Is Representative Democracy really dead?
I’d urge everyone who is interested in solving the problem of populism (I prefer “crude populism”) to read the text of Lisa Nandy’s Clement Attlee Memorial Lecture from a few days ago.
It’s an appeal that comes from a more libertarian left than the one that currently dominates both the Labour leadership and its largely critical parliamentary party. She says…
“… populists claim that representative democracy is not valid and they are, I think, winning that argument.”
If I can also strike a slightly critical note though, I think there are things in here that are typical of a lot of liberal left thinking down the ages – a reaching for vague and undeveloped alternatives where current morbid symptoms are being highlighted.
No matter how many isolated mutual-ish success stories of the kind she points to in Grimsby and East London, and no amount of blue skies thinking about citizens assemblies is going to absolve anyone who is serious from the job of remaking a system of Representative Democracy in some form.
In the UK, (in contrast to Scandinavian states) we have failed to invest enough energy into developing a practice of democratic skills – building strong assertive communities built around consensuses, managing co-ops well, organising democratic trades unionism (as opposed to union-as-a-service) in workplaces, democratic public management, ownership models that get the incentive structures right, and so on.
The reason we haven’t done this is because we’ve also failed to create the incentive structures that would enable us to do so.
I think that she’s right to imply that there may not be a way back now for Representative Democracy in its current form, but I hope others will come forward and respond that it’s not going to be possible to remake liberal democracy in any new form without a dominant mechanism of Representative Democracy, albeit one that has a new, and as yet, undetermined form (my book was written to explore this question).
I hope Lisa, and people like her can be persuaded to make this step.
Also, I think she slightly misjudges the reasons why this upsurge of crude populism happened. I think she dismisses technology as a contributory cause a little too easily, and her general position on “honouring the result of the 2016 referendum” points to a degree of respect for plebiscitary politics that it can’t be afforded.
Here’s a prediction: Brexit will not be cancelled by another referendum. It will be cancelled when the political class take up the (very winnable) fight that they have ducked for four years now. It will be cancelled because they have finally managed to successfully delegitimise the very idea of making decisions like this using crude binary referendums.
Pennies are beginning to drop all over the political spectrum on this issue.
Lisa is one of the most impressive new political voices around and I hope enough people will help her to develop something new on the liberal left, and for all of my quibbles here, it’s refreshing to see that someone is even thinking about these problems.
