Ongoing democracy
September 26th, 2009 | This post was written by Fiona MelvilleI’m reading Zac Goldsmith’s book, The Constant Economy, at the moment. In it, he proposes “a political programme: a tool for voters, and a challenge to the political classes; a gauntlet thrown down at their feet”. As I haven’t finished it yet, I won’t say much about it. But one idea that recurs frequently is direct democracy (as also espoused by Dan Hannan, Douglas Carswell, Greg Clark, Nick Herbert, Jeremy Hunt, John Penrose, Theresa Villiers… the list goes on).
I am a huge fan of their ideas. I think that even where some of them are impractical at the moment, steps can be taken. I want to see a reversal of the role between state and citizen so the citizen holds the reins, and the state is there to enable our lives rather than run them.
Lots of the ideas suggested in the 2005 book and the 2008 one (The Plan) have or will become official party policy. Which is great news.
One word of warning… Every time anyone mentions California (where I have sadly never been), it is held up as a paragon of voter initiatives and local control. They even have a recall mechanism which I think is absolutely essential (with appropriate safeguards – but who wants to wait 4 years to chuck out a corrupt politician?) and have argued for before. But it appears that they forgot something in California. Apparently every single budget set-aside which is specifically voted on is then set in stone forever. So if, say, there was something in 1989 which particularly exercised voters, they got a vote up, won it, won some budget to do whatever it was they wanted, achieved it… the money still, twenty years on, has to be spent on that project even though it was a success and isn’t needed any more.
So what’s needed as well is either sunset clauses, or an automatic cut-off at which point another vote needs to be won. I know that is a lot of voting (so let’s see if we can make that more efficient as well) but it really will be essential to be able to say, yes – we did that. Now it’s time to move on.
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Tags: Living in Britain, Localism, New Politics, Voters
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