Power to the People

How ridiculous is that as a title for a serious and much needed report?

A report is today being published, and going largely unnoticed, that says that we need a major shake-up in the way that government is elected and operates. No kidding. After travesty that was the last election, Labour getting about 20% of the popular vote and nearly 60% of the seats etc. The report, the result of a commission led by Baroness Kennedy and containing a genuinely broad representation of society - witness a Radio 1 DJ, a sports coach and a former director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts - was designed presumeably to tell us that the younger generation (ie people like myself) are apathetic about the political process, are entirely apolitical and are content to let the party's bicker because after all one party is pretty much like the other right? Well that's not what they found. They found a swell of politcal opinion, a massive and I would say angry dissolutionment with the current political climate and desire to do something to change it all.

"The disenchantment cuts across all sections of society, but the political class just do not get it. They do not realise how deep the alienation runs. A bit of reinvention by the political parties will not be the answer. More fundamental reform is needed if we are to re-establish a democracy fit for a 21st-century People."

Says Kennedy in a fantastic rabble-rousing editorial in today's Independent - http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article347992.ece - All of which leads to the fact that what people want is a real input into the way their country is run.

There's also a fantastic opinion piece in The Telegraph - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/02/27/do2701.xml&sSheet=/portal/2006/02/27/ixportal.html - which raises again the idea of reform to the second house and that Gordon Brown may well advocate an elected second house. To be honest its never been something I’ve had strong views on, ok when I was younger I hated the Lord because they seemed to represent to kind of stuffy past-it generation that I so detested, but recently I’ve begun to see the worth in the Lords, they seem to vote with their conscience, they debate along idealogical rather political lines and I like that, a Platonic ideal of the philosophical ruler. The system, with hereditariness and the selection by the governing party etc, does seem to create a stayed and conservative bias. So perhaps the way forward is to play it like the US supreme court, life members nominated by the ruling party and voted on by the entire house. It does then create that sense of a lofty philosophical group debating the moral and practical consequences of any legislation. Of course life-peers are open to corruption one ruling party can stack the house with their own cronies and dictate the political climate of a generation, so maybe you limit terms, but that to me seems a little wishy-washy.

Who knows, I just hope this new report and a new batch of leaders can finally effect the change that the public clearly want so we can dispel the idea that people (younger people in particular) just don't care about the world they live in anymore.