Anthony Barnett (London, OK): It seems that the BBC has an advance copy of the speech Jack Straw is due to make at George Washington University. He will say:
Most people [in the UK] might struggle to put their finger on where their rights are. The next stage is to look at whether we need to articulate those rights which are scattered across a whole host of places. We can learn from the American example, particularly from the concept of civic duty. We want to elevate them in a new status in a constitutional document. It is much easier to perform your civic duty when you have a clear sense of what is expected of you
I missed his Today programme interview this morning. Probably a good thing as breakfast is one of the most important meals of the day. Absurd as it may seem, Jack does not support the idea of a new constitution being more powerful than parliament, nor does he support the creation of a supreme court that sits above parliament - the sovereignty of parliament is not to be challenged. Instead, it would, as I guessed in my short post below, codify existing constitutional arrangements... Of course it will also set out the "rights and responsibilities" that citizens have. Straw promised yet another Green paper on the topic and said it will take 10 or 20 years - and it would be for "another generation" - to get it all into written shape.
What a load of cobblers! The whole point of a democratic, written constitution is that it creates a constitutional democracy that belongs to the people. This cannot but replace parliamentary sovereignty. If you want to write down the latter all that is needed is one sentence: "The Crown in Parliament can do whatever it wants".
Jack's jealous talk about gaining an American sense of civic duty is revealing. What the government desires is to achieve the symptoms and benefits of a healthy democracy without having to undergo the surgery that is now essential.
While I think I agree with David Beetham that the term 'rights-based democracy' is the best description of what we want in the UK, David Marquand is spot on when he argues that the key issue politics has to address in the UK is sovereignty ("The biggest hole in the Green paper has to do with the ultimate political questions of where sovereignty lies and ought to lie"). The issue of sovereignty has three legs: replacing parliamentary sovereignty as we know it; facing up to national sovereignty Scottish, Welsh and especially English; resolving how we relate to European sovereignty.
These are great issues. Straw's approach threatens to become evasion of them and to entice progressives into a decades long fiddling whose aim is the preservation of the status quo.
Over at Unlock Democracy, in the spirit of Charter 88 which it has folded into its campaign, its Director Peter Facey says,
"We welcome this positive step, although we question the idea that it will take around 20 years to develop a written constitution Such a long process would almost certainly shudder to a halt before it was completed. No other country has taken so long to develop a constitution: what’s so different about the UK?
"Either way, it is important that the process is taken out of Whitehall and Westminster and that the public are given a central role in the process. Any constitution should reflect the public’s priorities, not the vested interests of politicians and civil servants. There is a growing range of international examples about how to do this, ranging from Canada to South Africa to Northern Ireland.
"The government could commit to such a process tomorrow by adopting the Citizen’s Convention Bill, which more than 100 MPs have leant their support for. This would commit the government to establishing an independent Citizen’s Convention and working with it to implement its recommendations."
