EU Referendum


Brexit: power to the people


22/01/2020




In a different world, it might be of some interest that the House of Lords has approved the Withdrawal Bill, having added five amendments.

But since it is likely that these amendments will be voted down by compliant Tory MPs, this will simply trigger what is known as a "ping-pong" period between the two chambers, eventually ending up in some sort of fudged compromise.

Under normal circumstances, the Lords do have some leverage because Johnson needs to get this Bill into law before the end of the month, and the Lords can run it right to the wire if they hold their nerve.

But these are not normal times, so predictions are unwise. We will just have to wait to see what happens – idle spectators witnessing the wreckage of a system that once had some pretensions of becoming a democracy.

Oddly enough, the stresses are beginning to show, as Gordon Brown pops up with some comments on how to fix our ailing political system, proposing a "forum of the regions and nations and a council of the north" as well as a council for the Midlands.

These, he argues, should gain their funds in the same way as Wales and Scotland do, labelling this extremely modest proposal "a sort of constitutional revolution". We have been a unitary state for too long, he says. "Once we bring in nations and regions you have a very different kind of UK and Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland would feel more comfortable".

There is something of this in The Harrogate Agenda, only we go much further in suggesting local income tax and the approval of annual budgets through the medium of local referendums. What we cannot tolerate is another layer of politicians sucking at the tit of the public purse, demanding money with menaces and telling us what to do.

This is why the most recent regionalisation movement, pushed by John Prescott, failed. We simply do not want more politicians, redistributing power between them. If there is to be a "constitutional revolution", it must involve a real transfer of power to the people.

In this sense, it really is quite wearying to see yet another politician perceive that there are flaws in our system of governance, only to come up with yet another raft of proposals which do not address the core failings. None so far have put the finger on the main defect, the failure to recognise that the essence of democracy is empowering people.

Coincidentally, we get a long whinge in the Guardian with Alberto Alemanno complaining "that the EU won't fix its democratic deficit with another top-down 'conference'".

This is a reference to Ursula von der Leyen honouring a promise she made after her appointment last year, to launch a two-year "deliberative process" tasked with overhauling how the EU works and listening to the voices of its citizens.

Alemanno's concern is that the conference is supposed to be "a bottom-up exercise where European citizens are listened to and their voices contribute to the debates on the future of Europe". What he evidently doesn't appreciate is that all the "listening" in the world will be to no avail if those listening are not required to act on what they hear.

But then, Alemanno, whose day job is working as professor of EU law at the HEC in Paris, is also the founder of an outfit called The Good Lobby, which aims to foster "collaborations between civil society and professionals (lawyers, consultants, academics)" willing to share their time and talents, "training civil society on the different ways in which we can make a change".

One of these days, one hopes, the chatterati might begin to realise that there is very little to be achieved by creating endless talking shops. Meaningful change will only be delivered when people have the power to make it happen. The trick is to enable that process without having to resort to violent revolution.

If there is an unlikely place to start looking for solutions, it might be the OECD, which at least is trying to get to grips with the way regulation works and how to make it better.

Explained in outline here, the OECD has been carrying out an assessment across all EU countries and the European Union of the use of stakeholder engagement, regulatory impact assessment (RIA), and ex post evaluation to improve the quality of laws and regulations.

With more detail provided by the OECD, we see the observation that "better regulation agendas" need "constant attention". The "set and forget", model of regulation does not work, says the OECD, just as it does not work for laws themselves.

This homes in on a particular interest of mine for, while the OECD argues for full "stakeholder" engagement before laws are made, it places special emphasis on systematic ex post evaluation of laws, leading to a review of existing regulations to determine whether regulatory goals have been achieved. This then allows for the introduction of improvements and the removal of obsolete or ineffective laws.

The issue here is that pre-legislative consultation is of limited value. Even those who will be directly affected often have difficulty visualising how new laws will work, and very often it is not until a law is in force that its faults are revealed.

In practical terms, the ability to change a faulty law is an important test of any democratic system. And it is here that not only the EU fails, but where we see a lack of flexibility in dealing with globalisation and the laws which emerge from global or regional bodies.

What we find is that, when standards and agreements are presented to national legislatures for codification as national law, texts cannot be changed and, once installed, the laws are almost impossible to change. Thus, what the OECD doesn't do, with its emphasis on ex post evaluation, is empower ordinary people.

For the next iteration of The Harrogate Agenda, however, we think we have at least a partial solution, which lies in the wider use of waivers and safeguards in international agreements, the nature of which is discussed here.

In short, our government should be constitutionally prohibited from agreeing to any treaty which did not encompass either waivers or safeguard provisions (of the nature of Art 112 of the EEA Agreement) which will permit any party to disapply specific provisions, without having to denounce entire agreements.

Where we then find that we are bound by an inappropriate or damaging law, which stems from an international agreement, the electorate should have the power to hold a referendum to demand a waiver or suspension of the relevant provisions, so that the law may be repealed or amended.

While one finds that some people manage to get extraordinarily worked up about such provisions, it is the case that both waivers and safeguards are common in international agreements, and provide vital safety valves where, otherwise, parties might feel the need to withdraw from them.

What is different here is that the people themselves are empowered to demand action, without having to go cap-in hand to the government in the hope that it might listen to their problems.

And there does lie the answer to many of our political woes. Politicians need to be aware that democracy comprises two parts, the people and power. Translated literally, democracy means people power, and without that power being thus devolved, no state can be considered to be a true democracy.

And, in the nature of things, if power is not given, it is taken. The latter is something that could be very messy.