Numerous citizens’ assemblies have been held by councils and other local bodies around the UK in recent years. Patricia Preller and Alan Renwick survey these processes to consider what lessons can be learned.
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The public inquiry into COVID-19 published its terms of reference earlier this summer, with its first ‘promise’ being that ‘People who have suffered during the pandemic will be at the heart of the inquiry’s work’. Simon Burall, Senior Associate at Involve, asks what this really means in practice, and suggests three questions we should ask ourselves to determine whether this promise is kept.
We have been locked down at least twice (and more depending on where you live in the country), schools have been closed, businesses lost and household budgets squeezed. To date, there have been over 200,000 deaths with COVID-19 on the death certificate. Nobody has remained untouched by the pandemic.
The UK COVID-19 Public Inquiry has been set-up to explore the impact of the pandemic, to examine the UK’s response, and to learn lessons for the future. Given the widespread impact of the pandemic, the Chair of the Inquiry, Baroness (Heather) Hallett is absolutely right to want to put the public at the heart of its work. It should be celebrated that this is the first of seven ‘promises’ that the inquiry has published. However, this ambition – and the inquiry in general – comes with risks. If this ambition is not met, and the public deem the inquiry to have failed to pass fair judgement, it could further undermine existing low levels of public trust in our politics.
So, this blogpost lays out three questions we will be asking to judge the extent to which the inquiry is keeping this promise, as it progresses in the months to come.
Are the public part of passing judgement and proposing plans for the future, or just witnesses?
The inquiry has been formally constituted and has a legal status as laid out in the 2005 Inquiries Act. The act lays out the statutory framework for the appointment of the Chair, how it should take evidence and produce its report. This will obviously, and rightly, restrict the ways in which the public can be involved, but there is much more the inquiry could do beyond publishing standard consultation questions, inviting a tiny number of members of the public as witnesses and meeting with specific groups which were particularly affected.
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Today the Unit publishes the Report of the Citizens’ Assembly on Democracy in the UK. Set up by the Unit last year, the Assembly offers unparalleled insights into public perceptions of how the UK’s democracy is working and should work. In this post, the project’s Research Assistant, James Cleaver, summarises the Assembly’s recommendations.
The Report of the Citizens’ Assembly on Democracy in the UK contains the conclusions of the first UK-wide citizens’ assembly to discuss the topic of democracy. Many of these conclusions speak directly to major ongoing political debates: around standards in public life, the balance between key democratic institutions, and the role of the public.
The Assembly
The Assembly was convened to answer the overarching question of ‘How should democracy in the UK work?’. It was conducted by the Constitution Unit in partnership with Involve, the UK’s leading public participation charity. Over six online weekends between September and December last year, Assembly members focused on three key areas of democracy: the relationship between government and parliament; the roles of the public; and ways of upholding rules and standards.
Having deliberated about these topics, members produced eight overarching resolutions and 51 specific recommendations, the latter designed to achieve the ambitions of the resolutions. Looking across these conclusions, three key themes emerge.
First, members expect high standards from those in public life, and they want independent regulators to be able to enforce this. Second, they oppose unduly concentrated power, calling for parliament, the courts and other constitutional checks to play more prominent roles. Third, members want better mechanisms for the public’s voice to be heard, both through improvements to the representative system, and through better use of petitions, referendums and deliberative processes.
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Citizens’ assemblies are suddenly in vogue. National, devolved and local bodies (including several Commons committees) have held or are intending to make use of citizens’ assemblies to seek guidance on topics such as climate change and social care. At the same time, senior politicians are now advocating for an assembly on Brexit. However, citizens’ assemblies are not a miracle cure: like any method of determining the public will, they have limitations. In order to explore the benefits of citizens’ assemblies, the Unit organised a seminar to discuss how they work, best practice and when they should be used. Lucie Davidson summarises the main contributions.
On 1 July, the Constitution Unit held an event entitled ‘Citizens’ Assemblies: What are they good for?’. Speaking were Joanna Cherry QC MP, SNP Justice and Home Affairs Spokesperson at Westminster; Sarah Allan, Head of Engagement at Involve; Lilian Greenwood MP, Chair of the Commons Transport Select Committee; and Professor Graham Smith, Director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster. Chaired by the Unit’s Deputy Director, Alan Renwick, the event discussed past use of assemblies, what they can be best used for in the future, and what constitutes a ‘good’ citizens’ assembly.
Joanna Cherry
Joanna Cherry offered an overview of the Citizens’ Assembly of Scotland, which was announced by Nicola Sturgeon in April. Just as Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly and Constitutional Convention were born out of a time of crisis following the financial crash in 2008, the constitutional crisis caused by Brexit stimulated the political interest necessary for the creation of Scotland’s own assembly. The Brexit process has reignited debate about the relationship between Scotland and the rest of the UK; Scotland voted to remain in the EU but has had ‘no say’ in the Brexit negotiations. In addition, if Brexit happens, Scots will lose their EU citizenship, despite the argument that independence was a threat to Scotland’s place in the EU being a prominent part of the 2014 ‘No’ campaign. A recent poll by the Sunday Times has indicated a majority of Scots would vote for independence if faced with a ‘no deal’ Brexit or a Boris Johnson premiership. Continue reading
In the second of two posts on the voting reform referendum in British Columbia, Jameson Quinn argues that the province’s electorate should support a move to some form of proportional representation. Specifically, he argues that the version known as Mixed Member Proportional is best for both the province itself and representative democracy as a whole.
This is the second of two posts on the upcoming British Columbia (BC) referendum on proportional representation (which I’ll call ‘pro-rep’, because ‘PR’ has too many other meanings). In the first post, I discussed the context and rules of the referendum itself. In this one, I’m going to discuss the options available, in the context of theories of voting and democracy. I’ll also look at some of the arguments being used in this campaign.
Before I start, I should lay my cards on the table. I am unabashedly in favour of voting reform. For over 20 years, I’ve felt that choose-one voting, as used in most English speaking countries, is a badly-flawed form of democracy. Also known as FPTP, for ‘first past the post’, choose-one almost inevitably leads to spoiled elections, dishonest strategic voting, or both. My support of voting reform is what led me to join the board of the Center for Election Science, a non-profit that advocates for better voting systems.
As my previous post mentioned, I was one of the primary organisers of the BC Symposium on Proportional Representation. Though many of the experts and activists attending that symposium were, like me, advocates for reform, the symposium itself remained neutral on whether changing to pro-rep was a good idea. Our role was to impartially lay out the evidence regarding the relative advantages and disadvantages of various options.
The functions of representative democracy
In order to argue that pro-rep is a better option for BC, I’m going to be explicit about what I mean by ‘better’; that is, what representative democracy is for. I believe that representative democracy serves three basic functions:
Any well-designed pro-rep method—which all three of the options on the BC referendum are or could be—is clearly superior to the current choose-one method on the latter two points: each would give outcomes that are more representative without being more divisive (point 2), all the while remaining comparably simple for voters (point 3). Continue reading