There will probably be minimal change despite all these grand statements and ideas that various commentators are making.

PR will not be introduced, the number of politicians will not be shrunk, the House of Lords will not be reformed, the constitution will not be written down in one document etc.

Ideally though I’d love to see a decentralisation of power, giving the counties the same powers as American states.

The key word is accountability. This means MPs holding to account the executive, and the voters holding to account the MPs. If an action is followed because the PM says that X is true, and it turns out not to be true, he should suffer some penalty. The first step is reducing the power of patronage by the executive. Once that happens we might get some serious people in politics who do object to illogical arguments and assertions for which there is little evidence, and we might start to get a virtuous circle that gets us out of the culture of unaccountability.

There should also be a means for the public to remove ministers – including the PM – without necessary having to remove the government itself. There’s no logical reason why we should have to remove progressive ministers in one department just to get rid of reactionaries in another.

Also, when you are sacked you stay sacked. No crawling back into cabinet when the fuss dies down, no sideways move into the European Parliament.

[to increase engagement in politics] “we will have to look again at ways of substantially increasing localisation. If more of our public services – everything from education & health to prisons and welfare – were not just delivered locally, but administered locally and became more accountable to local people, I think you’d see not only greater public interest & activism, but also better, more efficient ways of seeing those services delivered.”

I don’t agree with this – that’s not been the experience of, say, PPI forums, LINKS or area committees. Are there any examples of localisation leading to these outcomes?

There is a real risk here of increasing inequality, as this kind of policy would mean handing power to people with the skills, time, confidence and resources to be able to engage with the new structures, at the expense of those who don’t.

Not an insoluble problem, but one which requires a lot of care and attention.

http://willrhodesportmanteau.com/2009/05/20/andrew-rawnsley-reinventing-the-party-system/

PR before anything else.

I don’t agree with this – that’s not been the experience of, say, PPI forums, LINKS or area committees. Are there any examples of localisation leading to these outcomes?

There is a real risk here of increasing inequality, as this kind of policy would mean handing power to people with the skills, time, confidence and resources to be able to engage with the new structures, at the expense of those who don’t.

Well, I’ll confess that neither PPI forums or Local Involvement Networks were what I had in mind when I wrote that bit, not least because they’re not particularly democratic systems of accountability. There’s been an outlay of some £100m+ for those two schemes, and neither seems to have proved more effective (indeed, in some ways they may be less effective) than the Community Health Councils they replaced.

But I actually think that feeds into my point somewhat, because those are perfect examples of the state trying to create and manage mechanisms for communities to act as a check on public services. Is it not possible that local authorities could’ve done a better job if they had the means to run such forums for themselves?

It’s a little incongruous for me to cite David Blunkett, but his recent speech made proposals for more localisation which I feel went a fair bit further than Blears’ okay-ish ‘Community Empowerment’ plan. (http://bit.ly/qFDXB) There’s a lot to intrigue in that speech, particularly on devolving the functions of the welfare state and encouraging city/regional banks, but the most important part was where he talks about ‘Civic health audits’ which would assess the opportunities for re-engagement with the public at a local level and identify what opportunities there are for more direct public participation. It seems to me that the very least we can do is take a look to see whether those opportunities exist.

But I suppose all of this depends on whether you disagree with localisation in principle, or merely in practice.

I think Blunkett’s ideas were quite interesting (Blears’ stuff, not so much). But it is all pretty theoretical stuff without much in the way of how to address inequalities of power.

“Is it not possible that local authorities could’ve done a better job if they had the means to run such forums for themselves?”

Again, the experience of scrutiny committees and area committees suggests that this is far from certain (though, to be fair, both were imposed on local government by central government. But the committee system wasn’t exactly a model of public participation either).

“But I suppose all of this depends on whether you disagree with localisation in principle, or merely in practice.”

I think localisation is a tool, rather than an end in itself. There’s a lot of interesting ideas, particularly from the global South, about how it could improve services and reduce inequality. There is also a lot of New Localism nonsense and proposals for localisation which would make things worse (either deliberately or because of good intentions but poor design).

If you haven’t seen it, I think Duncan Green’s recent book on poverty is really good – I’ve just started reading it and it talks about the need for a combination of active citizens and effective state.

Funnily enough, I’m reading that Duncan Green book at the moment (alongside Paul Collier) and the ‘effective states’ argument is very persuasive. However (as you’ll know) he’s really talking about countries that need to catch up, in terms of development, rather than countries that are already industrialised. I suspect (having met him) that Duncan is of the opinion that the British state is, if anything, rather too powerful.

These are some ideas that interest me:

primary elections to select candidates from the major parties;
a recall mechanism;
PR (of course);
state funding of political parties;
more power to select committees, less power for whips;
executive’s prerogative powers to be relocated in Parliament as a whole;
more, stronger, better FOI/transparency legislation;
more power at the local level.