A couple of years ago, almost 35,000 people phoned and emailed me over the course of a single fortnight. It wasn’t a sudden boom in personal popularity: the social research company I work for had got involved in recruiting 30 members of the public who wanted to ‘have a say on the NHS’.
As an organisation that specialises in finding new ways to include the public in decision-making, we’d gone to great lengths to ensure that we ran a high-profile and inclusive campaign that reached out beyond the existing ‘committee’ class and appealed to people who’d never previously considered themselves to be active citizens.
To get that friendly, personal approach we decided to put my name and my email address in the adverts. It’s no exaggeration to say we were a little overwhelmed by the response.
In hindsight, we shouldn’t have been. Those of us who are engaged in a whole range of public involvement exercises frequently see people exhibit a strong desire for active citizenship. It’s often very close to the surface in people who also feel angry and frustrated, and who find themselves described as apathetic or having given up on politics. Given a constructive alternative, I’ve found that most people willingly choose it over cynicism and commentary.
And now over 40,000 people have been involved in the Labour party’s Big Conversation consultation. I’ve been hugely encouraged by the way the party has embraced this approach so enthusiastically – it signals a positive culture change. But there are some big questions about what happens next. The Big Conversation is an outward-looking consultation and public involvement mechanism, ideally suited to getting large numbers of people to talk politics again. The National Policy Forum is a decision-making mechanism, designed to allow party stakeholders to reach agreement on specific policies.
How do they come together?
This is an important challenge, with no easy answers. Models of public involvement are highly developed in the UK and elsewhere, but fewer blueprints exist for models of decision-making. In almost every example I can think of, it’s still in the gift of the commissioning body (in our case, the party leadership) to pick and choose which bits of the advice it wants to hear, never mind adopt. It will take some ingenuity to make sure that we retain an open and inclusive approach that’s not vulnerable to being selectively managed when it suits.
How do we give members clout without sacrificing the flexibility needed to keep it responsive?
Some of my NEC and National Policy Forum colleagues are currently on working groups to try to resolve this. Although I can’t suggest a model for them to adopt, I’d like to suggest four principles on which to base the structures they’ll have to invent.
First, accept that qualitative, deliberative debate is important in itself. It allows intelligent re-engagement with the public and people gain satisfaction from the process as well as the results. It’s been my experience that the more you involve people in seeking solutions, the more progressive they become.
A citizens’ jury I chaired in Dublin on anti-social behaviour started with calls for joy-riders to be taken into care or horse-whipped. It ended up with a group of elderly residents offering to be ‘volunteer grandparents’ to the young people and their single parents who were finding it hard to cope. There was still an insistence that tough standards had to be set and maintained in the community, but there were also almost 50 practical recommendations for how local people could help statutory services to uphold them. I understand that the responses to the Big Conversation have followed a similar pattern.
So this is a political point. Deliberative, participative democracy is good news for the left. It’s a way of re-engaging with the public in a meaningful way, and it’s in our political interests to move away from shallow forms of democracy and decision-making that encourage knee-jerk, reactionary or ideologically entrenched responses.
Second, do it in public – open debate matters and helps keep the leadership and electorate aligned and on a progressive course. They change the territory itself and create a momentum of public will and political change that politicians neither can nor want to ignore. For party members, this is not an entirely robust safeguard. But, if we’re honest, we know all the rules in the world that state conference is the sovereign decision-making body can never really stop a Labour government doing what it wants to do. From the leadership’s perspective, a conference defeat isn’t good, but a general election defeat is what matters.
So perhaps for progressives in the Labour party, our best chance of getting our positions adopted in the manifesto is to show that our policy is rooted in the public’s best instincts and experience. And as well as using public deliberation as a better way of making policy, our commitment to new forms of engagement should be an important policy in itself.
Third, understand that policy development is a circular and reciprocal process, not a way of generating demands that are placed on leaders. A policy and decision-making process that is deliberative and iterative acts to turn the responsibility back onto public as well as leadership – and that’s what embeds real change in society.
I can’t think of any public involvement exercise I’ve been involved in that hasn’t ended with a list of tasks for the community themselves to take on that is almost as long as the list of demands that they are making on their political or administrative leaders. It’s often this challenge that’s thrown back to people that makes them feel so positive about their role as active, empowered citizens.
Political policy and practice need this kind of two-way approach. Undoubtedly policy is better when the people who are affected by it get a chance to help make it. But, just as importantly, practice is only possible if people and politicians share responsibility for making it work. So policy development should be a dynamic relationship between values and action, not a one-way route from political demand to conference victory.
Finally, fourth, be prepared to experiment, take risks and go forward. It is better to get it slightly wrong but to be at the forefront of this debate. For too long our party structures have lagged behind the most exciting and empowering developments in civil society. While local communities have been using dynamic forms of new democracy to generate discussions and solutions for housing, crime or health, we’ve been stuck in the community centre dutifully plodding through the agenda. If as a party we’re to be at the forefront, it will require experimentation and imagination. It will need goodwill on all sides: a willingness to be swift to embrace risks and to be slow to cast blame if it isn’t right first time.
So, exciting times for the Labour party: we face a real challenge. But it will be worth it. Because whenever anyone says that the public isn’t interested in politics, in active citizenship or in taking part in public life, I hear a ringing in my ears. Perhaps it’s simply an echo of the phones going all hours of the day and night at Vision 21 back in August 2002 – but I know for a fact just how much people really do want to get involved, and just how well they rise to the challenge when they get their chance to do it.