Our Climate Conversation

Politics for All People

It’s official – the next General Election will be held on Thursday July 4. Are you going to vote? Do you feel involved in politics and that your voice and opinions will be listened to? Is it a case of voting for the lesser evil? Does the current voting system give you somebody you can approach to listen sympathetically to your views? How do we hold politicians’ pledges and promises to account – what happens when they fail to keep them?

If you are disenchanted with our politicians only being interested in us on election day you are not alone. It's time to do away with ridiculously lengthy and ambitious manifestos. It's time for the people to have a proper say in our democratic processes. The country needs a national Citizens Assembly to consider each petition (only those securing 100,000 signatures) for new laws. Strongly supported proposals from the Assembly should be put to a Referendum; and if successful passed into law. The petition to Restore nature now should be the first considered.

There is a lot wrong with our Politics. We the people should determine the principles that govern it - they should belong to us from the beginning. There is a democratic means of achieving this: a Constitutional Convention. It’s a kind of Citizens' Assembly: A sample group of citizens, experts, and facilitators that engage in open discussion and questioning on specific issues, leading to policy recommendations. This is what we must demand say every 20 years.

Of course such a Convention must be allowed to set its own frame of reference, and some of the areas that it might consider are:

What voting method to use? - some form of Proportional Representation could be considered. The details might best be devolved to a separate Citizens’ Assembly.

What constraints on Campaign Finance should be imposed to prevent the rich and powerful from buying the policies that they want? We also must stop this super-rich elite from buying political influence often through bogus 'think-tanks' and media ownership and by making donations to political parties and individual politicians.

How do we get citizens’ strongly supported views into law between one election event and the next?

Do we need a legally-binding written code to set and enforce rules for Standards in Public Life?

Is political power in the UK over-centralized? We need to look at the devolution of power and finance- raising down to as local a level as possible

Let’s reclaim democratic power by building a politics that belongs to us all. It is only in that way that we can approach a balanced debate about all our issues and especially the existential ones of Climate Breakdown and its interconnected Environmental Collapse that we know so many people are rightly very concerned about. What if our communities come to own and manage local resources starting with renewable energy, ensuring that wealth is widely shared?

Then we will all be involved and knowledgable about politics. So let’s not go into that Booth, stab our pencil at a name we vaguely recall and go away muttering “they’re all as bad as each other” .