Why democrats should sign 'Fellow Citizens'

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): Those of us who signed the Fellow Citizens petition are asking for a lot. Neither the British state nor its current governing party have ever done participation or even consent in a meaningful way. So it’s worth saying that our voices are representative of a wider and deeper longing in British society that the government, civil service and all parties must take seriously. The appeal only scratches the surface when it comes to the profound distrust in the political class, but also of the manifold frustrations of better educated and more assertive generations. In different ways different politicians have now recognised this shift in society. But they are not sure how to respond to it within the limits of traditional party politics. Back in 1988, Charter 88 showed just how much the peoples of the UK wanted radical reform: 10,000 signed up spontaneously to the Charter's demands when we published it in the Guardian and New Statesman and then the Observer. Since then another 70,000 have added their names. A few years after Charter 88’s launch I talked to Tony Blair about the need to act on its demands; “Yes”, he responded, “we must keep the door open”. What Labour has done since is to half-open the door from, if this is not to mix a metaphor, the top-down. It has reserved to itself the flexible and unaccountable powers that have limited the effects of the reforms that they themselves enacted. This has frustrated a full advance towards inclusive democracy in the United Kingdom. Charter 88 demanded a written constitution embedded in a full and open national debate. That demand was rejected. But there is now far more acceptance that a diverse society like ours, seeking social cohesion, requires a constitutional state with a Bill of Rights and civic citizenship at its core. We will only achieve this if we can ensure that any process following on from Gordon Brown's initiating the debate is genuinely open to all. This means constructing a robust and inclusive process from the start: a framework for participation in forging a democratic constitutional relationship between state and people.