A Proposal For Change

It is fair to say that the West is going through a period when faith in politicians and the  political system is at a very low point. Whatever one thinks about the UK’s decision to leave the European Union or Donald Trump’s election to the presidency of the United States, these are, by any standards, unusual events. As were the Front National’s Marine Le Pen winning 34% of the vote in the French presidential election in May (double what her father achieved in 2002) and the AfD winning 1 in 8 votes in the Bundestag last month.

And as faith in politicians has declined so has faith in religion; outside the USA, Christianity is dying in the West and the indigenous population of Europe and North America is not warming to the latest aggressive and intolerant version of the Abrahamic delusion that has poisoned Western society since the fourth century.

People are at once cynical and ill-informed about politics – witness the enthusiasm for Jeremy Corbyn among people in their 20s and 30s. Some of Corbyn’s most ardent fans support his plan for large-scale nationalisation but also want to want to stay in the neoliberal EU. Both of these positions are intellectually valid but they do tend to be mutually exclusive – you simply can’t have both. Look at the way Greece was treated by the EU when it was forced to sell off state utilities to pay debts to international banks. There was no ‘bailout’ for Greece, only for the banks – privatised profits but socialised losses.

It is time acknowledge that the democratic institutions of the West are in need of a thorough overhaul. I have written before about the debt the West owes to the Classical Greece and Rome rather than to so-called ‘Judeo-Christian’ values. One of the key ideas I think can revitalise democracy and end the domination of the neoliberal Establishment (by which I mean all the main political parties in the West) is sortition – the selection of public officials by lot.

The entire British constitution needs to be redesigned for the twenty-first century. Staring at the top, the dysfunctional Windsor-Mountbatten clan needs to be swept away. Instead of an executive presidency like the USA, a monarchical presidency like France or a figurehead presidency like Germany, I propose a five-person directory to act as head of state. Each person would be elected for a total of ten years and elections would take place every two years. After every election, one person would retire and a newly-elected member take their place. The most senior member of the directory would act as president for two years before they retired to the Senate as a non-voting member. No person elected to the House of Commons would be eligible for election to the directory.

Like the monarchy, the House of Lords is so ludicrous, so anachronistic, so corrupt that it cannot be reformed, only ended. I propose a Senate of three hundred members to replace it. Members of the Senate would serve a single, twelve-year term with a third of the members retiring every four years. A third of the Senators would be elected, a third would be chosen proportionally according to the results of the previous three elections to the House of Commons and a third would be chosen at random in the same way as juries are currently selected. Ex-members of the directory would sit in the Senate as non-voting members, as would representatives of the devolved administrations which (as explained below) would include England.

The House of Commons would be broadly like it is today but with four-year fixed terms. There would also be one-third of members who would be selected by lot who would only be able to serve a single term as a ‘sortition member’ – they would be free to seek re-election as MPs or Senators if they felt they had more to offer after their term had expired.

As can be seen with the Scottish Referendum in 2014 (and the Scottish Nazi Party’s campaign for another) and the current crisis in Catalonia, there is a desire for power to be closer to the people than the nation state or the corrupt EU. I would therefore propose an English devolved administration along the lines of those that rule Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. I would also call the SNP’s bluff and have ‘devo-max’ for all four nations. The ‘federal parliament’ in Birmingham/Manchester/Glasgow/wherever would only deal with matters such as defence and foreign affairs. All other matters would be in the hands of the governments in London, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast.

I am sure that many people would disagree with many of the proposals I have made but the point is that I have made them. The current system cannot continue. As the Establishment controls all the main political parties in the UK it is vital to break their monopoly of political power. The way I propose to do so is by sortition. Surely this is a better way forward than allowing the rich neoliberals who rule us to continue to destroy democracy and corner a vastly disproportionate share of the country’s wealth in their pursuit of ‘gush-up’ economics (the real consequence of so-called ‘trickle-down’ economics).