One of the questions in a rather dull edition of Question Time last night was, "How can we have confidence in the running of our country?"
A number of aspects of this question were interesting, with the most significant being that it was asked. The BBC do appear to be permitting a more subversive form of question onto this programme at present. Perhaps they know that the Tory stranglehold on power might be over.
The answers were not worth musing on. All that needed to be said in direct response was that we cannot have confidence in the running of our country as things stand.
I have to admit that there have been many periods when this might have just as appropriately been said. At any time until 1939 I am sure that was true. That was because the country was always run in the interests of a wealthy elite until then. There was no pretence otherwise. Everyone but that elite existed in the minds of most of those who ruled as means to serve their interests, whether they be the waged employee in the UK or anyone in the colonies the UK held around the world. This hierarchy was apparent, known about and until the onset of a universal franchise, empowered by their sacrifice in a second world war in far too short a space of time, it was accepted.
And then everything changed. I genuinely believe that the 1945 Labour government was revolutionary. I am not saying that class prejudice has disappeared. Nor am I saying that pettiness, incompetence and just plain error were eliminated from the state. They were not and probably never can be. The maintenance of a privileged power elite in our society virtually guarantees that, and those denying its existence have to be presumed to be doing so because they are a part of it, or want to be.
But, that being said, overall I think that the attitude of the government in the post-war era that lasted until 1979 was to serve the interests of the people of this country. The obligation was one of duty to make change for the collective betterment of all in society, and in a massive number of ways that is what the outcome was. That cannot have been by accident: at its core it was the result of an attitude that pervaded both Tory and Labour governments of this era.
And then came Thatcher, Hayek, Friedman and Rand and with her and their dogma, the whole neoliberal era.
Society was no more.
Individual, and not collective, well-being was what mattered.
The focus was on shrinking the state to empower individual action.
The idea that the state had a duty was largely abandoned.
And so we got to the point where ministers had no plan for a pandemic.
They might have understood how to get rich in a financial crisis, but they did not understand how to finance the government.
And when it came to it, they wanted to argue over who would make the decision as to who would die rather than remember their duty to save people.
I have picked examples from the last few days, but you can find them almost anywhere you look. If you are not sure, start with how benefits now work, where the imposition of cruel punishment on those already vulnerable would appear to be the primary goal of the system. That attitude arose from somewhere. It came from ministers who loathe those that they are meant to serve and who have never sought to hide the fact. Instead, they delight in vilifying them.
So, to go back to the question, of course we cannot have confidence in the running of the country when those running it - and the attitudes are pervasive amongst those now leading the Tories and Labour - are antagonistic towards the needs of those in the country whilst prioritising the needs of finance instead. The rot starts at the top in this case, and it has spread far and wide.
How can we restore confidence? Not with ease, I admit.
And not with the current leaderships of either of our main parties.
And probably not without changing our whole electoral system so that we are not plagued by people of that mindset - with its inherent belief in the right of some to govern at the very heart of it - ever again.
And not until we have a revolution in political thinking that understands that politics is not about which party wins or loses, but is actually about how we care for people.
Is that too much to hope for? Maybe, but I am going to hope for it anyway.
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Last item on Newsnight was a report by Andrew Verity who has spent months investigating companies which are secretly owned by members of Putin’s inner circle and involving the Seychelles. There is a lot more.
They are running rings around Companies House -as you have written about.
The government have decided not to proceed with legislation.
Baroness Kramer (Lib Dem) said it is not a even a loophole, you could drive an oil tanker through it.’
I wonder what vested interests are at work in Whitehall facilitating the abuse.
I agree with all he has to say
I know this is dreaming but I’m all for MP’s dealing solely with constituency matters while a group of legislative MP’s selected by sortition make those decisions. An alternative would be decision making by citizens assemblies.
I have no desire for sortition
Abaility and aptitude have to be taken into account
Dito citizen’s assembles – a deeply dangerous idea IMO
I would disagree with your reply here. On the one hand you’re saying assemblies of citizens can’t decide about their own needs and how to meet those collectively, in assemblies, but that they can decide on a small citizens’ assembly of 650 people who, with impunity, can impose upon them, in the way you describe in this blog. Also, I would disagree that elections in any way work to identify those with ability and aptitude. This is also a point you make regularly in your blog – many MPs are not only incompetent, they are also simultaneously cruel, and yet they are elected. There is no possible way that the current system helps to identify who is or isn’t capable, since elections are based on slogans, party political broadcast, and in the main untruths, misdirections and empty promises, which may require ability but they’re not ones to be proud of or seek out. The problem in my view is the system. Somehow expecting a system to do something different than it does, and globally elected governments are wreaking havoc on their populations, isn’t credible. If we viewed parliaments as an experiment in social organising and power distribution, the conclusion would be unequivocally damning. Even between 1945 and the beginning of the 1970s, life for the majority was still bad. I would add, as example, that it was a citizens’ assembly that led to positive changes in marriage equality and abortion laws in NI, and in Brazilia, citizens’ assemblies have been much more effective in distributing resources than politicians. It is parliaments across the world that have enabled the establishment of unaccountable, powerful, supranational organisations, and introduced neoliberalism, the wholesale privatisation of collective resources, and presided over breathtaking levels of inequality, not to mention the deaths of hundreds of thousands in the UK alone from what the UN described as a policy of social murder, none of which the majority want or have asked for. And then there are the world wars you mentioned. Without systemic change we know the trajectory we are heading in, and we know the difference, from poll after poll, between what people want, and what elected governments do, the world over. This is a dangerous disconnect, since it is precipitating the end of all life on earth. I would contend that the evidence does not support elections to parliaments as conducive to human wellbeing, flourishing, and now our very survival.
I am a democrat
Citizen’s assemblies are not democratic
Nor is sortation
There is no further debate to be had in my opinion
Discuss consitutional reform, by all means, but not government by random action
How to faciliate citizen oversight that is more than a vote every 5 years or so? (regardless of the electoral system).
How to stop events such as the Sheffield fiasco with trees (council decided that 15,000 had to be felled) – that ran against citizens wishes & clear evidence.
How to facilitate citizen oversight of the organs of government – national, regional, local which have been exposed for what they are – wholly inadequate.
There has to be a process that involves citizens more in governance. Otherwise, the failures will continue.
The blog has profiled the failure of all the statutory regulators – almost all of the time. Citizen oversight could improve that situation – & I doubt if it would make it worse.
I have to disagree with you about citizen’s assemblies Richard.
They are able to be far more radical than elected politicians because they are not worried about being re-elected. They do not generally write legislation but make recommendations, which carry a lot of weight because they are ordinary people who have given their time and energy to listening to evidence from experts and debating the issues among themselves. In Ireland they recommended legalising gay marriage and abortion, both of which were subject to referenda before being adopted. What is undemocratic about that? https://citizensassembly.ie/
I don’t think this would have happened in Ireland without the citizen’s assemblies.
Anyone can offer advice.
That does not mean legislators need to follow it.
What we need is a proper democracy.
I wouldn’t entrench citizens assemblies in “Government” but there are many instances where they have been useful in some part of the process. I think in many respects “The Wisdom of Crowds” by James Surowiecki makes a good case for “wisdom” lying with the large groups rather than individuals and even “experts”. Worth a read.
One issue is that ministers are selected from constituency MPs. These are totally different jobs. How can a busy minister properly attend to ministerial business and also represent their constituents? They can’t. So, I propose that ministers should be MPs without a constituency. When an MP is selected as a minister then a by-election would held to select the constituency MP. That way they wouldn’t be trying to do two jobs with the inevitable conflict of interest. If a Minister resigned or was sacked then there would always be a by-election they could fight to become a constituency MP again.
Or are ministers not selcted from MPs, as in the USA?
Perhaps that would be a better suggestion.
Then MPS could fulfil their primary function which is scrutinising legislation and the executive.
But there does need to be a mechanism for MPS to propose legislation, not merely vote on that proposed by the executive.
There is
Ten Minute rule bills
Private members bills
Etc
They just don’t get to see the light of day in most cases
But a few do
I note the Guardian is reporting two Labour Councils calling for Starmer’s resignation. I think they are right in that Starmer did not made clear his conflict of interest that his wife was Jewish. This of course raises the much broader issue that UK democracy is failing in part because there is not a much more effective machinery for revealing conflicts of interest. How this can be done is of course a very difficult problem.
I can think of many reasons why Starmer should resign, but not declaring that his wife is Jewish does not seem to me to be one. Please explain how this can be a conflict of interest, bearing in mind that the current horror in the Middle East is between the Israeli government and the Palestinians. The position of the Israeli government is fiercely condemned by many Jews, both in Israel and abroad.
Under any normal etjhical code that would be considered a conflict requiring disclosure
Not an issue
But something to draw attention to
Saying that you support Zionism is a conflict of interest within the Labour Party because of Zionist expansionism at the expense of the Palestinians. Starmer needs to clarify what he means by his support of Zionism so it doesn’t appear connected to his wife having family in Israel.
https://www.ottawajewishbulletin.com/jewish-world/keir-starmer-elected-leader-of-british-labour-party
No conflict of interest for Starmer to address when Revisionist Zionism existed and continues to influence right-wing political parties in Israel? It’s naive to pretend that Starmer doesn’t need to do a lot of explaining where he actually stand in regard to Israel:-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revisionist_Zionism
Schofield
There are a lot of people who consider themselves to be Zionists, whose wives are not Jewish. I agree, declaring oneself, as Leader of the Labour party, to be a Zionist needs some explaining. I cannot accept that failing to declare one’s wife as Jewish is a conflict. Was the First Minister in Scotland required to declare that his wife had family members in Gaza? I know he told the press and the public, but I don’t think that is a formal declaration of a conflict of interest.
Conflicts of interest are defined as situations that people think might create bias. It does not matter that there is none. The risk that there might be creates the need fur declaration. So, yes, Humza Yasouf did need to declare his situation.
I cannot agree with the idea that having a partner who is a Revisionist Zionist makes no difference in a marriage or partnership because for me this stance is fundamentally immoral and I wouldn’t want to live with an immoral person! For most people this is a private matter but when you are bidding to run a country you have above normal power to influence situations so we need to know exactly how moral you are. I strongly suspect Starmer running Corbyn out of the Labour Party is tied up with the type of Zionist he really is.
Conflicts of interest and public resolution of them (though maybe not always possible or desirable) are indeed difficult. We don’t know the influence of vested interests though we can often guess,
The Left wing narrative about what happens ‘behind the scenes’ is that the security services dictate what is permissible in foreign policy. Certainly the British Establishment seems very pro-Israel ( majority of Tory MPs and half of Labour signed up to parliamentary ‘Friends of Israel’.) If any other country spend three weeks bombing a defenceless population with no ability to leave the area, there would open discussion as to whether it was a war crime. Not with Israel it seems.
However, looking at the Chatham House and Royal United Services Institute, I read opinions which challenge the Establishment view. Given the turnover of people in the institutions of government and some history, I think a determined Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary are capable of changing that narrative. Whether they choose to, is a different matter. It is where the quality of leadership matters.
It might be argued that one advantage of Cabinet government over the American system of appointing ministers from outside, is that a united cabinet can share the responsibility for a policy in the House and in the country. Usually better decisions come from group discussion-as we find in the strategic direction of WW2. It is not driven (there are exceptions e.g. Eden in 1956) by one man’s ego. An example of that is Trump’s effects on US foreign policy. He didn’t even read the briefs but followed Fox News!
Schofield
I think it is Starmer’s wife’s choice to live with a Revisionist Zionist or not. Her choice is nobody’s business but hers – she is not leader of the Labour party.
I think this line of argument is exhausted
Starmer made his “unequivocal” support for Israel clear at least a year ago. And his wife’s Jewish status has been reported far and wide. I agree that he should be removed, not only for refusing to call for a ceasefire now, but also for his purging of CLP and LP members and general authoritarian behaviour.
Difficult to disagree with any of this – and Gavin Esler recently did a pretty effective characterisation of the UK’s disfunctionality
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/25/key-question-britain-2023-why-do-we-put-up-with-this-rubbish?CMP=twt_gu#Echobox=1698212152
Is there already any half effective campaign/pressure group which has the slightest chance of getting electoral reform / constitutional reform onto the national agenda – in such a way that political parties have to take notice? If not should we start one?
The ERS has always failed
Compass has got nowhere…
Nor have political parties supporting it
I wish I knew the answer
Make Votes Matter does its best. https://www.makevotesmatter.org.uk/
I noticed last night on QT that there was absolute silence when the tory minister said that he was relieved that Johnson kept Corbyn out of number 10.
What concerns me isnt so much the ‘Political Views’ of Government as much as their ability to run the Country effectively.
The evidence suggests that Ministers simply dont have the skills or insight needed to do this.
In short the ‘British Disease’
How we address it, I dont know
The only way to restore confidence in Government is for it to go back and to get things done like it used to along the lines of the 1945 government or at least as New Labour left it in 2010 (which was not perfect, but my God – a lot better than it is now).
This means that we need an incoming Government to address this. But we don’t seem to have that do we? So, hope is all we have long term. Hold on to it is all I can say.
Citizens assemblies? No way!
If you are going to do citizens assemblies, then first of all let’s slay the zombie that is Nicholas Ridley first and get rid of the over centralised control of London of the shires first and its stranglehold on finance.
Examples? Look at the Right to Buy receipts collected by local government from a central government policy from Thatcher’s time, and how they had to be saved and not spent to reinvest in local affordable housing – even under New Labour. Council’s have only really just been allowed to spend those receipts on new housing. And then, if they can’t spend those receipts, have to give them to the Treasury, where they disappear forever!!!
But even better, don’t have such assemblies and let’s boost local authority power and have a system closer to Germany with strong properly funded regional governments instead.
And let’s have a look at our status as citizens and not subjects and revise that. A proper bill of rights ,a proper contract between the governed and the governors.
Sovereignty must reside in that agreement with rights and obligations on both sides. It’s got to be a something for something deal that recognises that government and the people have an interdependent relationship, a relationship that is mutually beneficial. Or it is nothing.
But as I’ve said before, fundamental to this is also looking at how national party politics is funded which to me is just corruption in plain sight?
If you want to know how it is that such crap human beings are in charge, the answer is in this area of politics and no revision aimed at a system in which faith has to be restored can achieve anything until this problem is unpacked and addressed.
I believe that I have highlighted the truth of the matter to be honest.
Confidence in the government requires:
✅Proportional representation
✅That a government can not hold on to power when so many are against them
✅That MPs tell the truth on oath in Parliament
✅Right to peaceful protest
✅Right to free speech as long as it does not harass another person
Much to agree with
A coherent written Constitution defining inter alia the limits of politicians’ powers is a sine que non for any changes to the status quo. We have to get rid of the obfuscation that infests our parliamentary governance (viz Gavin Esler’s exposure of the multiple meanings of “the Crown”). What other country of comparable economic size does not have a codified Constitution?
Yes the rot starts at the top with the monarch who appoints the prime minister and also the ministers of state etc. He needs to go to start with. Furthermore we should all be equal and so the first step to levelling up is giving everyone equal rights. Instead of swearing allegiance to the Crown and Country, we should swear allegiance to the people, our fellow citizens. I find it insulting that I am expected to show due deference to an “elevated person”. This should go hand in hand with a change in the voting system and change in the undemocratic House of Lords.
Our conditioning, inflicted upon us at too early an age for us to be able to grasp what it is or avoid it, effectively stops us from being able to think of solutions to problems like this, which, I imagine, is largely the point of it. Thus to find answers we need to break down our conditioning or seek perspectives from those never subject to it. Bring on the psychedelics, then, to assist in the first objective and to achieve the second let us cultivate a group of very clever people who aren’t schooled but have been allowed to use modern facilities to educate themselves as they wish. Molesworth has it right; Down with Skool!
My suggestion for increasing confidence in government would be gradually devolving creation of money away from central government.
Money is about power.
Devolving it automatically brings power closer to the people:
http://www.progressivepulse.org/economics/we-need-to-make-money-more-local-indeed-that-is-actually-what-any-local-independence-means?preview_id=32282&preview_nonce=313324d70a&preview=true
Sorry Peter, but that is SO wrong.
Money is the flip side of tax – and what you suggest would make macroeconomic control of the economy impossible.
We will have to disagree, but your suggestion would fundamentally undermine the state and that is not my goal.
I’m surprised that you do not approve ..
Of course money is the flip side of tax – but when money is power, then local control and accountability is surely fundamentally the actual ‘start’ of democracy.
And local control has currently the, albeit regressive, council tax.
Yet surely any inflation could be subject to the Indonesian system of supervision?
Central state government could then decide how – or if – to intervene.
We would simply be talking about excess inflation in say, Somerset, as against, say, Lancashire, and not all over the UK here..
Money creation is really the basis of the state and surely does not undermine it. (We need the Tories for that!)
Could I suggest that macroeconomics should not outstrip democracy, which at its core, is nothing if not, at base, local?
I am sorry Peter, but it’s naive to suggest we could talk about inflation by county, and doing so reveals just how little you have thought this through.
It’s also naive to suggest that locality is the centre of democracy – unless the locality should itself be, or is at least capable of being, a nation state, which is not true of any county in the UK, but is of each nation.
This is not to undermine local democracy – but in the interests of avoiding massive regional difference – constraints on local governments economic autonomy are also vital. Redistribution requires that.
The ancient state was defined by its power to defend borders.
The modern state is defined by its power to tax.
One evolved from the other.
Both required money creation. Devolve that and there is no functioning state left.
I have no wish for that. I think this suggestion is fundamentally wrong.
Your dialogue with Peter May, Richard is a reminder that effectively; de facto – money functionally defines the state.
I write to support Citizens’ Assemblies if they are very carefully prepared and led with with adequate resources: for examples, the ‘Involve’ Citizens’ Assemblies on the N. Ireland Constitution (already mentioned in these comments) and on Brexit. The Involve Brexit Citizens’ Assembly September 2017 is at: “https://www.involve.org.uk/our-work/our-projects/what-kind-brexit-do-people-want
I’m not keen on citizens assemblies at all.
I have spent a good portion of my public sector career in public consultation policy concerning housing policies.
I’ve seen close up how service users have worked with policy makers, from community meetings, tenant representative bodies to tenants sitting on boards and seen some interesting and disturbing things from service users and landlord organisations.
There is a lot to be said for tenants and citizens as service users and making sure services deliver to needs and that they are of effective quality. No problem there. These can be effective feedback/consultative arrangements that can lead to the co-creation of services – when you are talking about day to day performance issues.
But when you come to stuff like policy and management you run into problems. I’ve seen service users inject policy with their own biases and prejudices that has stymied innovation and locked out certain categories of need.
I’ve seen directors and senior managers use or allow these biases for their own benefit or as ‘tactics’. I’ve seen organisations set up and support tenant bodies, board members etc., as if they were medals on their chest but still deliver a poor service (it’s all just for show).
Essentially many of those involved are told that they hold power – we tell them that they are customers when in fact they very often do not have the power to be a customer as they have very little real choice. If a social housing tenant or NHS patient does not like the service or the house they are in, try getting another house or finding another ‘free at the point of use health care provider’. The customer culture in the public sector is to me at least a pure lie. Real customers spend there money elsewhere if they do not like your wares.
When we tell people we are ‘consulting’ it is very often that we providers have made our minds up and made a decision and just want to know what people think about it and tinker afterwards.
To me, it’s all down to one thing in the public sector: Sovereignty. The Neo-lib public choice theorists can bleat on all they like about the customer being sovereign, but really this is just importing bourgeois ideas about spending power into worlds where spending power does not really exist (it would perhaps if not so many people were required to be unemployed, or where benefits were the equivalent of a living wage and a living wage WAS a living wage).
Theories of customer sovereignty merely obfuscate who is in charge in my view. It lets those in charge off the hook who manipulate the agenda and all you end up with is turkeys voting for Christmas – tenant Board members endorsing cuts to housing services they don’t receive for others who do under instruction that they are part of a Board team and any dissent is not team work!
No, for my own reasons I think Richard is right but so is Carl Schmitt about the concept of sovereignty.
You can’t have it both ways. Animals born with two heads mostly do not go on to live. Someone has to be in charge (but open to feedback loops). Politicians need to rediscover state sovereignty and not see it as an impediment to the person (like the Neo-libs have drip-fed us all over time)
And – once again – until we have sorted out how our politics is funded – party funding and ‘advisor funding’ (Tufton Street) – we will have to carry on with this pretence of a democracy wringing our hands at its ineffectiveness when the problem (a State that has decided not to be sovereign) is in my view at least staring us in the face!
Thanks
Pilgrim Slight Return
I think we are not talking about the same thing. You are talking about consultation with service users, I have no opinion about that, though it would seem to be a good idea. Citizen’s assemblies are quite different, please look at how they have been used in Ireland https://citizensassembly.ie/
There has also been one in Scotland whose role was to address the following three questions:
What kind of country are we seeking to build?
How best can we overcome the challenges Scotland and the world face in the 21st century, including those arising from Brexit?
What further work should be carried out to give us the information we need to make informed choices about the future of the country?
They are not a substitute for good local government, we can have both.
Hi PSR,
I don’t think Citizens’ Assemblies and the public consultation processes you describe are the same thing at all, and I’m afraid you’re allowing your negative experiences with the latter to bias you against CAs. I was on the Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit (2017) mentioned by Roger Gartland above, and I was amazed at how professionally it was organised and presented. It was very obvious that a huge amount of thought had gone into every aspect of the structure and process. You only have to glance at the opening chapters of the final report to see that (https://www.involve.org.uk/sites/default/files/uploads/docuemnt/Citizens%27%20Assembly%20on%20Brexit%20-%20Full%20Report.pdf). In fact, for that very reason, i.e. the labour intensiveness of the process, I can’t see CAs ever becoming an alternative form of government, as some commenters here have suggested and which Richard has roundly dismissed. But I do think they have a place and a role to play in a democratic society.
I have no objection to them being used to sound out opinion
But they are not democratic
A brief, thoughtful essay on the way we were and the way we are. What particularly struck me was the association of the First Past the Post electoral system with the Entitlement of the two- cheeks-of-the-same-ruling-class political-arse dominant LP and Con parties rather than being an incidental product of ‘tradition’ (this is how things are done around here’) – or, more pointedly, Anglo-Saxon adversarialism which pervades British politics and law, civil and criminal – as well as the broader culture. Finally, a point not touched on in the article is the burgeoning and toxic anti-democratic practice of lobbying and financing of political parties, the two big ones getting the greater share – and individual MPs. Time for change.
Richard, I think there is probably a misunderstanding here – I’m certainly not proposing ALL money creation be decentralised!
I agree that would undermine the state.
I’m suggesting that SOME local money creation be permitted and we start with say, £200 per annum per head and see how we get on.
So, why not just let each local authority have a central bank reserve accounts with no interest charged to that amount per annum?
Why not have local community banks with full money creation licenses so people can bank with them and see profits returned to the community which makes them? (Because they won’t ever get that license, appears to be the answer, judging by the experience of Hampshire).
Hampshire won’t get a licence because of the way the project is being structured as I understand it
My reservations stand
Local savings banks then? Sparkassen?
No problems at all with that
That is the circular economy
The rich use two sticks to beat naive voters with in the UK, firstly that public services perform worse than the private sector, and secondly government has no money of its own (this avoids explaining the true role of government in regard to taxation).
Hello again Richard. Ideally, political control should be as local as possible, with powers delegated upwards only if really necessary.
In Switzerland, decisions are made by consensus. The Communes are the closest to the people, and are granted as many powers as possible.
Powers are delegated by Communes, upwards to the Cantons, and then by them, to the Confederation ONLY when this is essential.
Swiss people also get to vote on specific issues by means of ‘Initiatives’ and by ‘Referendums’.
Initiatives require a petition of 100,000 signatures to be collected within 18 months.
An Optional referendum requires 50,000 signatures within 100 days of proposed changes to legislation.
A Mandatory referendum is required for any Constitutional Amendment approved by Parliament.
Our British voices should be heard more often than once every five years. Online voting would enable that, easily & cheaply.
Btw, Switzerland has not participated in a foreign war since its neutrality was established by the Treaty of Paris in 1815.
Could that be concomitant with it’s Direct Democracy?
But that is based on 800 years of experience
We have none
You simply can’t compare the two
Online voting would enable democratisation, and not just for the General Election.
But my reservations that I think need addressing are:
☑️There would need to be an option for those who are not online
☑️The mainstream media have a biased influence
Sue & Theresa
Thanks for your responses.
My concerns are and remain about human behaviour in consultative bodies – both tenant participation and citizens assemblies I think share the same weaknesses, I don’t see a difference given what I set above and below.
I have spoken often about the structural issues in politics – the biggest being how competition in politics is funded and how that perverts democracy. That must be addressed because it makes all sorts of community involvement inauthentic.
But the other area is the capacity of the population to understand what it is doing and what it is there for when being consulted by government . I think that education in this country about citizenship is very poor indeed.
I refer to the work of Margaret Ledwith and her writings in ‘Participating in Transformation’ based on the work of Pablo Freire.
I find the idea of ‘naive consciousness’ and ‘critical consciousness’ crucial to understanding the problems we have in this country with involving people with government. Some might baulk at this and find the ideas too closely associated with a Leftist narrative about power relationships but it makes sense to me.
Looking at our media, looking the internet even, these are all inputs into society shaping opinions. My view is that there is too much ‘naive consciousness’ and not enough of the critical version. Marketizing based information delivery is one that gets us to react and not think. We are expected to jump to or accept conclusions in the same we we decide to spend our money. Our early formal education is about rote learning rather than learning to question things.
My view is that too many citizens are ill equipped to be involved and I do wish that we spent more time enlightening them. Then there is the issue of what they are being taught – even our universities are bastions of lies about economics and turn out graduates who go off into the world promoting trash.
So for me,there’s lots to do and I still think that the relationship between the State and individual needs to be reforged and this can only be done with better education and more critical thinking.
And my last point is about sovereignty. The State is sovereign and so is the money that it makes to pay for things.
We have a situation however in this country where the State wants to prove its sovereignty by NOT paying for things that it could.
But even Rishi Sunak’s concern during Covid was that lockdown would mean that the bond markets would not buy government bonds and the government would run out of money. If Sunak really believes that, he should not be in government. Yet he is.
The rampant lying about how government works or not has got to be changed – people have to be more critically consciousness and it is society’s role in my view to teach them to be so. I don’t think much of the current crop of methods of involving citizens in decision making are authentic at all until the education problem is addressed.
Your point about sovereignty – “The State is sovereign” is essentially an English Law interpretation. In Scotland the people of Scotland are sovereign under the Claim of Rights which dates back to 1689 and which was restated in more modern terminology in 1988 by the Scottish Convention, ratified by the Scottish Parliament in 2012 and by the Westminster Parliament in 2018. The Tories have sought to undermine it by getting the Supreme Court’s approval to overturn intra vires legislation passed legitimately by the Scottish Parliament. It’s a fundamental difference of principle which will continue to be matter of contention as long as the Tories are in power and I don’t expect Labour to change this if it gets into power at Westminster.
Thanks Ken
I had forgotten this
Ken
That is good stuff to know but also to be expected from Scotland, but also a possible base from which a more balanced relationship between state and citizen can be achieved perhaps in English law.
When I talk of and in support of sovereignty I’m really taking the view informed by Stephanie Kelton and seeing sovereignty as suffused with the creation of legal tender – money.
Making money is something that citizens do not do – if they manufacture their own money, they are usually in trouble for doing so. And, as discussed many a time on this blog – money is power, so making it, originating it, is also a source of absolute power in a state (which can be granted to private banks to create credit).
The people don’t make it, they use it.
This area of money creation and sovereignty has been undermined by Public Choice Theory which has simply derided the production of state money (investment) as having no rationality except for the self serving actions of politicians.
Personally, and after nearly 14 years of the Tory party blighting my life I don’t think there is anything wrong with politicians making people happier – does anyone else? When you see how the rich with their party funding being made happy at the expense of the majority, Public Choice Theory is just another neo-liberal stick to beat the state with and a very hollow one.
“Making money is something that citizens do not do”
I think I’ve read some people describe credit cards as a way for people to create money at will, the problem being that it needs repaying, and worse, with interest (which creates money for the bank).
It always takes two to make money
It is an exchange of promises to pay
As a PS to my obsession with getting the money agenda into mainstream media & political discussion, would there be be any merit in an en masse petition on the lines I have suggested, NOT to Parliament (although that might be done simutaneously?), but to the BBC, ITV, C4 investigations, Sky, LBC etc…+ a selection of written media outlets?
“No Brains; No Bones: No Heart; No Eyes!” …And this coming from our massively pro-establishment BBC! Were they actually broadcasting an honest evaluation of our current political leadership, both Tory and Labour? No, they were describing ‘the Jellyfish’ which just happens to be unusually prevalent in UK waters right now.
As much as possible, we have to demonstrate our resistance to grotesquely poor leadership. We must continue to protest the insane support for the cruel onslaught on Gaza; I am committed to joining the next big protest in London. We can only hope that a real statesman with brains, a spine, a compassionate heart and with eyes wide open to the reality of this genocide will come forward to gain universal public support both in the UK and the US. Don’t lose hope…
The next big protest in London is next Saturday, I think. Already liaised with the police to make sure it does not detract from the remembrance service at the cenotaph, although you wouldn’t think so as far as Braverman is concerned. She’s full of threats to those who support a ceasefire.