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Democracy: POWER Inquiry

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, and the Power inquiry team on a serious and important contribution to the debate on political participation. Of course, it is a report with attitude; I would not have expected or hoped for much else. She and the other members of the team have a point of view and the report, while extremely well written, constantly hovers between impartial objectivity and a niggling unease with the way in which the Government conduct their political affairs. You can feel the noble Baroness straining to be critical but, in the end, judicial integrity wins through and the report makes great strides towards achieving the truth about political disengagement. At the heart of the report is a tension between a long-standing commitment to representative democracy and a growing understanding that participatory democracy is the emerging future of politics. In the end, the report’s commitment to participatory democracy is decisive. It makes it clear that,"““when ‘ordinary’ citizens are presented with clear information and given the freedom and structure to deliberate on that information, they will come to decisions as reasons and balanced as those made by elected representatives or public officials””." In my view, that is the basic sentiment that underpins participatory democracy. The people can do it if you give them the chance. There is, of course, a caveat in the report, that on no account must ordinary voters be allowed unqualified access to political power. So there is a way to go yet. The report is right to say that we face a crisis of political engagement. The metaphor that I have long used for this crisis is the empty stadium. We who work in politics continue as normal while the audience—in this case, literally—trickles away. The report is also right to make it clear that the current crisis of democracy has no single cause or easy explanation. It flows from the whirlwind of change, much of it generated by globalisation, which has transformed the nature of our politics in recent years. That process of accelerated change has trapped political engagement inside a four-sided box: national states are more vulnerable than ever before; disengaged citizens are more insecure than ever before; consumers are more empowered than ever before; and communications are more contaminated than ever before. That is the box from which political engagement must escape. I demur from the description of the modern Executive as quietly and increasingly authoritarian. Politics is an activity concerned mostly with survival in a dangerous and uncertain world. As the world becomes more hostile, more complex and faster moving, that becomes an ever more arduous task. Perceptions of the Executive seeking more power are much less a result of the state seeking more power and much more a result of the state seeking to exercise its legitimate power in much more demanding circumstances—less the authoritarian state, much more the vulnerable state. If the state is vulnerable, the citizen feels insecure and trapped by a series of competing forces apparently beyond his or her control. Global schism has left many feeling trapped and exposed. People feel that the world is being divided by religion, environment and economic differences that appear to be beyond their control. Globalisation has led to a heightened sense of the individual’s lack of control. Although people can see the benefits of an increasingly interconnected world, many feel unnerved and exposed by their greater dependence on external events and their capacity to influence them. Community is believed to have eroded in the face of those pressures. The focus of that is concerns about crime, anti-social behaviour, the decline of traditional family life and migration, which, in their turn, are the result of globalisation. Those perceptions of a declining community, linked to a perceived erosion of traditional sources of authority, have further helped to foster distrust towards public and political institutions. In the face of that, confidence in the effectiveness of elected Governments has been eroded as people see the power of global forces that seem beyond the scope of government. To many, global corporations now seem more powerful than Governments. The autonomous power of national Governments appears weakened in the face of global, economic, social and migratory forces. In contrast, as citizens feel more insecure, consumers feel more empowered. As consumers, the public across Europe display confidence and empowerment. People feel that they have a real choice as consumers and are able to exert control and influence over their lives. As one well known commentator has written,"““they want to ‘opt in’ and make their own choices, controlling their destinies and their cash. They want their voices to be heard and they want them to matter””." Ironically, the individual as consumer feels more empowered and more in control of his or her life than ever, while the same individual, as citizen, feels more insecure and more disempowered in the face of vast global forces. The empowered consumer goes further than just wanting choice. He or she now wants self-actualisation, a world of connection, community and authenticity. That produces an extraordinary bipolarity where the same person can feel empowered as a consumer, yet disempowered as a citizen. That tension between the insecure citizen and the empowered consumer further heightens the sense of political engagement as the individual seeks fulfilment of control but as a citizen feels voiceless and lacking in influence. The world of consumption appears to meet modern needs. The world of politics appears to frustrate them. This gap between consumer empowerment and citizen insecurity leads to frustration, resentment and a loss of faith in politics. But it is the twisted and distorted nature of so much communication about politics that turns scepticism about politics into resentment about politics and, ultimately, to political disengagement. Steve Barnett, professor of politics, has laid out the four phases of media development; that is, the age of deference, the age of debate, the age of journalistic disdain and, finally, the age of contempt. He says that,"““there is considerable evidence on both sides of the Atlantic that media reporting has crossed the line from detached skepticism to derision and ridicule . . . politicians are treated almost routinely as a lower form of life””." As the report says, it is foolish to say that it is only the media’s fault. It is clear that there is a joint responsibility between politics and the media. But the cost of contaminated political communication has been high. The UK now has the least trusted political system in Europe and the least trusted press, with 77 per cent of people not trusting it. No one can be content with that. We are left with a four-sided problem—a box from which we must escape. We have modern states battling to make sense of a world of risk and disorder, a world of conventional politics that is blamed for insecurity, powerlessness and social fracture, a consumer world of empowerment and self-realisation that is profoundly disconnected from the world of politics, and political communication that all too often treats politics and politicians with contempt and abuse, and in which the feeling is increasingly entirely mutual. It is not surprising that the stadium is emptying and the public are disengaging from politics. I have long believed that there is only one response to the empty stadium; it is to effect a complete revolution, transforming our politics from passivity to participation. If we are to fill the stadium, we need a new kind of politics and a new kind of democracy that puts participation at its heart. If I have a criticism of the report, it is that it places too much reliance on constitutional reform as a remedy for such huge and sweeping changes. I do not believe that, for example, electoral reform of the voting system for the European elections has made any difference to participation in those elections. I do not believe that a new Select Committee for supranational institutions is anywhere near an appropriate response to the revolution in globalisation that has gripped the world in recent decades. If we do seek to create democracy out of the global forces that surround us, we must look for a far more radical realignment of the global forces that govern us, the sort of solutions that, for example, David Held from the LSE has been developing with his ““cosmopolitan democracy”” notion. But the strength of the report outweighs these weaknesses. The step that the report makes into participatory democracy is decisive. It is this recognition of the limits of conventional representational democracy and the need to develop a new form of democracy based on direct participation that will be the lasting impact of the Power inquiry. Participatory democracy is not delegated democracy; it is interactive democracy in which political participation is based on free and full information, open debate and shared responsibility for outcomes. It involves a new relationship between citizen and representative which is continuous and responsive, and a relationship between citizen and executive that is direct and reciprocal. For this to work, a lot of things must change. Politics has to become more open and transparent, the media less cynical and destructive and the Executive more realistic about the limits and possibilities of political change. But, above all, the formal political class has to recognise that over recent years it has moved from being part of the solution to being part of the problem, and that the way out of the box lies not with making constitutional amendments to conventional politics, but by making informal politics the driver of a new and transformed political process which has participation at its heart. That sounds far-fetched, but we can be assured that it is already happening. In 2001, I stood up after the general election and said that never again would we fight an election that would lead to such high levels of disengagement. I argued that that election was the last of its kind and that the next campaign would be based around participatory campaigning. I was wrong, of course. The next campaign produced little more in the way of genuine participation than the one preceding it. But goodness knows we tried: phones, mails, e-mailings, local campaigning and massive amounts of additional resources to local constituency campaigning. In 2005, we were more local and more interactive than ever before, but it did not work, for one simple reason: it was driven from the top down and not from the bottom up. Historically, political change is driven from the bottom, and that is more true today than ever. The public want participation, they want involvement, but they do not want it on our terms. There is a revolution taking place in politics and communication, but the revolution is not ours. If we want to be part of it, we must join their world, not try to force them to join us. In the history of political change, it was ever thus. As we speak, probably the biggest single catalyst for political change in this country is the mySociety website, which is attempting to facilitate a conversation between every elected or unelected representative in this country and every citizen. From HearFromYourMP.com, every MP will have access eventually to the e-mails of every one of their constituents, and every constituent will have the opportunity to connect with their MP in a mediated and workable process. This builds on other websites such as TheyWorkForYou.com and WriteToThem.com. This is such a huge catalyst for change. Important though these websites are, they are but the tip of a deluge of participatory change. In the US, 57 per cent of teenagers create content for the internet. People are no longer consuming media, they are creating it. With participatory media, the distinction between audience and creation blurs and disappears. David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard University, describes this process as taking institutions and turning them into conversations. However enclosed and hierarchical an institution, it cannot avoid this process. Try as we might, we cannot avoid the power of participation. Participatory democracy is the future of politics, and it is happening now. We may wish to argue, as the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, did the other day, that this House should be wary of public opinion, but such a view, untenable a century ago, is simply absurd now. It is to the great credit of the report that it knows that the solution to disengagement is not to ignore what the public think but to build new political structures that will allow participation to flourish and the views of the public to prevail. The unique contribution of the Power inquiry is to try to suggest ways in which this can happen without compromising the liberal strengths of our constitution. I should like the report to go further—much further, really, when it comes to participation—but it remains the case that a commitment to empowering the citizen in new ways for new times took courage. For that, as well as for much else, the report should be commended. I believe that we can use this as the basis of a new start.