Skip to main content

How to enliven Lords reform

Guardians for future generations proposal: a new route to enlivening Lords reform

 

"Nick Clegg's plans for a historic reform of the House of Lords are set to dominate the list of Bills [in the next Queen's Speech], the Evening Standard tell us (http://tinyurl.com/7j4u6xx )." At a time of frenzied media discussion of government plans to reform the House of Lords, 'Guardians for future generations', a recent report by the 'Green House' think tank, may offer a refreshing insight into the potential for further constitutional reform. The report, authored by me and launched recently at the House of Commons, proposes the creation of strong 'guardians' to protect the needs of future generations. In order to achieve this, the 'Guardians for future generations' report suggests creating a 'super-jury', picked by chance (as juries are) from the population at large, charged with preserving the basic needs of future generations. This 'super-jury' could be part of the new reformed upper house (or alternatively could be placed above the upper house). 

 

Selecting some of the members of the reformed upper house in this way, by sortition, would reduce the controversy over the upper house being a rival to the House of Commons, if too many of its members are elected.

 

The Guardians' central powers would be a veto over new legislation that would damage/ compromise the basic needs of future people, and a right to force a review of existing legislation that is already damaging their basic needs.

 

House of Lords reform needs a new impetus. It is flagging and facing implacable opposition. The proposal in this report – to make care for and representation of future people a central purpose of Lords reform – would dramatically enliven the process of reform of the upper House.

 

     -          The 'Guardians' report is available here:

  http://www.greenhousethinktank.org/files/greenhouse/home/Guardians_inside_final.pdf

-          Further information about Green House think tank can be found at http://www.greenhousethinktank.org.

 

Summary of report findings:

 

'Democracy' means 'government by the people'; but who are 'the people'?

 

Society exists over time and decisions taken today can have significant consequences for people yet to be born. This report argues that the interests of future generations should be formally represented within our existing parliamentary democracy. In other words: Future people should be included among 'the people'.

 

Building on the precedent of Hungary's innovative office of Ombudsman for Future Generations, the report proposes the creation of a new legislative structure – Guardians of Future Generations. The members of this body would be selected by sortition, as is current practice for jury service, in order to ensure independence from present-day party political interests.

 

The Guardians would have a power of veto over legislation that was likely to have substantial negative effects for society in the future, and perhaps also the right to review major administrative decisions which substantially affected future people and the power to initiate legislation to preserve the basic needs and interests of future people.

 

The report argues that two facts make the proposal especially timely; first, the government's intention to become 'the greenest government ever', contrasted with its closure of institutions designed to maintain our ecosystems for the future; second, the current process of radical constitutional reform (most notably, potential democratisation of the House of Lords).

 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reasonable manners, in the blogosphere

Dear readers of Rupert's Read; One thing I am pleased about about this blog is that when we have had debates or disagreements here, they have virtually always been good-tempered. Because the norm out there in the blogosphere is often not like that. Take 'Comment is Free', for example, on the Guardian Unlimited site: the level of debate on CIF is pretty awful, frankly, in terms of civility. It is a very unpleasant place to take part in any debate, generally, unless perhaps (as most commenters do) one hides behind the veil of anonymity (which 'ain't allowed' here). And the truth is, in case any fellow commenters reading this don't realise it, that there are many many people who get put off even reading (let alone posting to) CIF because of the volume of plain nasty comments that they risk getting, when they do. I am slightly singling out CIF here, because I believe that this is actually one of the worst places on the blogosphere in terms of this kind of ...
15 comments
Read more

Medialens under the lens, over Syria and Libya: Becoming the new Dave Sparts?

I have long been an active supporter of Medialens ( http://www.medialens.org/ ). Like many others, I have supported them with money, time, tips, and I have been proud to have done so. For they have done very important groundbreaking work over the years challenging the inanities and distortions of the 'mainstream' media. They have for example written important critiques of mainstream media coverage of dangerous climate change, of Iraq Body Count, of the corporate nature of most of our media, and much more besides. They have held the corporate media to account time and again. They ought to be saluted for all of that. It is therefore with a sense of deep regret (as well as of some foreboding) that I have finally to write to address the ways in which, lately, some of the wheels seem to be coming off their wagon. An early warning sign perhaps was their long-running spat with George Monbiot, over the Rwandan genocide and the terrible atr...
16 comments
Read more