IMAGINE THAT WESTMINSTER had not escaped the great British levelling of the 1940s and 1950s. Or, more realistically: imagine that the omission were to be made good today, in the same spirit that created the welfare state. Given the chance to remake Parliament in 2017 – in the imagery of Brideshead Revisited, to make ‘a new house with the stones of the old’ – what would we do?
It would be absurd to answer by suggesting reforms to diminish the influence of the general populace. Those post-war aspirations to increase fairness and reduce privilege cried out for the opposite; the consensus of support for those aspirations remains overwhelming. Yet how could the system be modified to increase the day-to-day influence of ordinary British citizens – nearly 47 million of whom are eligible to vote – without making it unfit for purpose?
Here’s how. We start in the obvious place, at the least democratic, southern end of the Palace of Westminster. We expel the occupants. And we give the House of Lords to the people.
That’s easier to say than to do – even without the problem of how to persuade those current occupants to leave. We cannot put everyone in the chamber; nor can we sensibly put everything to referendum. What we could do, though, is create a People’s Chamber, whose members, randomly conscripted from the electoral roll as jurors are, would be a small, representative sample of the population as a whole.
The details are negotiable. Here’s one hypothetical version. Everyone eligible to vote is also eligible for selection by lot to serve in the chamber for a fixed term of, say, four years. Service is compulsory, well-paid and prestigious. The People’s Peers can wear ermine and, if they want, use titles; the financial rewards are comparable to a sizeable lottery win.
The chamber’s functions remain the same: scrutiny, endorsement, revision, occasional delay. The great and good have vacated their seats, but much of their expertise can remain. The new peers’ four-year terms include a six-month period for training. (The intake would eventually be staggered.) Expelled members of the old chamber can choose between a severance package, or, if they prefer, paid employment as trainers or specialist advisers for their randomly selected replacements. It might even make sense to create a new, permanent mini-chamber, a 100-member House of Elders, from which the brightest and best of the current Lords (elected, in the first instance, by their peers) could perform their advisory duties.
The randomly selected People’s Peers perform their duties largely in person but also, when appropriate, remotely. When expertise is required, they are encouraged – and funded – to recruit expert help. A large permanent staff is employed to ensure that all runs smoothly: keeping debates on topic, making sure all voices are heard. (Luckily, all those citizens’ juries and assemblies have left a significant legacy of accumulated wisdom about how best to do these things.) The peers’ deliberations take place, as now, in public; but voting, crucially, is by secret ballot – reducing the risk of improper outside interference.
It would all take a bit of organising. So did National Service (which disrupted around 130,000 lives a year rather than 400 every four years). And while some people might resent the call-up, their displeasure would be worth living with. As with jury service, there would be the option of seeking exemption or postponement. But the whole process – selection, plea, outcome – would be public; and with luck most people would prefer to do their civic duty than to risk the social stigma attached to dodging it.
The overall running costs might be higher than those of the current House of Lords, even if the new chamber had just 400 members compared with the current total of around 800 (likely to be reduced to 600 over the next decade). It would be money well spent. The prize would be a second chamber whose legitimacy could not be questioned: a chamber that, finally, was no less democratic than the Commons, yet did not challenge its supremacy: not more legitimate, or equally legitimate, but differently legitimate. The two chambers would complement one another – and the legislation enabling the reform could make it unarguably clear that the Commons had primacy.
Every voter, as a potential member, would have an emotional stake in this new chamber, and thus in Parliament. It would be a chamber of ‘us’ rather than ‘them’; and, as a result, would not seem remote or out of touch. It would be a chamber of our peers.
Would it work? There would be drawbacks. We have all seen how easily people power can go rogue, in Twitter mobs or in votes for Boaty McBoatface. But the mere creation of the chamber would remove the need for anti-Establishment gestures. As for mischief, experience suggests that randomly selected citizens who are given decision-making responsibilities usually take them seriously and exercise them wisely. We see this all the time in juries. It has also been demonstrated repeatedly in experiments in ‘deliberative polling’ conducted by, notably, Professor James S. Fishkin of Stanford University and Professor Robert C. Luskin of the University of Texas at Austin. Fishkin’s and Luskin’s joint work, from the early 1990s onwards, suggests strongly that, in the right conditions, random samples of the mass public are perfectly capable of meaningful and constructive debate on thorny questions of policy. It helps to have a moderator, and a well-oiled administrative system – just as it does in the Commons. Generally, though, people are instinctively conscientious, and deliberate with open minds. One frequent outcome (rarely encountered in the Commons or on social media) is that, following thoughtful discussion of the facts, there are statistically significant shifts in the balance of opinion among those taking part.
Fishkin and Luskin are the leaders in the field – and, indeed, have trademarked the phrase ‘Deliberative Polling’™. But they are not isolated eccentrics. At the Jefferson Center in Minnesota, similar work on citizens’ juries, led by Ned Crosby, has been going on since 1973. In the UK, as previously mentioned, the IPPR spent much of the 1990s bringing such forms of consultation to bear on real-life British politics. And in recent years the broad idea of incorporating deliberative public consultation into the machinery of government has achieved traction in Westminster itself. In 2013, the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee commissioned YouGov to conduct a programme of ‘deliberative’ consultations with the public on big issues ranging from public spending priorities to renewal of the UK’s nuclear deterrent. The initiative followed the recommendation of the Committee’s 2012 report, ‘Strategic Thinking in Government’, which had concluded that governments needed ‘a deeper understanding both of how the public perceives our national interests and what sort of country the public aspires for the UK to be’. The experiment – according to the Committee’s 2013 report, ‘Engaging the Public in National Strategy’ – convincingly demonstrated ‘the value of engaging the public in intelligent conversations about complex national strategic issues’. The randomly selected members of the public responded to weighty and sometimes abstruse questions in ways that were ‘nuanced and subject to subtle shifts depending on the information provided’. The Committee concluded that this ‘hitherto untapped resource […] could meaningfully be used in the formation of national strategic goals and priorities’.
This is, of course, quite different from suggesting that the deliberations and scrutiny of a representative cross-section of the public could replace the current functions of the House of Lords in their entirety – but it is only a medium-sized leap from one thought to the other. The key point for the moment is this: however much our prejudice tells us that the average citizen, given a role in Parliament, would be thoughtless, feckless and ignorant compared with the average ermine-clad peer of the realm, the evidence suggests that, placed in contexts in which it is clear that their judgements matter, members of the public typically rise to the challenge.
Studies that go far beyond the realm of politics (for example, by Professor Philip Fernbach, the University of Colorado marketing researcher, or Professor Frank Keil, the Yale psychologist) have reinforced the three underlying points: that most of us, most of the time, are more ignorant than we think; that most of us, faced with a requirement to explain or justify our views, become aware of the gaps in our knowledge and, if the necessary information is available, rectify them; and that most of us, having done so, become less extreme in our views.
If we find such evidence persuasive, a simple question remains: is the average person capable, when given such assistance and when giving it their best shot, of making wise choices and sharing wise insights on matters of national importance?
If you think the answer is ‘no’, it’s arguable that you should be opposed to democracy itself. You should certainly be against trial by jury. But you should also apply the same question to the chamber’s current occupants. Do you really believe that, collectively, the massed members of today’s House of Lords offer a better source of wise, impartial judgement than a random cross-section of the electorate? Ninety-one of them, remember, are there mainly because of who their parents were. Twenty-four are there because of their prominence in organised religion. Around 500 are beneficiaries, to some degree, of party political patronage. Most are drawn from the same gilded sub-sets: career politicians, academic high-fliers, company directors. Many have significant outside financial interests. Three-quarters are men. Their average age is sixty-nine. Such a house may be clever and experienced. But is it fit to speak for the nation – to embody not just its collective wisdom but its collective conscience and common sense? Or is it merely fit to speak for the Establishment?
In a randomly selected house, lack of balance is not an issue. Everyone – rich, poor, old, young, educated, uneducated, pushy, shy, high-flying, under-achieving, innovative, traditionalist, male, female, white, non-white – will tend to be represented, in proportion to their democratic weight. So will voters whose preferred parties or candidates have failed to win first-past-the-post elections to the Commons. In John Adams’s words, the assembly is ‘in miniature an exact portrait of the people at large’.
A further virtue is that the enlisted members are not driven by ambition: power has been thrust upon them. They are independent of government and, since they cannot seek re-election, have no incentive (unlike MPs in the Commons) to put short-term political advantage before the long-term national interest. Collectively, they are likely to understand the priorities of ordinary voters, and their loyalties are to nation, not party.
I can already hear the scorn of parliamentary sophisticates mocking the naïvety of my proposal and complaining that I don’t understand the full complexities of how Parliament works. Maybe I don’t. But I do understand that, on its own terms, the current upper chamber works reasonably well. I accept that – among the party stooges, hereditary fools and hard-faced businessmen who have done well out of globalisation – it has a substantial contingent of experienced parliamentarians and real-world high achievers, without whose skilled revision of legislation we would be a worse-governed nation. I don’t deny that, over the past couple of decades, there have been many occasions when the House of Lords has behaved with more wisdom and principle than the Commons. I even accept that the chamber’s weak legitimacy may have helped it to find a useful role as a trusted servant of government: helpfully independentminded but not a threat.
But all this is to look at the question from the wrong place: from inside Westminster. Look at it from the outside, and bigger issues claim the attention. It’s the system as a whole that’s dysfunctional. A large part of the electorate feels that Parliament does not share its priorities. We have to reform something, and the Lords – which needs reforming anyway and whose failings (of which more later) are becoming harder to ignore – is the logical place to start.
This is not a proposal to replace expertise with ignorance. It is a proposal to redistribute the power to influence government. All the ingredients of my proposed People’s Chamber are already in use in the existing House of Lords. Outside experts advise, as witnesses to Select Committees; so, to a degree, do ordinary citizens. Appointed and hereditary peers, some of them ‘great and good’, can choose to draw on these contributions, along with their own expertise, when deliberating and voting. In the system I propose, the greatest and best former peers would be paid to join outside experts in giving advice (plentifully, I hope), while citizens would be in the chamber, with the power to use the advice as they saw fit. The aim would be for the quantity and quality of expertise in the equation to remain the same. Only the power would shift. But it would truly need to shift. An advisory citizens’ panel would change nothing. A citizens’ chamber with decision-making powers (even limited ones) would change everything.
If we grant the idea that specialist expertise could be bought in as required (and that hereditary and appointed peers do not have a monopoly on wisdom, and that not every ordinary voter is an ignoramus with no useful life experience), I see no reason why, in time, all the chamber’s current functions – scrutinising and amending legislation, commissioning reports, debating policy and questioning government actions – could not be taken on by ordinary citizens. Others might argue that a three-chamber system – Commons, People, Elders – would work better. But I do not want to get bogged down in the countless possible practical permutations. This is a blue-sky suggestion, not a technical blueprint. The fine details matter little until the broad principle has been agreed – and that will not happen until large numbers of people have been persuaded to think about the idea with an open mind.
Could they be?
This isn’t the first time such a system has been proposed. Political theorists call it ‘sortition’. It was used successfully in ancient Athens and at different times in Italian city states such as Florence and, later, in parts of Switzerland. In modern times it has been used, to varying degrees, for assemblies on constitutional reform in Canada, Iceland, Mongolia and the Republic of Ireland. (The latter now has an advisory Citizens’ Assembly convened on a long-term basis.) It has been used at local level in the Netherlands and Australia and in several US states, and has played a part in a number of significant crowd-funded assemblies, such as the hugely popular G1000 citizens’ summits in Belgium and the Netherlands. Former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan recently endorsed it, and there has barely been a year in the past three decades when a political thinker somewhere in the world hasn’t proposed it – often as part of a wider programme to incorporate elements of direct democracy into existing representative systems. In the UK, several think tanks have championed the idea (notably the Cambridge-based Sortition Foundation). In British corridors of power, however, the idea is traditionally dismissed – by the educated, politically connected, metropolitan elite – as childish: a reckless formula for putting power into unwashed hands that would make inappropriate use of it. When I first tried to advocate it in print, nearly twenty years ago, the story ended up as The Independent’s April Fool item. Around the same time, Peter Carty and Anthony Barnett, authors of a Demos pamphlet on the subject, proposed it to the Royal Commission on the Reform of the House of Lords, led by Lord Wakeham, the famous political fixer and (less famously) Enron auditor. Lord Wakeham’s subsequent report, published in 2000, dismissed the proposal with a single paragraph: such a system, he opined, ‘would not deliver sufficient people with the specific personal qualities and expertise that would be desirable’ and ‘would be unlikely to secure members with sufficient individual or collective authority … [for] the House of Commons to take the second chamber’s concerns seriously’.
It would be hard to imagine a more elegant encapsulation of Establishment complacency. Never mind the pros and cons: the idea is brushed aside. Yet many ordinary people would instinctively share Lord Wakeham’s reaction. A People’s Chamber is a neat idea, you think, but then so are many ideas – flat tax, say, or universal basic income – that sound good in the mouths of students and dreamers. The real world works differently, being neither neat nor simple.
It’s hard to resist such common sense. It’s worth making the effort to do so, because beneath it lie three fallacies. The first is the assumption that the flaws of Joe Public (generally assumed to include shallowness, ignorance, woolly-mindedness, prejudice and laziness) are not shared – or matched with opposite faults such as pomposity and venality – by members of the ermineclad political elite. A few hours immersed in Hansard – or studying the specific personal qualities of such disgraced luminaries as Lord Hanningfield, Lord Sewel, Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare or Lord Taylor of Warwick – are generally enough to dispel this illusion.
The second fallacy is the argument that the current system works pretty well – which sounds pretty convincing when you consider all the good things the House of Lords has done in the past. The crucial missed point here is that that was then, while this is now. Unelected peers can still set the Commons right to good effect on the details of, for example, the Health Service Medical Supplies (Costs) Bill or the Neighbourhood Planning Bill. But the days when the Lords had the credibility to steer governments from paths of folly on big, nation-changing matters are long gone; and the bigger the issue (think of Brexit), the easier it is to turn the peers’ ostensible victories against them – as titled toffs, trying to frustrate the people’s will. Public respect for the House of Lords has declined since the 2009 expenses scandal and the subsequent flooding of the chamber with political appointees, and peers pack less political punch than they used to. For a Prime Minister in the Commons, a defeat in the Lords is barely an embarrassment any more, just an irritation. The chamber has long lacked hard power. (If all else fails, the government can invoke the Parliament Acts against it.) Now its soft power is draining away too, and its members, for all their competence and pedigree, suffer increasingly from political impotence.
The third and most important fallacy is the widely shared belief that the future will always resemble the past. Anyone who gazes directly at reality can see that this, too, is untrue. The world works in a certain way until it doesn’t. Common sense tells us that the rule of the Tsars is permanent, that the German state will never launch a systematic programme to murder every Jew in Europe, that the mullahs will never rule Iran, that property prices won’t collapse, that the European Union will never fall apart. The assumptions are realistic and worldly-wise. Then history makes a nonsense of them.
This is the light in which the idea of a People’s Chamber should be judged: the constantly shifting light of historical change. If you think that nothing fundamental has altered in British politics in recent years, and that nothing fundamental is likely to alter in the foreseeable future, it makes sense to share the Establishment’s scepticism. Why risk a wild-eyed reform, when we can keep calm and muddle on?
If you take the opposite view, however, those lordly reservations are neither here nor there, and nor is our instinctive inertia. Cold reason tells us that the times, and the pressures on democracy, are changing; and that the existing system isn’t up to it. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed (that’s a ‘self-evident’ truth from the US Declaration of Independence), and in the UK the consent of the governed can no longer be taken for granted. It’s not that my idea is brilliant: it’s just that, for the nation we now live in, the current idea – a chamber of Parliament that is widely considered illegitimate – is awful. If Parliament doesn’t adapt, it risks being swept away; radical reform is the conservative option. As Abraham Lincoln told Congress in 1862: ‘The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present… As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.’
Let us return to the visible facts. The people aren’t asking for power: they are demanding it. Increasingly, they are exercising it – but only in a wild, reckless way, to which politicians respond with panic or reckless demagoguery. Fairness demands change. So does prudence. By conceding a little to direct democracy, representative democracy could secure its future. By doing nothing, it risks losing everything.
Of course we feel reluctant to mess with our centuries-old institutions. If it still just about works, instinct tells us, don’t fix it. But it may not work for much longer. And, as Eisenhower observed: ‘Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.’