So, Iceland’s president has thrown a controversial international financial deal to a referendum. Looking at this alongside the Lisbon Treaty kerfuffle in the UK, can we now approach a definition of “referendum” as:
a political device used by politicians of one party to unpick international agreements made by politicians of another party, in circumstances where they believe the popular mood of the moment is on their side.
The news from Switzerland is bad, not just for the overwhelmingly moderate Swiss Muslim population, but also for democratic reformers in general. Anyone arguing against democratic reform can now say – “let the people have their say, and you’ll get racism and discrimination, like in Switzerland”.
What’s worse, a minority in British politics see such populist racism and discrimination as positive reasons for more participatory democracy. “Cut through the wiles of politicians and the PC brigade, and let the people say what I … sorry, they really think.”
What case can democrats make against those populists?
It has to start from questioning the democratic credentials of the Swiss vote. Sure, the vote was passed in the proper constitutional form, but there are undemocratic elements to every constitution, and I would argue that the use of referendums to deny minority rights is just such an undemocratic element.
One has to draw the distinction between the false view of democracy as “whatever the people think today”, and the larger view of democracy as a system that secures the right of people to control their government both now and in the future.
When I think about the basic principles of democracy, I’m always drawn back to its original Athenian conception, centred around three words – isonomia (equality before the law), isegoria (equal right to speak), and eleutheria (personal freedom).
Two and a half thousand years on, our conception of equality has moved on a little (no slaves, women voting), but the ancient fundamental that a good state secures permanent equality in laws, speech and freedom is written into the US Constitution, the Declaration of Human Rights, and a hundred other basic laws.
If we start with this conception, the Swiss vote starts to look very undemocratic. In the same way that it is not democracy to vote to abolish democracy, it is not democracy to legislate against the fundamentals of democracy.
This Swiss law would be democratic if it applied to all citizens of any religion – the French concept of laïcité works, in theory, like this. As it is, the Swiss referendum attacks isonomia as it applies to Muslim citizens alone. This is even more obvious when one looks at the form it took: a federal constitutional amendment on one religious building in a constitution that delegates every other religious matter to the cantons.
I don’t know what reach the ECHR has in Switzerland – I assume the country is a member of the Council of Europe. I hope that the ECHR has the power to overturn the referendum result. You can imagine the reaction from the rightwingers on the Net: screaming about a disgraceful denial of democracy. I don’t agree. To overturn this unjust and undemocratic referendum would be in itself a democratic decision – even if not taken by the people.
In an excellent overview (Digital engagement governance – a dichotomy between hyperlocal or partnership managed), Michele Ide-Smith sets out the pros and cons of handling community engagement projects through councils and partnerships, or through more organic local community media approaches:
Council / partnership managed approach
Pro’s:
- A level of moderation and facilitation control
- Less reliance on volunteers, who are often transitory and hard to coordinate
- Focus on specific issues relevant to public service providers
- Council hosts system and data – reliable and secure
- Potential for integration with other systems, workflow etc.
Con’s:
- Top down = undemocratic
- Resource intensive to moderate
- Not as sustainable longer term when funding runs out
- Lack of focus on community interests may disenfranchise the community
- Liability and data protection issues
- Technology less flexible and higher support costs
Community led/managed approach
Pro’s
- Democratic and self-moderating
- Sustainable model – owned by the community
- Building community skills in digital media and citizen journalism
- Public service providers have no liability
- Low / no cost technology and flexibility to try a range of different tools
Con’s
- Lack of control, public service providers not engaged due to fear of criticism
- Reliance on a few motivated individuals, could be hijacked by one community group
- Lack of motivation / interest from community in digital media
- Lack of community access to internet and skills in digital media production
- Unclear how to intervene if there are tensions or conflict arises
- Reliance on continuing existence of providers of platforms / tools
According to the local paper, the promised open primary in marginal Brighton Pavilion will require voters to turn up in person.
Presumably put off by the high cost of the postal ballot used in Totnes, the Tories have hired a room in a seafront hotel, where (if you book in advance) residents of Pavilion constituency can turn up and choose between six potential candidates.
Cost reasons aside, I’m a bit surprised that the Tories are turning down the free publicity they would get for running a higher-profile race in the city. The open hustings (as they should be called) are taking place a week today – no time for the media to publicise and examine the candidates, and so no time for the winner to establish a public profile.
It does raise the question for me of what ‘open primary’ really means. I doubt that many people who aren’t Conservatives will drag themselves down to the seafront on a windy November night. It’s not likely that even 1% of the 80,000 Pavilion voters will turn out – so in what way, other than purely technically, is it open?
This morning’s Today programme pitted David Heathcote-Amory against the Economist’s Brussels correspondent, Charlemagne (David Rennie) in a discussion about the appointment of the President of the EU Council.
It was an uneven match-up. Heathcote-Amory complained about the Lisbon Treaty, complained about the undemocratic EU and how awful it all was, and came across as backward-looking, querulous and reactionary. Rennie/Charlemagne tried to drag the conversation towards the future and the powers of the new role, pointing out that the Lisbon Treaty was all but passed, so we should stop complaining about referendums and just get on with it.
The oddest part of the interview was when Heathcote-Amory complained about how the new Council President wouldn’t be appointed by a democratic vote, but by the heads of national governments. Rennie made the point that since the job was to represent national governments, it was reasonable for the national governments to make the appointment.
The point Rennie didn’t make, which is perhaps more important, is that anyone who wants the EU to be less powerful and at the same time more democratic is asking for two incompatible things. Greater democratic legitimacy would push the EU towards being a proper federal state, which would be a very bad thing for those (unlike me) who think that sovereignty within national borders is the most important part of democratic governance.
It reminded me of Semele, the hapless lover of Zeus, who is tricked by Hera into asking Zeus to make love to her in his divine form, and is then burned to a crisp. Semele: Eurosceptics :: Zeus : elected European president.
Liz Azyan picks up on some questions about e-petitions that were asked at the Local Democracy Blog by Paul a couple of months back. She doesn’t mention the fascinating word cloud that accompanies her article, called “E-petition verbs”.
The biggest words are, on a quick skim, “prevent, save, reimburse, make, oppose, charge and introduce”. With my local government head on, all of those words, except charge, are “spend” words. Save this thing the council want to close, introduce a new service, put more bobbies on the beat to prevent crime.
I don’t have a problem with people saying that they want the council to spend more money – people do that all the time. It’s just very likely that the appeals to spend more money will push for higher and higher spending at a time when there’s less money than ever for doing new things.
Easier petitioning means councils will need to get (even) better at saying no.
Sidebar: Interesting research project for someone: take the most recent 100 petitions on the Number 10 website, and work out the net cost of accepting them.
Charles Crawford’s recent Blogoir challenges the idea of “Polish anti-semitism” that we’ve heard so much about recently.
In doing so, he touches on the wider point that the left’s attacks on the Conservative alliance with eastern European right-wingers are being expressed in rather sweeping terms. Accusations of anti-semitism against Michal Kaminski are too easily eliding into accusations of anti-semitism against those ker-razy Poles and Latvians – even Stephen Fry chipped in on Channel Four news with a shamefully foolish remark implying that the Nazis built the concentration camps in Poland because that’s where the anti-semites were.
It’s absolutely not a problem for commentators to attack Law and Justice (Kaminski’s party) or Kaminski himself. They’re fair game. To imply, however, that L&J or Kaminski are representative of mainstream political thought in Poland is wrong as a matter of plain fact, and risks falling into the lazy habits of the right-wing press, where foreign politics is funny or horrifying with nothing in the middle.
In fact, Polish politics, mutatis mutandis, is similar to British politics, and indeed politics in any other European country. There is a centre-left party in the Party of European Socialists (or whatever they’re called this week), and a centre-right party in the European People’s Party, where the Conservatives will be once they get past their self-indulgent loathing of the Lisbon Treaty.
It’s sloppy and patronising for the left to put Kaminski in the central European mainstream. It’s also bad politics – the strongest argument against the Cameron Euro-alliance is the very marginality of its other member parties.
In today’s Guardian, Martin Kettle makes the case for why the Labour party will not suffer the fate of the pre-war Liberal Party, whose epochal electoral collapse gave rise to the book The Strange Death of Liberal England
Labour’s vote is still based on class identity, not ideology. That wasn’t, in the end, true of the Liberals once all men and women got the vote after 1918 and 1928. The Liberals were an ideological party. When they went into decline they went into decline everywhere – north, south, east and west – as their ideology fell apart in new conditions. Labour is simply different. Even in decline, Labour is still electorally concentrated in particular regions, where its class identity remains strong. As long as first-past-the-post continues, Labour is likely to remain strong at Westminster, and thus is in a position, if it takes the right decisions, to rebound. The classic proof of that came in the 1983 election, when Labour and the Liberal/SDP Alliance each polled about 8m votes, but Labour ended up with 209 MPs against the alliance’s 23.
While I think Kettle is right that Labour voters (and Tory voters) are much more tribal than the Liberals of the pre-war era, I think he ignores the fact that tribalism in politics as a whole is on the decline.
People in the north might vote Labour when they do vote, but fewer and fewer of them are voting at all. At the same time, the growing individualism and consumerism of politics means people are more ready to switch parties for the issues they believe in, and party identity is weaker (as shown by the rapid growth of small and single-issue parties such as UKIP and the Greens).
It’s complacency these days for any party to rely on ‘our voters’ to keep on turning out, even if the party is unpopular. All parties need to understand that ‘their voters’ are individuals nowadays, and need to be respected as such. It’s notable that the Conservatives are about to launch a new online campaigning community, which Iain Dale praises for its interactivity. That’s certainly the right approach – though whether the party leadership will listen to what the users say remains to be seen.
Well worth reading Danah Boyd’s analysis of the social and racial self-segregation being seen in US social media use, taken from a talk given at the Personal Democracy Forum earlier in the year. Snippet:
For decades, we’ve assumed that inequality in relation to technology has everything to do with “access” and that if we fix the access problem, all will be fine. This is the grand narrative of concepts like the “digital divide.” Yet, increasingly, we’re seeing people with similar levels of access engage in fundamentally different ways. And we’re seeing a social media landscape where participation “choice” leads to a digital reproduction of social divisions.
There’s an interesting interview with Douglas Carswell (a Conservative MP) at the Mark Reckons blog.
Carswell is an interesting figure. I admire his radicalism and his readiness to fight for reform. He is, according to his lights, a true friend of democratic reform. That’s the ice-cream. The liver is that I thoroughly disagree with his political starting-point – that “vile elites” of pro-European leftists have taken over the British state and need to be exterminated by the cleansing power of the referendum.
His belief in direct democracy, brought out in his book with Daniel Hannan, The Plan
For example, from Mark’s interview:
The Left’s long march through our institutions explains the leftist disposition of so much of the quango state – from the criminal justice system, to the BBC to the educationalists. The default settings of the quango state are well to the Left of the British people. That is why we need direct democracy – to recalibrate the state and undo the left’s creeping victory.
This, I think, is the original sin of the supporters of direct democracy – they support referendums because they think the people in general agree with them. In reality, I doubt that the people are as anti-left as Mr Carswell thinks they are, they are just small-c conservative. I can’t imagine that a referendum would support, say, the abolition of the NHS or the lowering of taxes on the highest-paid. Referendums might support populist/right measures such as leaving the EU or imprisoning petty criminals for life, but they might just as easily support populist/left measures such as confiscatory taxation or trade protection.
I hope that Mr Carswell is consistent enough in his beliefs to accept that a 99% tax rate on incomes over £60,000 is a reasonable price to pay for removing the power of those vile elites. I’m not sure that the barristers, bankers and others on either front bench would necessarily agree with him.