Joni Lovenduski | The Constitution Unit Blog

Progress on the Restoration and Renewal (R&R) project has been slow, but despite the time taken, there has been limited engagement with the public on the issue. Alexandra Anderson, Alexandra Meakin and Matt Flinders express optimism that amendments to the legislation responsible for R&R indicate a promising change of direction, creating an opportunity not to simply restore and protect the past but to embrace a positive vision of the future.

It is now three years since a Joint Select Committee warned that ‘The Palace of Westminster, a masterpiece of Victorian and medieval architecture and engineering, faces an impending crisis which we cannot responsibly ignore’. This crisis, the Committee continued, was likely to be a catastrophe, such as a major fire or flood, or a succession of failures of the infrastructure, leaving the building unusable. There can now be no doubt about the validity of this warning: since the Committee reported we have seen the House of Commons flood during a debate, a ‘football-sized lump’ fall off the Victoria Tower, and wardens are currently patrolling the building twenty-four hours a day to address the regular outbreaks of fire (now totalling 66 in the last decade). As the then Leader of the Commons, Andrea Leadsom, told MPs in May — referring only to the instances of crumbling masonry — ‘It is only through luck that none of them has led to any serious injuries or even fatalities’. If any further warning was necessary, the tragedy of Notre Dame in April demonstrated the potential devastation of fire.

This week has marked a significant step forward in plans for a major renovation, aimed at keeping the building—and the visitors, parliamentarians, and staff within it—safe from disaster or tragedy. The Parliamentary Buildings (Restoration and Renewal) Act 2019, which has now received Royal Assent, will establish the necessary governance bodies so that the planning work for what will be a multi-billion, multi-decade project can begin in earnest.

Not only will the Act offer the best opportunity for preventing a crisis hitting the Palace, it also offers the opportunity to place the public at the heart of this renovation: the Restoration and Renewal (R&R) Programme. This is hugely significant. The original text of the legislation (and the projects associated with the wider programme) were designed to address only the crisis of the building, and not the broader crisis of UK democracy. Amendments tabled in the House of Lords and approved by the Commons on Monday have ensured that public engagement will be an integral part of fixing the Palace. Continue reading →

On 14 May, the Constitution Unit hosted an event to launch ‘Rethinking Democracy’, which was published by Political Quarterly earlier this year. The collection contains essays from leading academics, in which they explore the problems of representative democracy and suggest ways it might now be extended and deepened. In this blog, Tony Wright, Joni Lovenduski, Andrew Gamble and Albert Weale summarise their contributions to the event.

Tony Wright

Earlier this year, I gave evidence to the House of Commons Liaison Committee (alongside Professor Meg Russell, Director of the Constitution Unit) on the topic of the effectiveness and influence of select committees. At that session, I was asked about the reforms instituted as a result of the recommendations in the 2009 report of the Reform of the House Committee, on which I served as chair. That committee came about because the expenses scandal had spurred me into writing to the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, in a bid to encourage him to reform parliament in a way that might increase public regard for it, at a time when it was perhaps lower than it had ever been. The reforms made as a result of what is now called the Wright Committee have, I think, proved relatively successful. However, in that same letter I also proposed setting up what I called ‘a democracy commission’ to think through what kind of democracy we now wanted. Part of the problem I wanted that committee to deal with was the fact that people were increasingly disengaged from politics.

Ten years later, it is extraordinary what has happened: we have had democracy by the bucketload, so it’s claimed, and people’s engagement with politics has most definitely increased. But it wasn’t supposed to be quite like this. People like me had spent years looking for ways to replace or improve upon representative democracy, but now events have caused us to come to its defence. This is because this established democratic model is under assault across – and indeed beyond – the western world, and from all directions.

In this country, the 2016 referendum was the spur for this. And the result of that referendum was traumatic not just because we lost the vote, but because we lost the democratic argument. By this, I mean that we lost the argument when it comes to the idea of democracy itself. The Leave campaigns were the ones making the argument for democracy; they made the case for democratic self-government and sovereignty. And that case went unanswered, because instead of making a democratic argument, those campaigning for Remain focused on economics and how we would be ‘better off in’. There was a different argument that could have been made by Remainers, albeit a more complicated one. But it wasn’t made, and because of this, the proponents of a certain view of democracy prevailed. Continue reading →