Citizen Brown says "Power to the People"?

Many times I have heard political parties saying they should engage with the public more outside elections. Are we now going to see some action?

Yesterday Gordon Brown announced a radical shake-up of the Labour Party. The Guardian reported that:

"Mr Brown's plans include establishing policy forums in every constituency, as well as regular questionnaires to members, and "citizens' forums" designed to improve Labour's campaigning edge and engage local people outside the party."

This sounds very welcome, but the proof of the pudding will be not the strong local Labour Parties that will be able to put this into practise, but whether there will be assistance to make this a reality in the 270 seats where there are no Labour MP's.

Labour's Deputy Leader candidates also set out their stall over political participation yesterday on the Power Inquiry website. There were some interesting ideas, which I have commented on in italics.

Alan Johnson - greater use of technology at a local level. There is a need for customised tools to enable this to happen.

Hilary Benn - an annual statement for each local party. This sounds like a clever move away from traditional resolutions to a more discursive approach.

John Cruddas - ring fencing of local party money and direct elections to constituency section of the National Policy Forum by the entire membership. This may make the NPF more relevant to members.

Hazel Blears - supporters should be able to sign up for text alerts and greater use of social networks such as Facebook. These could be linked into local web based services to link local and national technologies together.

Harriet Harman - more engagement with people in their workplace. Interesting idea, but needs more detail.

Peter Hain - policies should not be bounced through media headlines. Good in principle, but will it never ever happen?

Whoever wins, I suspect many of the ideas suggested will be taken up by the successful candidate

On wider issues:

• All bar Hazel Blears were sympathetic to a serious debate on a Written Constitution.
• A majority were in favour of considering further electoral reform. Harriet Harman and Hazel Blears were the strongest against this.
• All were in favour of a majority elected upper house, though some preferred the retention of a non-elected element.
• All were in favour of more participatory and deliberative forms of democracy to supplement traditional representative forms.

Overall, it is clear that whoever is elected, there is a likelihood that the new party leadership will be looking at further change, both internally within the Labour Party and on a much wider level, with a new round of constitutional reform to build on the reforms from the early period of the outgoing Blair government.