The Campaign Company Blog

The Jury's Out

At the Labour Party Leadership Hustings in London on Saturday, Gordon Brown talked quite a lot about Citizen's Juries and how they should be used more to deliberate on local issues.

This sounds like a good idea as they allow far more in-depth discussion on a given issue.

Whilst they are not a replacement for other forms of democratic process they can certainly add to the richness of a debate.

However in order for that to happen there needs to be support from central government to encourage more of them to occur and for them to be seen as a regular part of local engagement processes.

In the rush to get decisions made - and the Planning White Paper springs to mind - there is a danger that they will be seen as something that is unnecessary.

That need not be the case. As Jonathan Upton of TCC recently pointed out in a presentation he gave to an event organised by the Consultation Institute, the trick is for community engagement to start early and be ongoing.

If that approach becomes the norm, then a wider range of engagement tools, including Citizen's Juries, can be employed to develop options or even wide consensus on a host of controversial local issues.

Let's hope the Jury's in before long!

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.

Sign of the Times?

Could the furore over the London Olympics Logo have been avoided?

Perhaps it might have been if the choice of the logo had been made by the public in the first place following a public design competition.

Rather than spend public money on an expensive ad agency, the money could have been ploughed into wider community engagement where:

1. A design competition was held across London reaching out to a wide range of individuals and groups of all ages.

2. A stakeholder group including representatives of ordinary Londoners drew up a shortlist of designs.

3. The shortlist was then voted on through phone and internet polls as well as perhaps a public opinion poll.

This would have secured a design with much greater consensus behind it as well as sending the message that London 2012 was going to involve people from the outset.

In launching the current logo, London 2012 Chair Sebastian Coe said:

"London 2012 will be Everyone's Games, everyone's 2012. This is the vision at the very heart of our brand. It will define the venues we build and the Games we hold and act as a reminder of our promise to use the Olympic spirit to inspire everyone and reach out to young people around the world. It is an invitation to take part and be involved."

Fine words, but I think they missed a trick with a logo that could have been chosen by "everyone"!!

Brownian Emotion

Just read an interesting quote in this weeks New Statesman (p15) which reports on Gordon Brown's recent talk at the Hay Book Festival where last week he said:

"Ten years ago, even a few years ago, I felt you could pull a lever and do things; there was an assumption you could dictate from on high. But I don't think you can solve problems without involving people."

This is exactly the sort of point we would make. It will be interesting to see whether this clear intent is realised with serious announcements and proposals for draft legislation over the coming months that make greater involvement a reality of the ground.

For a better Croatia - try Zoran!

It's not just the Labour Party in the UK that are having a leadership election at present.

Our good friends in the Croatian SDP have just elected their new Party President following the sad death of Ivica Racan which we have previously reported on.

Zoran Milanovic was elected over the weekend after a very participatory contest involving debate amongst the entire SDP membership.

Both David Evans and Jonathan Upton at TCC have met with Zoran in previous visits to Croatia (see photo below) and they and the rest of us at TCC offer our congratulations both to Zoran and to the SDP on a successful conclusion to their leadership election process!

Global Cool: How to buy your own public policy

Not new news, but new to me...

Global Cool the celebrity driven campaign to lower carbon emissions was launched at the begining of the year by a whole load of famous faces. The campaign will be running fund and awareness raising concerts alla 'Make poverty history'.

The campaign is collecting cash through donation and a large proportion of this money is used to buy carbon credits on the European emissions trading scheme, but with out then selling them. As we all know buy increasing demand in a market of restricted supply this will of course force prices up, that's the plan of Global Cool to make it more expensive for business to buy carbon credit and hence more economic to lessern emissions.

In terms of the discussion about participation this is pretty fascinating.

The European ETS is basically a public policy tool born of Kyoto. It's aim is to provide a market based incentive for lessening emissions. Of course having a open market as a part of your public policy creates a new avenue for influencing that policy. Global Cool is exploiting that avenue, by buying carbon credits they effectively making European emissions policy more strigent without having to go to the trouble of lobbying legislatures or anything as quaint as that.

But in a world where money already has a huge influence in the shaping of public policy is this a retrograde development, even if in this case it's for the better?

Points mean prizes

While we're on the subject of online consultation and government, a couple of days ago Parliament launched an 'e-consultation' site

Immediately the community of participation bloggers has posted plenty of description and anaylsis, see:

Whitehall Webby
The ideal government project

One of the first consulations up is on the draft climate change bill and I certain intend to make a contribution... that is after I've read the document, struggled with it's compexity, maybe done a bit of extra reading around the subject, formulated an opinion, decided on a contribution I want to make, written it up and posted it to the consultation....

Phew, I'd forgotten how much work it is to be an active and engaged citizen... perhaps I'll just go to the pub with my mates instead...

The serious point being no matter how we use on-line spaces to make policy consultations available there's no avoiding how much effort and time the consultee has to put in. Given how important it is that there's a wide engagement with government and policy making why not reward those who make that effort now.

Of course people are already rewarded with a sense of civic pride and some (small) degree of influence on the body politic... but what about more, points of some description, citizen points?, or gold stars in peoples passports... how about selecting a random sample of people from the electoral role and giving them a day off work to engage in the consulation...

Arr it's probably been tried already..... but my point is if we want a broad range of people to engage in policy consultation I think we need to do more than just stick up a website.