DEMOS

But the second most important reminder that came through was that constitutions are not just artefacts, but that in fact they are processes (as regularly pointed out by the Canadian political theorist Jim Tully—the term constitution can mean two things simultaneously, a process and the product of that process).  Some argued that such a process of constitutional reform would detract from the importance of non-constitutional matters, the more lived experience of day-to-day politics (a view symptomatic of a generalised conception that somehow constitutions are fixed and best left up to experts to decipher – much like the tea-leaf reading that goes on in the US); Others myself included, suggested that whilst of paramount importance, the main problem was perhaps that, barring a few of us willing to give up an early summer’s evening to discuss these matters, most people would have difficulty keeping their eyes open past the first 10 minutes of our proceedings.  As I said, it was a good discussion—but most people would have gone to the pub instead.  The biggest challenge is how you engage people with this sort of engagement.  On Wednesday, the Constitution Unit (whose director Robert Hazell helpfully mentioned the Ontario and the British Columbia Citizen’s Assemblies at the JRF seminar) is hosting another event with Michael Wills on the Governance of Britain—it will review the progress made on all related questions including the consultation process on the British Statement of Values and the value of a British Bill of Rights.  And despite all manner of hand-wringing, I doubt that anyone will seriously ask whether or not some real thought has been given as to how you engage with people on such matters.  Beyond the composition of the groups and the selection of ‘facilitators’, we have seldom considered the fact that engagement is an art, and much like any art it requires practice and exercise.  At Demos, we’ve been working with a new Canada-based organisation called Mass LBP (several of its staff members and associates were involved in the design of Canadian citizens' assemblies and you can read more about them  here ).  It claims to be reinventing public consultation and its premise is a simple one: that much as anyone should expect to perform jury duty at some point in their life, so everyone should expect at one point or another to be called upon to deliberate and feed into public consultation.  The idea is that such consultation, such engagement should be near-routine, it should be embedded in the fabric of everyday life and the basis for everyday democracy.  It doesn’t replace elections, or purport to hold all the answers to complex ethical or technical problems, it should simply be properly designed, professionally organised and, most importantly, recurrent.  Not a sop to organised public pressure, or a blanket exercise to ‘build consensus’, or a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to engage, but something much more routinely accepted as an occasional but intrinsic part of the life-span of any citizen in a democracy. This sort of approach is the only way in which we will move toward meaningful and reasonable consultation.  More to the point it might allow us to learn to flex that participative muscle in constructive ways. Then we might all be able to go to the pub on a summer’s evening.