The Athenian Option: Radical Reform for the House of Lords
By Anthony Barnett and Peter Carty
()
About this ebook
Anthony Barnett
Anthony Barnett moved into higher education from teaching in inner London and Kent. Before starting his current post at the University of Worcester he was a science and ICT coordinator. His PhD is in the area of innovative research methodology and his specific interests in ICT include the role of asynchronous discussion within blended learning approaches to teaching. His current teaching role includes undergraduate and postgraduate design & technology, creativity in foundation subject teaching, educational studies modules focusing on issues in ICT and support for postgraduate specialist ICT students and MA students in a range of subjects.
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The Athenian Option - Anthony Barnett
The Athenian Option
radical reform for the House of Lords
Anthony Barnett and Peter Carty
imprint-academic.com/sortition
2017 digital version converted and published by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © Anthony Barnett and Peter Carty, 1998, 2008, 2017
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.
First edition published in 1998 by Demos
Imprint Academic
PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK
Front cover illustration:
Hellenistic kleroterion (lottery machine), c. 200 BCE Athens, Epigraphical Museum
For Ian Christie, our first publisher
I am arguing for a new constitutional settlement, a new deal between the people and the state that puts the citizen centre stage. A deal that gives people new powers and a stronger voice in the affairs of the nation. And a deal that restores a sense of cohesion and vitality to our national life.
I want to see a fundamental shift in the balance of power between the citizen and the state - a shift away from an over-powering state to a citizens’ democracy where people have rights and powers and where they are served by accountable and responsive government.
Rt. Hon. John Smith MP
1 March 1993
Preface to the New Edition
More than a decade has passed since we wrote the pamphlet which comprises the bulk of this slim volume. This is a good moment for taking stock, for looking back at its reception and for examining the prospects for its central idea. When it was published the response we received was on a scale and of an intensity not normally associated with think-tank papers, which are usually of interest only to small groups of commentators and experts. Our core arguments (set out in the summary on page 15) aroused widespread and very strong reactions. By any reckoning this feedback was not always positive, including as it did brutal dismissiveness, accusations of irrelevance and straightforward ridicule.
Professional politicians, perhaps inevitably, could not welcome proposals which questioned their stranglehold over so much of our democracy. We experienced this cold-shouldering at first hand, when we gave evidence to the Royal Commission on the Reform of the House of Lords in May 1999. Contempt and hostility were almost palpable behind a veneer of strained civility. This was not surprising, because the Commission’s panel of mostly superannuated politicians and associated camp followers was part of the very grouping whose domination of the Lords we had come along to challenge.
Their chairman, Lord Wakeham, was widely acknowledged to be a fixer extraordinaire. He had been Tory leader of the Lords and remained head of the Press Complaints Commission while he undertook the role of steering the Royal Commission. Its conclusions were that the status quo could hardly be improved upon, and that the UK’s appointed upper house should continue largely unaltered with perhaps a smattering of elected peers to give it a facade of popular approval. The feeling was that the Prime Minister wanted it this way, at least while he was in office.
We were surprised, but not astonished, to learn that Wakeham was also extending his professional expertise to Texas in a role on the board of Enron, at least until its complete collapse in scandal and fraud - for which he was in no way responsible. People remember Enron as a salutatory lesson, but who recalls the collapse into irrelevance of the Wakeham Commission? On the other hand, perhaps this kind of forgetting is one of the time-honoured routines by which the British way of government preserves itself.
Be that as it may, some members of the Commission were afflicted with a kind of bemused puzzlement about our proposed ‘Athenian Option’. There was something here, they felt, that could not quite be stamped upon, that was slipping and sliding away from their best efforts to humanely put it down. A Conservative peer deigned to address one of us in the lift on the way up to the proceedings. ‘You know’, said this grey-faced timeserver, with an air of bafflement, ‘wherever we go in the country, people keep coming up to us with this idea.’ It had clearly never crossed his mind for a moment that if people were spontaneously suggesting the principles of the jury system could be applied to hold government to account, then there might therefore be something to the idea.
Reaction from media commentators was, with honourable exceptions, severe. This was to be expected and we are not going to pretend that there is any mystery behind it. The society in which we live is predicated upon a self-perpetuating hierarchy and the fourth estate is an integral part of an excluding establishment. A couple of dozen private schools and a couple of universities supply the ballast both of our executive and of our senior editors and commentators. Accordingly, when it comes to politics the media concerns itself with day-to-day factional disputes, scandals and administrative malpractices. It has little stomach for tackling fundamental and pressing issues of democracy and government. It followed that where the media was not overtly dismissive it ran stories concerned with the perceived newness of the idea, rather than subjecting it to serious and dispassionate analysis. Novelty sells newspapers, after all.
At the same time there has been a definite change in the underlying mood, which itself may have contributed to the momentum behind the publication of a splendid spread of studies of the experience and potential of ‘sortition’ (as we are learning to call it), of which this second edition of The Athenian Option is now a part.
As the idea is simple enough, the reaction to it becomes an important part of the argument. We have therefore added two appendices. The first consists of the submission we sent the Wakeham Commission (whose members’ names are listed) followed by the proceedings in which we gave oral evidence to them in public. As you can see, most of them felt that silence was the kindest form of asphyxiation, but to some degree our idea was tested, even challenged. There is a striking exchange at the start when Wakeham objects to our proposal on the grounds that the Lords could not continue to play the same role as a legislative chamber, initiating a large part of the work of parliament in the way it does at present. This was revealing for two reasons:
The formal terms of reference for the Commission were sweeping, specifically permitting a complete reconsideration of the Lords’ legislative role and function, provided the Commons retained its primacy. In fact the C ommission’s chairman assumed from the outset that the status quo would not be fundamentally changed.
Members of the public think of the Lords asa second chamber that scrutinises bills passed by the first, and most are surely unaware that it plays a significant role in initiating legislation, even though it has no democratic legitimacy.
If readers are interested in the Commission’s conclusions, the tenor of its approach is captured by brief extracts from the following clauses:
(13) No radical change is needed in the balance of power between the two Houses of Parliament....
(14) ... the new second chamber should have the same powers as the present House of Lords ...
(16) There should be no significant changes in the second chamber’s law-making functions...
(17) The second chamber’s role in protecting the constitution should be maintained.
Perhaps we can claim to have helped make a small dent in the ancient armory of the British constitution: it was officially admitted that our approach existed. In the executive summary of its findings the Commission’s Report states:
After making a detailed analysis of potential methods of composition we do not recommend:
a wholly or largely directly elected second chamber;
indirect election from the devolved institutions (or local government electoral colleges) or from among United Kingdom MEPs;
random selection
co-option.
It did not share its ‘detailed analysis’ with the public. But it did publish some of the results of a survey. It offered the thousand people who attended the public sessions of the Commission a questionnaire which about 600 filled in, as did 340 people from the Commission’s website. Of this sample 13 per cent supported ‘random selection’ as their preferred method of appointing an upper house. This was the lowest scoring system. Direct election got the highest score, but with only 45 per cent support; while 34 per cent supported ‘a mixture of two or more methods’. But note that ‘random selection’ is the most misleading description possible. If members of the public had been asked to choose ‘like a jury drawn from a cross-sample of citizens’ the number would have been higher.
Our second appendix reproduces some of the press response, in particular that in the Times, which made the story its own, with an Editorial and an op-ed article by Anthony. It then published two sets of lively letters from its readers. The Guardian by contrast ignored the publication but carried a column by Hugo Young which showed that he had not deigned to read the pamphlet before blasting it with his scorn. This is a warning. However carefully advocates of experiments with sortition may be, they should not expect their care and precision to be respected. Our joint letter in response was not published but we have included it here. We have not reproduced some of the other generous coverage such as the report in the Daily Mail.
There are two changes of context which make reading The Athenian Option a different experience from a decade ago, one global and the other national.
We have mentioned the way the idea was apparently being spontaneously suggested by regular people when they thought about how to recruit a