Our Climate Conversation

Dear King Charles, .... As you know, the UK is one of the world’s most nature-depleted countries. Such is the severity and urgency of the situation that we ought to be on a War Footing to devote resources to tackle it. Yet pledges to protect this planet by successive UK Governments have been just empty words. Instead, short-termism, inaction and profits have continued to lead their agendas.

It is clear that we cannot leave it to our political representatives, and this is one of the reasons that I am writing to you. Our so-called Democracy is that in name only – we, the people, have a short involvement at election time to make a choice, and then the winning party forms a Government that assumes complete permission to enact all its manifesto promises and all its other policies for the next five years or so, that may be got through Parliament with little scrutiny (or even no scrutiny thanks to Henry VIII laws). Except for very rare instances like the Brexit Referendum, the people are not consulted again between elections. Constituents can of course write to their MP as I often did, only to be given the brush-off with a standard reply and sometimes not answered at all. We can add our names to a petition and if the numbers get huge then Parliament is required to discuss the issue – but this can happen in a side room and gets easily dismissed by the incumbent government.

I’m sure that you agree that this year’s election produced strange anomalies. There was a clear need for change, but the winning party produced a two-thirds Landslide on just 34% of the registered vote, almost exactly the same percentage that gave it a pathetic minority in 2019, thanks to the collapse of its main rival. The party I voted for gained just four MPs – in a proportional system they would have achieved 40.

But it gets worse than that as only 52% of people who were eligible to vote actually did so. Some of those who did not vote would have been put off by the new requirement to provide specific identification, but many were just not registered. They feel that politics has nothing to say to them. They have ‘no skin in the game’ and you can understand that when the winning party says that it is going for wealth (whose?) and growth (this is not possible on a finite planet without devastating environmental impacts). However I do not agree with this No Voting position. Politics belongs to all of us and we must all step up and engage as committed citizens and community members.

At the moment we are being failed by the awful system – what we need is a Constitutional Convention to examine the options and propose a new way to operate our Democracy. This cannot be left to the current Parliamentary members, the Civil Service or any existing structure of state because they will not be impartial. It must be done by a Citizens’ Assembly: a sample group of citizens, experts, and facilitators that engage in open discussion and questioning on specific issues, leading to policy recommendations. In France a recent Citizens’ Assembly on Climate Change policy was heavily publicised so that the population felt involved – this is a good strategy. It had the unreserved backing of the President. In UK there was a similar Citizens Assembly set up by Parliament’s Committees at the end of the May government but its policy recommendations were quietly ignored by the incoming Johnson administration. Of course we need buy-in by our political representatives to implement well-supported recommendations or at least put them into a Referendum. Otherwise it’s just a pointless talking shop.

Citizen Assemblies ensure learning, listening, collaborating, and making decisions together for the common good. What if such a Constitutional Convention opened the door to a new culture of participation, of devolved decision making where everyone felt that they have a path to express their feelings and get their voices and concerns listened to? What if politicians actually do work for the people and not for the interests of big business, the oligarchs, the press barons, or the dark money controlled think tanks in Tufton Street?

So dear King Charles, will you please bring up the topic of Citizens’ Assemblies in your next audiences with the Prime Minister? We need one to make far-reaching changes to ensure we have a Democracy worthy of the name. We need another to steer climate justice, global justice, social justice and justice for nature together with a government commitment to the cross-party Climate and Nature Bill. They could also do worse than look at the People’s Plan for Nature sponsored by stalwart organisations WWF, National Trust and RSPB in 2023. Let’s show the world what real, meaningful Democracy actually looks like.