling to increasingly untenable assumptions about parliamentary sovereignty. True these have underpinned our constitution since the seventeenth century. But they do not work any longer. Citing the ad hoc way in which referendums are called, Riddell correctly suggests we must clarify the relationship between popular and parliamentary sovereignty. Yet the closer one looks at the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty the more one sees it as a case of strategic obfuscation on behalf of governing elites rather than a principle that could be clarified. What was once a good alternative to absolutism in the 18th century has become a permission for the elective absolutism of the political class in the 21st.
Forged in the 1688 settlement, the doctrine was parasitic upon, yet ultimately opposed to, ideas of popular sovereignty. These first emerged in the English civil war and perhaps it is finally time we can claim them with patriotic pride. To quote Martin Loughlin of the LSE on popular sovereignty,
“Although the concept received its first clear expression by the Levellers in the 1640's, their claims raised a series of fundamental questions that those seeking to manage the unfolding English revolution felt necessary to repress. Thereafter with the subsequent failure of the English revolution and the restoration of the old order, even the more elementary precepts of constitutional ordering based in the principle of popular sovereignty came to be obfuscated”
In our constitutional tradition the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, meaning parliamentary representation and the powers of elected officials, has come to be seen as democracy. But it isn't, or rather there is a lot more to democracy than this. The logic of tradition enables Riddell to counter-pose 'democracy' with 'direct participation', when these ought to reinforce each other. And this poses a fundamental question for Gordon Brown's agenda. Will it be guided by the same untenable, yet deeply entrenched, assumptions? If we want a democratic constitutional settlement fit for the 21st century, the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty must itself become part of the public debate.
