Since the great reform bill of 1832, British democracy has advanced in three main directions. The first has been to extend the franchise, by stages, to working men, women and eighteen year-olds. The second was to remove special political privileges from property-owners, business people, university graduates and, most important, the unelected House of Lords.
Accompanying this process was the effective transfer of executive prerogative power from the hereditary monarch to the elected prime minister. The third was to reform the methods and purpose of voting, through the secret ballot, common rules for voting and, latterly, referendums and new electoral systems.
All of these reforms left one basic feature untouched: British citizens’ participation in their democracy still begins and ends on election day. What happens afterwards is largely outside their control. They elect a parliament and then have no direct voice in its output. They are forced to rely instead on intermediaries to influence the content of legislation: pressure groups, the media, opinion researchers and, of course, their elected MP.
The next Labour government could move beyond that, introducing the next great reform: non-stop democracy, giving all our citizens an opportunity to take part in the legislative process, rather than waiting until election day to judge its results.
The means to achieve this are in the hands of parliament, by reform of its procedures, and the BBC, by redefining its public service obligation. Together, they could provide for the online pre-legislative scrutiny of bills in parliamentary committees.
That probably sounds as exciting as the finals of the national paint-drying championships. But it would mean that every BBC licence-payer could look at proposed laws and offer ideas to improve them before they happen. The present system squeezes out MPs – never mind citizens – from giving laws any proper scrutiny. The government prepares a bill and drives it through parliament as fast as it can in the form it was first introduced. Parliament is largely a rubber stamp. Individual citizens are onlookers of remote, arcane processes that have no connection with their daily lives.
Pre-legislative scrutiny would change that fundamentally. Instead of being dumped on parliament in a finished bill, government proposals would be assessed first by a joint committee of both Houses. The committee would take evidence and commentary on them from politicians, civil servants and outside experts, all of which would be broadcast live online by the BBC. Any viewer could submit comments by email to the committee through an impartial mediator (the Hansard Society, for choice). The mediator would weed out comments which were irrelevant or obsessive or evidently planted by special interest groups, and provide a running digest on paper for the committee of the remainder, drawing attention to those that showed any special expertise in the subject at hand.
This kind of committee has already worked, with great success, under the chairmanship of Lord Puttnam on the communications bill.
With this facility through the BBC, no citizen need be excluded from law-making. It would deliver power to people to improve the law from their own experience and knowledge. For example, a new antisocial behaviour bill committee could take evidence from serving police and probation officers, frontline council staff, local residents and, of course, victims, all contributing to improving its nuts and bolts. Government would benefit immeasurably – and so would MPs. Both would avoid legislative disasters (like the Child Support Act, on which I led for Labour and which has had to be rewritten five times). Every MP has experts in his or her constituency on any bill – whether practitioners who will have to put it into effect or the people whose lives will be changed by it. At present, we rarely hear their voices until too late – usually in anger or despair when an ill-prepared bill has become a bad act. We should be hearing them instead as wise and timely advisers, providing a public service of great value.
The nineteenth century initiated representative democracy, the twentieth century produced extended democracy. The twenty-first could be the century of non-stop democracy – making all our citizens daily partners in their parliament, instead of being ignored for four years at a time and then bombarded with attention, courtship and promises they no longer believe.