Liam Byrne, Hodge Hill Labour MP and former West Midlands Minister, called in last week’s Post for a constitutional convention – to decide, following the various , how additional powers and funding could be transferred from Westminster to the English regions.
Actually, he called for two conventions. First, there’s Ed Miliband’s hastily conceived offering after the referendum result, as a diversionary response to David Cameron’s call for . Composed of an unspecified mix of the public, ‘civil society’, and politicians, it would meet from an unspecified date and discuss some unspecified regional reports.
Fag packety as it was, Byrne possibly felt obliged to back that one. But he also proposed a more focused and immediate Birmingham constitutional convention (CC), to “think radically” about our city’s future.
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Byrne was anything but alone. On the same page of the Post the Local Government Association also wanted a CC, and others making similar calls include the Electoral Reform Society, the Lib Dems, the Greens, 海角视频IP, the 海角视频 Constitutional Law Association, and Unlock Democracy.
Similar up to a point, that is – because, though the proposers aren’t always crystal clear about their ideas, it’s obvious at least some of the envisaged CCs share little in common beyond the label.
It seemed worthwhile, therefore, popping into the CC emporium and checking what was on offer, accompanied by an academic colleague, Dr Alan Renwick, and his Constitution Society guidebook, After the Referendum: Options for a Constitutional Convention.
Initially, it was a bit overwhelming. Renwick identified at least six basic models, and that’s without hybrids. Still, some we dispensed with pretty summarily – including that proposed by Professor Vernon Bogdanor, acknowledged constitutional expert and David Cameron’s Oxford tutor.
Bogdanor wants “a proper national conversation about where we should be going”, beginning with a Royal Commission, which would help instigate “a national learning exercise”. Note that ‘beginning’ – methinks the prof’s glimpsed a job for life.
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You can just hear Yes, Minister’s top civil servant, Sir Humphrey Appleby. “This is an urgent problem; we must set up a Royal Commission. Translation: this problem’s a bloody nuisance, but by the time the commission reports, four years from now, everyone will have forgotten about it or we can find someone else to blame.”
It’s how we’d have done it in the past, and more recently we’ve had comparable commissions in both Scotland and Wales. I’m not suggesting we emulate America’s founding fathers and, like the 1787 Philadelphia Convention, dash off a complete national constitution in four months. But a Royal Commission as a prelude to an eventual national conversation? Surely not. The same goes for the round-table élite bargaining that produced many of Eastern Europe’s post-communist constitutions; also the 1998 Belfast Agreement, involving the British and Irish governments and representatives of the political parties.
It’s no slight on the tremendous achievements of these deliberations to suggest that they’re as inappropriate in today’s anti-élitist political climate as a Royal Commission.
Inappropriate too, though still a fascinating idea, is the directly elected constituent assembly. A recent example was the 2011 post-revolution Tunisian Constituent Assembly, elected in the country’s first free elections since its 1956 independence, and whose Decentralisation Commission I had the honour of advising.
It was, I felt, an ambitious and politically courageous experiment for a newly democratised nation (the Assembly, not using me), but that probably is its most natural setting – as, for example, in India (1947) and Spain (1977).
Renwick’s only example in an established democracy of an entirely directly elected constituent assembly distinct from the existing legislature was Iceland’s small, independents-only Constituent Council, following the collapse both of the banks and of all public confidence in the political system.
The council, like the Philadelphia Convention, produced a constitution within a four-month time frame, which was endorsed in this instance by a referendum.
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Iceland’s electorate, however, is barely a third the size of Birmingham’s, and, as the largest elected legislature in the democratic world, our MPs aren’t going to be that easily dismissed, whatever we think of them. Sidelined, though, they surely must be.
There’s increasing talk of a People’s or People-led Constitutional Convention which would actually lead the discussion and deliberation on proposals for constitutional reform, so it’s worth looking at how those might work, including the one on our doorstep.
Generically, they’re known as citizens’ assemblies, and there have been recent examples in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Ontario, the Netherlands and Ireland.
They comprise ordinary citizens, statistically selected from the electoral roll to reflect the key characteristics of the overall electorate, and invited to participate. Sampling continues until the required number of usually between 100 and 150 is reached.
At the generally weekend assembly meetings, members listen to presentations, learn about and in facilitated groups discuss options, deliberate, and make proposals, usually through majority votes. Ideally, as in the Canadian cases, the Government would commit itself to holding a referendum on any major recommended changes.
Ireland’s Constitutional Convention was set up in 2012 and, as in Iceland, was a response to actual economic and perceived political failure. Strictly speaking, though, it was a people-led, rather than purely people’s, convention: 66 randomly selected electors, 33 party-nominated politicians, with a government-appointed chair.
Renwick considers this hybrid Irish model potentially the most suited to the 海角视频’s present situation, the minority of politicians increasing the likelihood of recommendations subsequently being adopted.
He doesn’t commend, though, the Irish convention’s very circumscribed but somewhat random agenda of eight specific topics, including: reducing voting age to 17, review of electoral system, provision for same-sex marriage, and removing the offence of blasphemy from the constitution.
He favours taking more time to smell the proverbial flowers: three distinct phases for learning, holding public hearings, and deliberating. The big question, of course, is the nature of the big questions on which all this learning and deliberation are going to be focused – but unfortunately I’ve just realised I’ve run right out of space.
* Chris Game is from the Institute of Local Government Studies at the University of Birmingham