This is a note about the way forward for online participation of the UK citizenry in our government.
Public consultations justly have a bad name. So indeed do stakeholder consultations.
For a period of several years I was involved with private sector market research and, frequently, public sector consultations. Confidentiality forbids me from sharing specific examples, but I grew used to hearing the growing horror of stakeholders gradually realising how limited their scope of influence was, on issues on which they were more passionate, more informed, and more directly influenced by than whoever was driving policy, and despite the trappings of open and responsive governance.
E.g.:
(a) I think the government tends to forget that it has a responsibility to assess the invested interests of those who participate in consultations. In particular, there is a tendency to think that businesses are experts in their own affairs, and that they can therefore be expected to make the best decisions for the economy and the country on sector-specific issues. In fact we live in such an interconnected world that there is no such thing as a purely sector-specific issue; the government have a responsibility to be critical of these sources, and to try to work out what the big picture is.
(b) I think stakeholder mapping is usually very badly done. There is often a slippage in sense from "anyone whom this issue affects" (a good definition of a stakeholder) to "those who are already influential in this area, and/or already present themselves as knowledgeable" (a poor definition).
(c) My strong intuition is that no matter how hard government (or any organisation) promises to itself it really will listen to its stakeholders this time, the only way to genuinely drive policy change through stakeholder engagement is to delegate real power to stakeholders - or at least to allow stakeholders to impose penalties if, in their considered judgement, the engagement process has not been material.
The issue, of course, is then whether you have the courage to delegate power to stakeholders who may disagree with you!
*
None of the following suggestions really make my heart leap, but I find it tricky to come up with anything better.
I am slightly worried that such measures might be adopted and executed badly. They might then serve as evidence that online participation is simply impractical.
So here are a few thoughts on online participation (apologies; they are slightly disjointed).
The UK should be leading the way in online participation, not half-heartedly trying out experiments we know will probably fail, so that we can have the excuse, "Well, we gave it a bloody good shot!"
I suppose a good principle to begin with is what the de facto citizen is like.
We shouldn't romanticize the notion of the citizen. We are often: overworked, harried, short on time, money, patience, passionate about issues but also nervous and defensive about a lack of deep knowledge of them, willing to learn, but also distrusting of all information on topics of public interest, without necessarily the time nor the inclination to be critical of that information, and craving the security and simplicity of authoritative information sources, or of timeless truths (typically cynical and/or vague dogmatism).
So "involving" us isn't just a matter of making government more permeable to the pre-existing knowledge, energy & deliberative resources of the citizenry. It is also finding ways to cultivate & nourish those things.
The trouble about polls is that there are just so many of them. One avenue worth exploring is making participation in official polls a bit more like voting: for instance, you can only vote in these polls once per month, so you'll choose the issue that's important to you, and not feel guilty about the rest. (Twelve votes per year might be better than one per month, for the sake of flexibility).
Letter-writing & petitions obviously have their place, but they feel rather dated. They take time and energy. The results are often discouraging (38 Degrees campaigns are a partial exception). They are only indirectly educative. We surely now have the technology to make the activities of government far more transparent, and to be able feedback on those activities at a fine grain, and for our government to be minutely responsive to that feedback. We have social networking and social browsing; why not social scrutiny of government?
We need to think about the notion of the "popularity" of information, and how the effects of particular items "going viral" could be usefully included in the interface between public and government. Not everything can receive equal attention, but it is not for the government to decide what is and isn't important. Nor can we any longer trust the opposition and traditional media to make such a selection. We the public must also be directly involved in determining relevance. At the same time, this is obviously risky territory. Information can become popular based on shallow considerations.
So in terms of online interaction, we also need to think about the relationship between the serious & official, and the casual, satirical, just-for-fun. Obviously not every tweeted joke, every "OMFG!" or ever photoshopped jpeg is an equally venerable and sacred exercise of a democratic right. At the same time, if you simply exclude the flippant, anarchic & playful side of things, you risk creating an arena for engagement which is dull, excessively hard work, and unrepresentative of the citizenry - being dominated by anoraks, humourless sorts, and special interests. You fail to cultivate & nourish the knowledge, energy & deliberative resources of the citizenry. (We also need to think about trolls. We also need to think about astroturf).
I don't have any big answers, but a small example might point us in roughly the right direction. Scenario A is that there is a comments section beneath Parliament TV. It obviously looks rather like the thread of pretty much any YouTube clip, and it confirms everyone's suspicion that we, the British public, are idiots.
Scenario B is that Parliament TV is integrated with Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc., as well as bespoke social networking sites. Users can comment on issues raised and share specific segments of the filmed proceedings, or transcripts thereof, and can filter the annotative activity of other users in a variety of ways. There is, for example, a "readers who liked this comment tended to also like these comments" feature, so it's not just a matter of what's popular or not - people with common purposes or ideas can find one another. There are incentives for independent fact-checking to flourish. Where jargon or specialised language appears, it is easy to click through to get definitions and explanations. Those readers who persevere on such a path can even find educative resources in the underlying theory. You may start your day seeing a funny photoshopped pic, proceed to the news story on which it is based, then find yourself enrolling in an online course in economics or environmental science. Openness is a guiding principle throughout. The online architecture has been designed with the frictionless experience of the end user, the citizen, kept firmly in mind.
But at the same time, we learn what the culture of parliament is like. What is it like to be an MP or a civil servant? What restrictions do they feel upon their speech and action? What is it they think the public don't understand about their position? What is it they feel they are blamed for that is beyond their control? How do even those who are in government feel their ability to govern as they would like, to make the decisions they really want to make, is restricted by their party, by the markets, by the economy, by specific commercial interests, by existing statutes and case law, by the media, by the European and international context? It may sound paradoxical, but e-democracy isn't just about increasing and improving the participation of the public in governing. It's also about increasing and improving the participation of the governors in governing.
To summarise slightly reductively: online participation needs to be frictionless, fun, and educative. It needs to imaginatively exploit cutting edge technologies, not just transfer pre-digital practices online.
What have the more far-thinking and imaginative theorists of e-democracy proposed? Has the Public Administration Select Committee interviewed anyone who fits that description?
Showing posts with label Dappy Ideas for Democracy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dappy Ideas for Democracy. Show all posts
Monday, 10 June 2013
Sunday, 9 May 2010
Why Lib-Lab or Lib-Con Could be Equally Undemocratic
Edinburgh South!
I voted Green (the weather was too good not to!), then nipped over to Armstrong’s to spend some coupons. Pottered about by the Castle, observing the midgies (research for my upcoming Transgressions conference!). On the way back I found poor Fred Mackintosh (Lib Dem!) standing at the crossroads at the top of the Meadows in his little suit, and they’d drawn a giant chalk flower around him. Instantly I knew I had committed a deep and unforgiveable betrayal. I went home and put his head up in the loo (see Note 1). Spent the night with David Dimbleby, and it was as turbulent as I have always imagined.
I am sure I was the most agonised voter in Britain! Fred narrowly missed out on Edinburgh South, so of course it went to Labour.
Finally the results are in:
Oh dear, I'm having technical difficulties. You know what I mean though.
A mixed parliament means a mixed mandate. No party can fairly enact the bulk of its programme. We deserve an all-party policy agenda. Specifically, we deserve an agenda which mixes its alignment with Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem principles roughly in proportion with each party’s popular support.
Thus 36%, 29%, 23% respectively, by the popular vote; or 47%, 40%, 9%, if you go by seats. You could say these numbers give you upper and lower limits determining how much conservativism, how much social democracy, and how much liberal democracy can legitimately emanate from Westminister (see Note 2).
There are plenty of policy mixtures which could comply with those limits. However, each party’s election manifesto is made up of interdependent policies. You can’t simply mix-and-match. A mixture must be found whose individual components complement each other, and don’t pull in different directions. We deserve an agenda that delivers technocratic efficiency as well as ideological proportionality. If it can also reflect geographical voting patterns, all the better.
That much is obvious and indisputable. The next bit is more speculative.
In considering how to weigh a particular point of policy, it’s not enough to ask how important it is to the party who put it forward. The negotiators must try to assess how popular, and how decisive, it has been with the electorate. Of course it’s difficult and involves guess-work, but polls and common sense offer some guidance.
I think that plenty of the electorate are quite shallow in our priorities. The Conservatives are probably correct when they emphasise that Gordon Brown has been dismissed as a personality. Nick Clegg and, above all, David Cameron, have both been endorsed. My hunch is that the Prime Ministership for Cameron, a high-profile ministerial role for Clegg, and obscurity for Brown, would conform with the electoral will (see Note 3). I think a lot of us are sick of the sight of Brown and have literally used our vote to keep him out of the newspapers and off the telly.
My other hunches are, first, our country is a little bit racist and xenophobic. That is reflected in the popularity of the Conservative policies on immigration (they are sort of policies) and on Europe. Second, our country is somewhat contaminated with a kind of nasty, vindictive class intolerance. This is reflected in the popularity of the Conservative’s policies on policing and on jobseeker’s benefits (see Note 4).
I don’t think, therefore, the Conservatives can be expected to compromise very much in these areas. It requires a different kind of democracy to defeat that immorality, discursive democracy rather than representative democracy. It requires grassroots movements, coordinated through networks and organisations like Hope Not Hate, the NoBorders Network and Unlock Democracy.
I think the Conservative mandate is far weaker on tax (especially inheritance tax), on efficiency savings in the current financial year, on only minimal electoral reform, on incentivizing the voluntary sector, and on plans for the NHS, education, housing, social security, and pensions. In these areas, Labour and Lib Dem can’t be expected to compromise very much with the Conservatives – only with each other.
I really have no idea about environment or defence! Probably rapeseed mecha?
If the bit I described as “obvious and indisputable” doesn’t, after all, go that way – if some lop-sided set of policies, plainly disfiguring our will, is imposed by a Lib-Lab coalition or by a Conservative government with Liberal support – if we don’t get what we deserve – then we have mandate, mandate to rise up.
Melody and I wandered out on Friday morning looking for riots and we didn’t come across any but we did find absolute armfuls of wild garlic and thistles. Bliss!
The sky looked almost too blue.
Note 1: For middle class English girls like me (originally from Newcastle!), the loo is a very important place for strong but mixed feelings. We often put up certificates and things in there, to show we’re quite proud of ourselves but not, you know, tacky. For a long time I even had a picture of me shaking hands with a man I thought was Kofi Anan! Fred went up next to my other darling, a particularly dashing axolotl whom I have also dubbed Kofi. But he will have to come down soon.
Here he is:
Note 2: (I’m leaving out the little parties because it’s just too confusing! Maybe just bung in UKIP and BNP’s 5% with the Conservatives, the SNP’s 2% with Labour and the Green’s 1% with the Lib Dems???) Imagining this spectrum with the popular vote on one end and the number of seats held on the other may look a little arbitrary; indeed it is but the arbitrariness derives from the FPP system. A kind of democratically optimum agenda configured at 36%/29%/23% Con/Lab/Lib would face a certain amount of arithmetical resistance from a house divvied up 47%/40%/9%, especially as MPs who themselves sui generis connosieurs of their constituency’s interest could do just about anything and still sleep at night.
Note 3: What mix of personalities should govern is to some extent independent of the democratic constraints described with respect to a policy agenda. In simple terms, it’s okay for a cabinet to be dominated by Conservatives, with one or two Lib Dems, or dominated by Labour, with one or two Lib Dems, provided that whoever it is superintends the kind of mixed policy agenda I describe above. (That is the sort of thing a representative is supposed to be able do. Representatives are delegates, not just trustees). But allowance must be made for the fact that many people have overridden their views on policy and specifically voted for or against Brown or Cameron.
Note 4: Thirdly (and a little less stridently) we have a knee-jerk dislike of officialdom, and prefer to judge any bureaucratic system by its failures, not by a score-sheet of successes vs. failures. I’m not exactly sure where on the Conservative programme this translates to mandate: presumably (1) wherever decisions can be decentralised with confidence that this will not lead to equally or more complex administration in the local context; (2) wherever the life of a public servant (especially a civil servant) can be made a bit more Spartan.
Note 5: This is a post about representative democracy, and what it means to live in a representative democracy. It's my stab at being non-partisan, but I am still a massive associative democrat! And my friends are all still Markists! I do worry about myself. I mean, the Conservatives abhor poofs too, but I don’t seem to have said that’s the will of the people. To defend the Conservatives in any way, however ingenious and convoluted and reluctant, on the “issue” of immigration, means I’m probably a bit a racist! I will be re-forged in the fires of deliberation like the rest of them.
I voted Green (the weather was too good not to!), then nipped over to Armstrong’s to spend some coupons. Pottered about by the Castle, observing the midgies (research for my upcoming Transgressions conference!). On the way back I found poor Fred Mackintosh (Lib Dem!) standing at the crossroads at the top of the Meadows in his little suit, and they’d drawn a giant chalk flower around him. Instantly I knew I had committed a deep and unforgiveable betrayal. I went home and put his head up in the loo (see Note 1). Spent the night with David Dimbleby, and it was as turbulent as I have always imagined.
I am sure I was the most agonised voter in Britain! Fred narrowly missed out on Edinburgh South, so of course it went to Labour.
Finally the results are in:
Oh dear, I'm having technical difficulties. You know what I mean though.
A mixed parliament means a mixed mandate. No party can fairly enact the bulk of its programme. We deserve an all-party policy agenda. Specifically, we deserve an agenda which mixes its alignment with Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem principles roughly in proportion with each party’s popular support.
Thus 36%, 29%, 23% respectively, by the popular vote; or 47%, 40%, 9%, if you go by seats. You could say these numbers give you upper and lower limits determining how much conservativism, how much social democracy, and how much liberal democracy can legitimately emanate from Westminister (see Note 2).
There are plenty of policy mixtures which could comply with those limits. However, each party’s election manifesto is made up of interdependent policies. You can’t simply mix-and-match. A mixture must be found whose individual components complement each other, and don’t pull in different directions. We deserve an agenda that delivers technocratic efficiency as well as ideological proportionality. If it can also reflect geographical voting patterns, all the better.
That much is obvious and indisputable. The next bit is more speculative.
In considering how to weigh a particular point of policy, it’s not enough to ask how important it is to the party who put it forward. The negotiators must try to assess how popular, and how decisive, it has been with the electorate. Of course it’s difficult and involves guess-work, but polls and common sense offer some guidance.
I think that plenty of the electorate are quite shallow in our priorities. The Conservatives are probably correct when they emphasise that Gordon Brown has been dismissed as a personality. Nick Clegg and, above all, David Cameron, have both been endorsed. My hunch is that the Prime Ministership for Cameron, a high-profile ministerial role for Clegg, and obscurity for Brown, would conform with the electoral will (see Note 3). I think a lot of us are sick of the sight of Brown and have literally used our vote to keep him out of the newspapers and off the telly.
My other hunches are, first, our country is a little bit racist and xenophobic. That is reflected in the popularity of the Conservative policies on immigration (they are sort of policies) and on Europe. Second, our country is somewhat contaminated with a kind of nasty, vindictive class intolerance. This is reflected in the popularity of the Conservative’s policies on policing and on jobseeker’s benefits (see Note 4).
I don’t think, therefore, the Conservatives can be expected to compromise very much in these areas. It requires a different kind of democracy to defeat that immorality, discursive democracy rather than representative democracy. It requires grassroots movements, coordinated through networks and organisations like Hope Not Hate, the NoBorders Network and Unlock Democracy.
I think the Conservative mandate is far weaker on tax (especially inheritance tax), on efficiency savings in the current financial year, on only minimal electoral reform, on incentivizing the voluntary sector, and on plans for the NHS, education, housing, social security, and pensions. In these areas, Labour and Lib Dem can’t be expected to compromise very much with the Conservatives – only with each other.
I really have no idea about environment or defence! Probably rapeseed mecha?
If the bit I described as “obvious and indisputable” doesn’t, after all, go that way – if some lop-sided set of policies, plainly disfiguring our will, is imposed by a Lib-Lab coalition or by a Conservative government with Liberal support – if we don’t get what we deserve – then we have mandate, mandate to rise up.
Melody and I wandered out on Friday morning looking for riots and we didn’t come across any but we did find absolute armfuls of wild garlic and thistles. Bliss!
The sky looked almost too blue.
Note 1: For middle class English girls like me (originally from Newcastle!), the loo is a very important place for strong but mixed feelings. We often put up certificates and things in there, to show we’re quite proud of ourselves but not, you know, tacky. For a long time I even had a picture of me shaking hands with a man I thought was Kofi Anan! Fred went up next to my other darling, a particularly dashing axolotl whom I have also dubbed Kofi. But he will have to come down soon.
Here he is:
Note 2: (I’m leaving out the little parties because it’s just too confusing! Maybe just bung in UKIP and BNP’s 5% with the Conservatives, the SNP’s 2% with Labour and the Green’s 1% with the Lib Dems???) Imagining this spectrum with the popular vote on one end and the number of seats held on the other may look a little arbitrary; indeed it is but the arbitrariness derives from the FPP system. A kind of democratically optimum agenda configured at 36%/29%/23% Con/Lab/Lib would face a certain amount of arithmetical resistance from a house divvied up 47%/40%/9%, especially as MPs who themselves sui generis connosieurs of their constituency’s interest could do just about anything and still sleep at night.
Note 3: What mix of personalities should govern is to some extent independent of the democratic constraints described with respect to a policy agenda. In simple terms, it’s okay for a cabinet to be dominated by Conservatives, with one or two Lib Dems, or dominated by Labour, with one or two Lib Dems, provided that whoever it is superintends the kind of mixed policy agenda I describe above. (That is the sort of thing a representative is supposed to be able do. Representatives are delegates, not just trustees). But allowance must be made for the fact that many people have overridden their views on policy and specifically voted for or against Brown or Cameron.
Note 4: Thirdly (and a little less stridently) we have a knee-jerk dislike of officialdom, and prefer to judge any bureaucratic system by its failures, not by a score-sheet of successes vs. failures. I’m not exactly sure where on the Conservative programme this translates to mandate: presumably (1) wherever decisions can be decentralised with confidence that this will not lead to equally or more complex administration in the local context; (2) wherever the life of a public servant (especially a civil servant) can be made a bit more Spartan.
Note 5: This is a post about representative democracy, and what it means to live in a representative democracy. It's my stab at being non-partisan, but I am still a massive associative democrat! And my friends are all still Markists! I do worry about myself. I mean, the Conservatives abhor poofs too, but I don’t seem to have said that’s the will of the people. To defend the Conservatives in any way, however ingenious and convoluted and reluctant, on the “issue” of immigration, means I’m probably a bit a racist! I will be re-forged in the fires of deliberation like the rest of them.
Wednesday, 4 November 2009
Blog post
Hello! Three things.
1) Power 2010 / Unlock Democracy is featuring some interesting ideas for democratic reform from the many little larabuckertons of "Blogland."
2) Meanwhile, I visited London this weekend to look for survivors and found nothing but bookshops. The bookartbookshop near Old Street tube station is a sweet little diving bell, stacked with pretty little hand-mades and a few poetic bots and bibs. Definitely worth a lick of its icing, but it has funny opening times so make sure you have a giggle at them before you go.
While you're securing the area, there's a little bookshop in Old Street station itself. Full prices, but "stacky" like a second hand bookshop, so I didn't feel afraid, and for its size it's a good selection of genre and cult stuff.
Altogether grittier is the Barnardo's charity shop near Brixton Tube, where Bon Jovi side-projects and suspect baby slippers mingle with rare and sacred texts of the contemporary avant garde -- you know, Articulate How, Eckhart Cars, that sort of thing. It probably won't be long before they clear either the poetry or the slippers out to make room for the other, so hurry girls!
I'd also recommend, back in Edinburgh, Armchair Books, which is along from Grassmarket. It has a nice large jumble of science fiction, fantasy and horror, and a large antiquarian collection whose books I can't afford, but whose titles made me titter melodiously. Two notices, "This bookshop may revert to a private residence at any moment," and "Please don't piss against the door -- it runs into the shop" also trickled under my fancy.
I haven't visited Peter Bell Books next door, but doesn't it sound trustworthy? Like a Praxis MP!
3) I'm guest-editing the "Scotland" bit of an online poetry journal, Sleeves run I think by Marcus Sleeves? I met him at a sort of poetry rodeo thing in London, he has very pure skin like a baby and carries a moustache comb. So do send me your poems, if you live in Scotland (larabuckerton at "gee, male!" dot com), or let's say down to Newcastle, by the end of November.
4) There are now four bald men and one with a ponytail opposite me clustered around a Toshiba laptop watching something that goes "Aaargh! Eugh! Aaaargh! Bchkew!! Bchkew!! Aaaaargh!!"
Looters xxx
1) Power 2010 / Unlock Democracy is featuring some interesting ideas for democratic reform from the many little larabuckertons of "Blogland."
2) Meanwhile, I visited London this weekend to look for survivors and found nothing but bookshops. The bookartbookshop near Old Street tube station is a sweet little diving bell, stacked with pretty little hand-mades and a few poetic bots and bibs. Definitely worth a lick of its icing, but it has funny opening times so make sure you have a giggle at them before you go.
While you're securing the area, there's a little bookshop in Old Street station itself. Full prices, but "stacky" like a second hand bookshop, so I didn't feel afraid, and for its size it's a good selection of genre and cult stuff.
Altogether grittier is the Barnardo's charity shop near Brixton Tube, where Bon Jovi side-projects and suspect baby slippers mingle with rare and sacred texts of the contemporary avant garde -- you know, Articulate How, Eckhart Cars, that sort of thing. It probably won't be long before they clear either the poetry or the slippers out to make room for the other, so hurry girls!
I'd also recommend, back in Edinburgh, Armchair Books, which is along from Grassmarket. It has a nice large jumble of science fiction, fantasy and horror, and a large antiquarian collection whose books I can't afford, but whose titles made me titter melodiously. Two notices, "This bookshop may revert to a private residence at any moment," and "Please don't piss against the door -- it runs into the shop" also trickled under my fancy.
I haven't visited Peter Bell Books next door, but doesn't it sound trustworthy? Like a Praxis MP!
3) I'm guest-editing the "Scotland" bit of an online poetry journal, Sleeves run I think by Marcus Sleeves? I met him at a sort of poetry rodeo thing in London, he has very pure skin like a baby and carries a moustache comb. So do send me your poems, if you live in Scotland (larabuckerton at "gee, male!" dot com), or let's say down to Newcastle, by the end of November.
4) There are now four bald men and one with a ponytail opposite me clustered around a Toshiba laptop watching something that goes "Aaargh! Eugh! Aaaargh! Bchkew!! Bchkew!! Aaaaargh!!"
Looters xxx
Friday, 15 May 2009
Dappy Ideas for Democracy no. 2
I don't want scapegoats -- unless it's an entire "state"-goat!! -- & I don't want David Cameron's "swift" resolution; I want the very bright limelight which our voluptuous political class currently enjoys to linger for an uncomfortably long time, almost as if up in the techie box someone had missed the cue for a scene change, or was dead.
Despite that hope, I can't help sharing an idea which I'm sure will attract a prompt and deep consensus, and solve at least part of the problem. MPs must of course maintain a home in their constituencies, but also must be accommodated when they come to London, unless they have Skype, to sit in parliament. A wing of HMP Pentonville should be adapted for this latter purpose.
Dostoyevsky's old saw, "the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons," is a background rationale, as is a long republican-democratic tradition associating public office with private austerity, as is the issue of securely housing our public officials till the war on terror is won. But I'm mainly thinking of the system of parallels between parliament's legislative activities (ROFLMAO) and the practice of release on temporary licence (ROTL).
Like the incarcerated, our representative legislators (1) may pose a threat to society (though the mix of powers & inclinations may be significantly different) and so must be contained by a system of checks and balances, including a separation of powers, high walls, dogs and machine guns; (2) owe a substantial debt to society (beyond the obligations of citizenship); (3) function to deter socially disruptive uses of power through those same uses (raison d'état ought to preempt, and delegitimise, vigilantism and private militarism -- still a little muddled about this one); (4) face the imperative of internalising a complex and alien texture of normativity and organising it as objectively meaningful morality (the "recuperative" goal of sentencing); (5) use cigarrettes as currency and have tattoos which signal gang loyalties. Nonetheless, there are circumstances where it becomes impractical to keep an elected representative or a criminal locked up.
I am available to head a commission!
Maybe we could also involve Dostoyevsky's new Saw! "When Don Touhig MP wakes up, he discovers that his head has been sealed in a box, which quickly begins to fill with water. A self-administered tracheotomy using a pen keeps him breathing until the Chief Whip arrives at the Gideon meatpacking plant . . ."
Despite that hope, I can't help sharing an idea which I'm sure will attract a prompt and deep consensus, and solve at least part of the problem. MPs must of course maintain a home in their constituencies, but also must be accommodated when they come to London, unless they have Skype, to sit in parliament. A wing of HMP Pentonville should be adapted for this latter purpose.
Dostoyevsky's old saw, "the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons," is a background rationale, as is a long republican-democratic tradition associating public office with private austerity, as is the issue of securely housing our public officials till the war on terror is won. But I'm mainly thinking of the system of parallels between parliament's legislative activities (ROFLMAO) and the practice of release on temporary licence (ROTL).
Like the incarcerated, our representative legislators (1) may pose a threat to society (though the mix of powers & inclinations may be significantly different) and so must be contained by a system of checks and balances, including a separation of powers, high walls, dogs and machine guns; (2) owe a substantial debt to society (beyond the obligations of citizenship); (3) function to deter socially disruptive uses of power through those same uses (raison d'état ought to preempt, and delegitimise, vigilantism and private militarism -- still a little muddled about this one); (4) face the imperative of internalising a complex and alien texture of normativity and organising it as objectively meaningful morality (the "recuperative" goal of sentencing); (5) use cigarrettes as currency and have tattoos which signal gang loyalties. Nonetheless, there are circumstances where it becomes impractical to keep an elected representative or a criminal locked up.
I am available to head a commission!
Maybe we could also involve Dostoyevsky's new Saw! "When Don Touhig MP wakes up, he discovers that his head has been sealed in a box, which quickly begins to fill with water. A self-administered tracheotomy using a pen keeps him breathing until the Chief Whip arrives at the Gideon meatpacking plant . . ."
Monday, 9 February 2009
Atta Grrl!
Important opinion piece by Posie Rider out today, along with an illustration by Catherine Redfern!
I haven't been able to think of any other dappy ideas for democracy, BTW! All my ideas have been really good and adopted by various visionary states this week. Cf. Finland's new constitution. Oh, but I did come across five post-democratic ideas from science fiction. "The Proper Study of Hivemind is Hivemind."
I haven't been able to think of any other dappy ideas for democracy, BTW! All my ideas have been really good and adopted by various visionary states this week. Cf. Finland's new constitution. Oh, but I did come across five post-democratic ideas from science fiction. "The Proper Study of Hivemind is Hivemind."
Friday, 30 January 2009
Dappy Ideas for Democracy #1
This one's for the ladiez.
Like, umm. The principle of supermajorities is already in use in the US democratic system. The senate needs a supermajority to end a fillibuster. And for a good reason - fillibusters are neat.
Why not mitigate some of the disadvantages of the first past the post system (voter apathy, wasted votes, tactical voting, et cetera) by rigging the presidential powers to the proportion of the popular vote the winner achieves (weighted according to turn-out)? That way it's more reasonable to vote for your guy, even if you happen to live in a safe seat state.
So, like. If the President has done a W. 2000 and won the electoral vote, but not the popular vote, zhe doesn't get to make so many federal appointments. Maybe there could be civil society institutions waiting in the wings to make these appointments. Or let foreign governments do it! Also, the President doesn't get the power of selective pardon. Either nobody gets pardons, or everybody gets one.
Or if the President gets a big mandate from the popular vote, tilt the balance of power zher way by requiring only a 2/5 Senate approval for Supreme Court appointments.
For really upper echelon shares of the popular vote, the President gets incredibly powerful technomancy anime attacks.
Maybe this could all be relativised according to what popular mandates have been achieved by the legislature and the judiciary's SAT scores.
These are just examples, they're probably not "tweaky" enough!
Anyway, the situation on the ground is fast overwhelming these fanciful & reformists maggotes in my brain: the results of yesterday's by-election in Stoke Newington show a swing of 0.4% from Labour to Green since 2006!
Like, umm. The principle of supermajorities is already in use in the US democratic system. The senate needs a supermajority to end a fillibuster. And for a good reason - fillibusters are neat.
Why not mitigate some of the disadvantages of the first past the post system (voter apathy, wasted votes, tactical voting, et cetera) by rigging the presidential powers to the proportion of the popular vote the winner achieves (weighted according to turn-out)? That way it's more reasonable to vote for your guy, even if you happen to live in a safe seat state.
So, like. If the President has done a W. 2000 and won the electoral vote, but not the popular vote, zhe doesn't get to make so many federal appointments. Maybe there could be civil society institutions waiting in the wings to make these appointments. Or let foreign governments do it! Also, the President doesn't get the power of selective pardon. Either nobody gets pardons, or everybody gets one.
Or if the President gets a big mandate from the popular vote, tilt the balance of power zher way by requiring only a 2/5 Senate approval for Supreme Court appointments.
For really upper echelon shares of the popular vote, the President gets incredibly powerful technomancy anime attacks.
Maybe this could all be relativised according to what popular mandates have been achieved by the legislature and the judiciary's SAT scores.
These are just examples, they're probably not "tweaky" enough!
Anyway, the situation on the ground is fast overwhelming these fanciful & reformists maggotes in my brain: the results of yesterday's by-election in Stoke Newington show a swing of 0.4% from Labour to Green since 2006!
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