The recent announcements by Hazel Blears, the new Secretary for Communities and Local Government that citizens should be given decision-making powers at the local-level are to be welcomed. All of us who work on participatory budgets and grass-roots democracy have been clear to demonstrate the benefits of these approaches from across the world, such as the hugely successful Participatory Budget process of Brazil. The truth is that this approach has been gaining ground and followers around the world and is rapidly becoming an intrinsic part of our understanding of what it means to be democratic. However it is only through an agreed inclusive framework that citizens can take part on a more equal footing and will therefore choose to engage over successive years. more
In our constitutional tradition the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, meaning parliamentary representation and the powers of elected officials, has come to be seen as democracy. But it isn’t, or rather there is a lot more to democracy than this.And this poses a fundamental question for Gordon Brown’s agenda. Will it be guided by the same untenable, yet deeply entrenched, assumptions? If we want a democratic constitutional settlement fit for the 21st century, the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty must itself become part of the public debate.
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Brown's statement to the House today has opened a new constitutional moment in the nation's political life - one of those defining moments when the way power is managed is opened up for contestation because the status quo has broken down. The question is, in whose interests and by what principles will it be shaped? more
