THIS MONTH’S Eco Action has been provided by Bromsgrove Extinction Rebellion.
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 is 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? The details might best be devolved to a separate Citizens’ Assembly.
- What constraints on election campaign finance should be imposed to prevent the rich and powerful from buying the policies they want?
- How do we get citizens’ strongly supported views into law between one election event and the next?
- How do we ensure tighter rules for standards in public life are adhered to?
- Is political power in the UK over-centralised?
What if our communities come to own and manage local resources, starting with renewable energy, ensuring that wealth is widely shared?
Let’s reclaim democratic power by building a politics that belongs to us all. It is only in that way we can have a properly 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 very concerned about.
Then we will all be involved and knowledgeable about politics. So let’s not go into that voting booth and just stab our pencil at a name we vaguely recall and go away muttering ‘they’re all as bad as each other’.
Visit xrworcs.org.uk/local. or email [email protected] for more on the group.
