Sortition: making a decision by using lots (straws or pebbles etc.) that are thrown or drawnMPs don't have a good press at the moment. In fact most folk's opinion of the typical MP isn't printable in a family-oriented blog such as this one. Suffice it to say that self-serving, greedy, opportunistic, lying and deceitful litter said opinions spiced up by choicer, more colourful descriptors.
So why do we have MPs? Is representative democracy really all it's cracked up to be? And are there alternative methods of making decisions that are fairer and more transparent? Only slightly tongue-in-cheek I'd like to explore replacing electing MPs to a parliament with selecting an assembly charged merely with making the decision - with the selection done by sortition.
Why you ask should this be considered? Because our system of governance is decaying and we are watching - among the latest scandals - another stage in the rotting of our body politic. And frankly we don't think MPs either represent us or have the slightest inclination to provide us with service. One of the best indicators of this decay is the role, size and scope of political parties.
Back in 1953 there were nearly 3 million members of the Conservative Party and over 1 million members of the Labour Party. These were the two largest voluntary organisations in the country organised at every level - from the highest places of power down to the smallest of local communities. In the factory, mill and mine communities of Northern England the Labour Party was as important an institution as the Methodist church, the working man's club and the trade union - it was part of the social fabric of these places. Similarly in the London suburbs and market towns the Conservative Party, the Conservative Club and the Primrose League were all important social institutions sitting alongside the Church of England, the Masons and the Chamber of Trade as key drivers of these communities.
Today all has changed - the Conservative Party has barely 250,000 members and the Labour Party just 160,000. All the political parties in the country can't scrape together many more than 500,000 folk to pay a subscription. These are dying organisations now dominated by the ambitious, by anoraks and by those who have to join so as to get elected. Yet today Political Parties are brought by law into the governance of the UK - we have a whole election driven entirely by political party label and we stagger and lurch each day towards a politics controlled by the few large paymasters of the big political parties.
We will have to change. And change must be radical. So put an end to representative democracy - it has had its time. Let's usher in a new age of participation and let's do so using a simple, fair and easily understood mechanism - the lottery. We want 650 men and women to decide on our laws? Choose them from the electoral register at random. Better still use modern communications media to select a new panel for each vote - again by lottery and at random.
We will still need an executive - directly elected rather than moderated through the corrupt filter of the dying political parties. But decision making through panels selected by lot is fairer more responsive, less open to corrupt influence and returns us to the citizen democracy we have lost with the decay of political parties as social institutions.
Give people a real role - or the prospect of such a role - and they will wake up, stop being honest idiots and bring in a new more open, participatory age of government.
Worth a try?
3 comments:
Not as whimsical as it sounds - today's MPs have lost sight of the fact that they're acting for us, as our representatives; therefore the electorate are, by default, the employers of the MPs.
Expanding that theme, each MP's constituents should have the ability to suspend, or dismiss, their MP, outside of official election. If, say, a quorum of 500 people was enough to act and call for a vote on the future of the MP, it may focus the MP's minds wonderfully on serving the electorate, instead of serving their leader, or, indeed, being self-serving.
To quote Citizen Smith, "Power to the People"!
I've often thought the same thing. It can't work any worse than what we have now.
It's an interesting supposition. As the cut of MPs to 600 works its way through parliament the question keeps coming up - "What is the role of an MP". This is where we underline the problems inherent in having a system where constituency MPs can also be Secretaries of State in major departments; how do we marry the day-to-day 'super social worker' role of an MP with the international statesman part?
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