Picking up the optimistic theme of the previous post here by Dave Cole, I think that there is...
- a cross-party consensus in support of political decentralisation;
- an opportunity to challenge and largely replace the political caste that have stood by and allowed the power of Parliament to wither;
- a widespread view that politics needs to be renewed, that parties need to reverse their decline, that they need to funded by lots of small donations rather than a few large ones;
- a cross-party view that new communications technologies can alter the way that people are involved in policymaking;
- a loss of the legitimacy of Parliament---as it is currently constituted---for it to use parliamentary privilege to defend the privileges and monopolies enjoyed by parliamentarians.
Now is good time to unpack the term 'Parliamentary Privilege.' We all know what it should mean, and we've seen what a lot of MPs have decided to understand it to mean. But now, formerly 'immovable' obstacles could be brushed aside in the light of recent revelations.
Personally, I've always hated the idea of MPs being 'recalled' and brought to account by their constituency parties because it has usually (in the past) been used as a means of mandating them to adopt unworkable (or electorally impossible) policies. But, today, everything is different.
The idea of MPs being forced to fight for their right to represent their party based upon their character is a fantastic opportunity for Labour, (and, as it happens, for the other parties).
Also, the possibilities for crowdsourcing opinion and evidence, as well as the ease with which trusted open deliberative communities can be formed, means that the kind of consensus-building needed for constitutional change can be done in weeks rather than years. As long as the current danger-point for Gordon Brown passes (and I'd not bet the farm that it will), Labour have a year. They could...
- Ask some trusted public figures to spend two weeks crowdsourcing existing evidence to come up with a model of the issues surrounding constitutional reform and decentralisation.
- Identify the obstacles to decentralisation and seek a consensus on what needs to be done to overcome them (some of them involve restraint in the way that the main parties campaign).
- Open every CLP's selection process up so that every candidate has to prove that their character is acceptable to people who will campaign for them.
Also, the party could establish a panel of people from outside the party (those smartarses that are talking about standing as 'white-suit' candidates would be perfect) and ask them to give every Labour candidate a clean bill-of-health on the question of probity
Labour could go to the country in the spring as the party with a clear road-map to transform politics forever subject to a consensus that isn't necessarily that politically contentious while being able to sidestep the intractable question of electoral reform. It would also go to the country as the one party that has NO candidates that haven't proved their personal probity.
There is no reason why any of these possibilities couldn't work today. They are all do-able before the next election. Even the Tories would agree with a lot of them.
In fact, the main reason that the Tories may not play ball here is that this approach could give our Gordon a fighting chance of winning the next election. Or---better still---it could give whoever Gordon steps aside for at the last minute a fighting chance of winning the next election...
(There's a longer and even more boring version of this over at NTaH)
About the author: Paul is a London-based blogger with a mixed track-record over at Never Trust a Hippy and a few other places. He usually writes about representative democracy and decentralisation. Follow him at www.twitter.com/paul0evans if you usually do that kind of thing. Read more from this author