Morsels of Mini-News

Number One news item has to be the wandering peacock which just appeared from the empty blue sky in a tree in someone’s garden in the village of Chedburgh, near Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. Replies to the announcement on the Neighbourhood What’s App included lots of ‘fingers crossed’ plus the pointer that the Beautiful Bird is normally seen around Church Road, Chevington plus an invitation that if he, afore-mentioned B.B. needed a home, ‘just give us a shout’ in Ickingham. As a newcomer to Suffolk, all these names mean little to me but I suspect the handsome peacock knows his way around.

Jacob Rees Mogg denigrating the photo ID rule change
as 'gerrymandering.'

I had thought to mention, in this blog, minor news items that had caught my eye, like the wandering peacock, but find it impossible to ignore the current National Conservativism [Nat-C] Conference, a sort of very right wing congregation

Suella in full flow at the Nat-C Conference

sieved from the current Tory party, which has been meeting and opining, often in a rather baffling way! Non-Conservative media people seem to have been outlawed from the proceedings, while Jacob Rees-Mogg reckoned that the voter photo ID rule change, introduced by the Government, had proved to be gerrymandering. However the most incomprehensible representative has continued to be Suella Braverman, the current Home Secretary, seemingly obsessed with reducing the numbers of immigrants, no matter how they get into the country but especially if they arrive in small boats which have miraculously, desperately, survived the Channel crossing. She is determined to “bring overall numbers down” but a recent Home Office analysis suggests that there will be more ‘spikes’ via work and study applications which may well increase by up to 40%. There are various Govt. proposals to reduce the appeal of studying for a Masters or a PhD in Britain such as time limits for students to remain, or the outlawing of family members accompanying students during their study period. Obviously, we wouldn’t seek to make students feel at home during their stay; who wants really bright people to like it here? It is these proposals which have particularly baffled me; increases in applications for bona fide students seem to be seen as threatening somehow instead of complimentary; tributes to the positives of choosing to study at Britain’s universities or colleges. Increasing student applications are surely A Good Thing not a furtive back door manoeuvre to smuggle foreigners in and

Andrew Marr

surreptitiously add to immigration numbers. As Andrew Marr observes of Suella's diatribe, in the current New Statesman, "there  is no Tory space to the right," Suella, in thinly-disguised bid for the Tory Party leadership, also denigrated “the unexamined drive to multiculturalism” when we have already become a multicultural society.

 I sometimes compare that narrow little English world of my childhood when a black person in town was An Event. During WW2 even the American G.Is stationed near where we lived, were regarded as exotic! It was a small and narrow white world as colonialism was beginning to fade and with it, the shaky platform of British exceptionalism.

Yesterday to a U3A talk on the Sortition Foundation by Rich Rippin which was fascinating. The Sortition Foundation is a not-for-profit social enterprise whose mission is to promote sortition in specific assemblies. Sortition means ‘random selection’ and contributes to the idea of Citizens’ Assemblies to run a variety of public/community enterprises. Started by a small group of like-minded people in discussion, in London in 2015, it eventually revved into formal action in 2017 [March 2^nd] after which an almost endless series of talks by the founders to publicise the idea, began. These introductory talks were widely dispersed and were included at festivals, in the Scottish Parliament, Brighton, Ted Talks, and a range of European countries and cities like Belgium, Paris, Italy, Australia. The huge effort was to plant the idea of random selection of representative citizens as a solution to organising public/community affairs; the ‘random selection’ is also carefully controlled in its attempts to result in a balance of social class, education, careers and jobs, financial income and status etc. These organising bodies are christened Citizens’ Assemblies or House of Citizens and they envision a world free of partisan politicking where representative samples of everyday people, selected by lottery, make decisions in informed, deliberative and fair 

House of Lords

environments. It is a very seductive idea for the many people tired of politics and politicians.

The Sortition Foundation has produced a thoughtful booklet with coherent arguments for abolishing the anachronistic House of Lords and substituting a House of Citizens. It reads well with its very attractive proposals to remove the Lords and establish a House of Citizens as a Second Chamber, selected by democratic lottery to represent a microcosm of the U.K. The idea is a-political [how attractive is that?] and would place the U.K. at the forefront of democratic innovation as a global leader in citizen empowerment and engagement.

An example of this approach already up and running is given as a case study. It is the Second Chamber in the Ostbelgien [East Belgian] Parliament. This relates to the small German-speaking community which voted to establish a permanent Citizens’ Council of 24 people meeting for 1.5 year terms in early 2019. This group can propose up to three topics for consideration by separate Citizens’ Panels whose recommendations are submitted to the elected Parliament which must then consider and publicly respond to them. This does sound more democratic [and attractive] than the House of Lords composed of hereditary peers and chiefly political allies rewarded for services by their political friends and masters. ***

Permanent Citizen's Council
"The Oosbelgien-Model"

***

There are some examples of Citizens' Councils in England.

Dudley People's Panel

Romsey Citizens' Assembly

Brent Climate Assembly

Kingston Citizens' Assembly on Air Quality

and, of course, there may be more. This could be an idea whose time has come!