Dumps and deliberations
I’ve written before that I’m not a huge fan of direct democracy, not in the sense of doing away with MPs and replacing them with referenda. Fatally, demand-revealing governance hands more power to the rich, then compounds the error by legitimizing it. This is unacceptable.
I prefer a proportional representation system like open-list PR or a preference voting system like STV. However, as suggested by theorists of deliberative democracy, we do need more (and different) voter engagement. Desperately. Citizens’ Assemblies, like the one used to study electoral reform in British Columbia, and Participatory Budgeting used in Porto Alegre, are just the start. Among developed democracies, Canada is leading the way, though at least one of my local mayoral candidates is starting to get the point.
An item in last week’s news suggested another testbed:
The U.K.’s nuclear waste should be buried “several hundred meters underground,” with the storage facilities incorporated into the surrounding rock, a government advisory body said Thursday.
…
About one-third of the land in the U.K. could be “geologically suitable” for storing the waste…
The process will work something like this: geologists do their assessment, someone in Whitehall chooses from their “possibles” list somewhere (not a marginal) to build the store. There’s a ten-year public enquiry, then the government gets its way and the locals are bitter, or the nimbys win and we go back to the start. Meanwhile, the fish off Sizewell are growing a third head and have joined the local golf club.
So, how about this for an alternative: Once the engineers and geologists have decided on the feasible places to bury the stuff, we let the locals bid for it. A demand-revealing process replicated at all the possible sites shows the council that will host the dump for the lowest proportional council tax rebate. The required cash transfers are funded proportionally by the “winners” from their council tax bills, for an agreed number of years, before reverting to central government. These compensate the “losers” for shifts in house prices, the inconvenience of health worries, the inevitable plague of campaigning local journalists, and so on. Should the aversion to living three hundred metres above a completely safe storage facility be great, we end up paying council tenants to live there.
So, it’s either an elite-led, top-down process that costs a fortune to establish that (a) the dump will be safe and (b) nobody wants to live near it. Or we can treat the people who have to live above it like adults, and all pay towards compensating them for their inconvenience. There are doubtless some tweaks needed to my methodology* (this is a post not a considered project design), but I can’t believe this is undesirable or impossible.
Of course, I don’t for a second think any of it will actually happen. Unimaginitive managerialism is the sine qua non of New Labour whiggery, and the Blue Blairites are no different. For this reason, and so many others, vote None Of The Above tomorrow.
* For example, to neutralize “gaming”, bid outliers could be excluded (like in figure skating judging), or a maximum valid rebate could be set, say 200%.
Interesing post. I certainly do not like the ides Demand Revealing Governance you mentioned. Pay to vote? No way! I see proportional representation as a realistic direction for British politics to head in. It would be a start at least allowing people who vote Green, for example, to be better represented. But it is still not a perfect system as we can see in numerous countries in Europe.
I am still attracted to the idea of Direct Democracy. If I am in agreement with a political party on most issues and vote for them, and then that party does something I’m completely against without asking the electorate, like, say, invade another country, how is that democratic? Referenda on the big issues is a fairer system that encourages participation and therefore also nurtures a better informed, more articulate electorate. Not perfect, what is? Open to corruption? What is going on now seems pretty corrupt to me. I think that technology will come to the rescue in the near future with a more secure direct voting system. Switzerland is an interesting case people can propose issues to vote on as well as vote on issues. I don’t think that it has come a plutocracy (but then I don’t have all the details).
People are going to vote tomorrow against a government they are angry with, and in the process, remove from office many good and capable councilors. Why? Because they have no alternative. Its either vote for someone else, spoil the ballot or stay at home. With a fairer system this could have been avoided.
I’ve always personally rather liked the American system of separation of powers, where the legislature and the executive are elected separately – that way, the problems hanging over both proportional representation and first-past-the-post no longer matter so much.
Is there a practical reason why such a system couldn’t work in Britain?
we do need more (and different) voter engagement. Desperately. Citizens’ Assemblies
Did anyone else read that as two sentences rather than three, the second beginning
“Desperate Citizens’ Assemblies…”
Just me, then.
Jonn? The reason we don’t do separation of powers in the UK (or most other EU countries) is because, at a basic level, it’s crap.
Really really crap. Executive needs to be held to regular account. Parliamentary systems do that. Directly elected PResidents are only accountable at election time. Think about it. Chirac, Bush, Putin. Not exactly confidence inspiring is it?
We need to fix the supine parliament, make it do its job properly, but separation of powers is, quite simply, a bad idea. There are some academic papers on the subject somewhere in the flat, I think, but meh, I failed at academia…
MatGB:
Really really crap. Executive needs to be held to regular account. Parliamentary systems do that. Directly elected PResidents are only accountable at election time. Think about it. Chirac, Bush, Putin. Not exactly confidence inspiring is it?
Fair enough – but surely the solution to many of the problems that face those countries are further limits to executive power and greater legislative scrutiny. Which is coincidentally exactly what we need in Britain right now.
Mat
How can you expect a parliament to hold the PM to account when he is the leader of their party, holds power over their political advancement, and has the power to stuff all the parliamentary committees with his own placemen? PMQ’s is a farce – a shouting match for morons. Where is the holding to account? Answer – nowhere.
I’ll go for separation of powers any day.
I have a feeling that there is a direct relationship between the rise of the party list – with its professional placemen politicians – and the decline of participation in the democratic process as evidenced through turnout at elections. I remember when I knew who my Euro MP was, for example, but then a few years ago I found out that the parties had the representatives, and we electors only had the tokens of their ambitions. I believe that one of the fundamental principles of a representative democracy is the ability to vote the (specific) bugger out when their personal activities or behaviour alienate them from the people whom they are supposed to represent. Once a politician pays more attention to his/her position on the party list, representative democracy is on the critical list.
Therefore, for a primary chamber of government, I firmly believe that the STV system is the appropriate model; each constituency will elect a person who has the assent of at least 50% of the people who cast a vote and can rightly consider themselves to be the representative of that constituency. I am perfectly clear that there is a difference between being a representative and a delegate; MPs are the former and not the latter and entitled to respond to their own party’s whip and policy imperatives; but they should always look over their shoulders to the people who directly put them there in the first place.
There is a place for PR, but that is in a second, revising, chamber in a bicameral system. And don’t get me started on the Scottish system which combines PR and first-past-the-post in the same chamber of Parliament – the worst of both worlds as far as I am concerned.
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