Parliament is still better than citizens' assemblies

Dave Clements argues that public debate by elected representatives will always trump orthodoxy-reinforcing, 'curated' discussions.

Citizens' assemblies are back in the news. But what are they? According to the UK Parliament website: ‘A citizens’ assembly is a group of people who are brought together to learn about and discuss an issue or issues, and reach conclusions about what they think should happen.’ They ‘enable decision-makers to understand people's informed and considered preferences on issues that are complex, controversial, moral or constitutional’. Sounds fair enough. Who could object to that? 

For former senior civil servant Sue Gray, now Keir Starmer's chief of staff - who came out in favour of assemblies in a recent interview for a biography of her new boss - it’s a no-brainer. She cites the success of their use in Ireland, with assemblies’ recommendations leading to the legalisation of abortion and gay marriage. (That said, those changes only actually came about via the small matter of historic, countrywide referendums.) Assemblies would be good for constitutional reform and housing policy, too, she claims. The shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, has come out in favour of them to consider the issue of assisted dying. 

Assemblies are, according to the Local Government Association (LGA), able to ‘make recommendations based on deliberation’ - a feature presented as if it were peculiar to these particular consultative fora and not to be found elsewhere. Another apparent selling point is that those selected to citizens’ assemblies (or citizen juries, as they are sometimes called) are first given instruction on the topic at hand, and involved in a facilitated discussion involving expert witnesses. In this way, advocates argue, they can be sure that those taking part are fully informed and able to take a balanced view on whatever is to be discussed. That’s the claim anyway. But I’m not so sure.

While the LGA favours citizens’ assemblies, particularly for furthering devolution - hardly a roaring success - the first citizens’ assembly in the UK was on social care, a particularly thorny issue. An ideal  issue for an assembly to chew over, you might think. But that was back in 2018, and we’re no closer to resolving the care crisis now. Indeed, the issue is so politically toxic that it is barely mentioned. But I suppose you can’t blame members of the public for the cluelessness of the political elite. 

So what about the Climate Assembly that was held in 2020? It, we are told, ‘heard balanced, accurate and comprehensive information on how the UK could reach its net zero target by 2050’. And yet the emerging reality of the costs of net zero means even Labour is now rowing back on the eye-watering costs of its climate commitments. 

More to the point, this particular assembly raised some pretty obvious questions about how truly disinterested those running these assemblies really are. Was the desirability of net zero discussed, or was it assumed to be a given? I don’t mean to be cynical, but Sir David Attenborough, national treasure and hysterical predictor of eco-doom, was one of the speakers. Were climate-change sceptics invited too? Were assembly members encouraged to interrogate the ‘balanced, accurate and comprehensive’ information? Did anybody at any point suggest that impoverishing a generation may be too high a cost to pay? Was there any real debate at all? I wasn’t there, but I suspect not. 

In truth, even if these bodies were truly representative of public opinion, their whole point is to build consensus and discourage debate. Those who think they are a great idea are quite explicit about this. For Niall Gooch, writing in The Spectator, they are all about ‘consensus laundering’. The whole point is to ‘create the appearance that there is a widely held view on some matter of public importance’, and to lend an elite policy position that ‘extra patina of legitimacy because the citizenry has given it two thumbs up’. 

Consequently, proceedings inevitably tend toward the orthodox and to favour the interests and views of those funding and facilitating them. They are designed with the ‘right’ answer in mind. Despite the lofty talk of members of the public deliberating on the big issues of the day, the parameters of discussion - like the membership of the assemblies - are necessarily narrow and self-selecting. 

---

---

Citizens’ assemblies are particularly popular in policy circles at the moment, not least because they appear to be an antidote to pesky, persistent populism. Assemblies could be a way of steering people away from ‘misinformation’ (ie, what the organisers view as the 'wrong' information), and any other alternative views that might tempt participants to adopt a more critical stance. Yet political parties that are supposed to be the opposition - those who we might otherwise look to for fresh ideas - are flirting with ways of avoiding having to think about these issues. That only underlines how lacking in contention and conviction our politics has become. 

Streeting thinks they are a way to ‘reconnect democracy with the public’. That's an odd way of putting it. Even a parliamentarian should surely grasp that democracy is of the people, not something to connect them with. He should know that the institution to which he is himself elected has more democratic legitimacy (albeit battered) than a hundred or so members of the public, convened and dissolved at the will of whoever commissions these assemblies into existence. You might say assemblies could hardly do any worse than Parliament, but either way, we’re not talking about a revival of Athenian democracy here. Consultation is important, but there is only so much long grass into which to kick thorny issues - if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor.

And to be fair, not everybody is as smitten as Gray and Streeting with the idea of citizens' assemblies anyway. There is already, just days into this semi-official policy announcement, talk of a U-turn. Luke Akehurst, who sits on Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee, has described citizens’ assemblies as a ‘stupid idea’ and reminded his colleagues that ‘we already have elected politicians who are put there by the public to take tough decisions’. Quite. As Henry Hill at ConservativeHome puts it, while Gray and others would no doubt like to ‘farm out’ difficult issues for somebody else to deal with, and the ‘combative style of parliamentary politics has its unedifying moments’, important matters are rightly subject to ‘critical scrutiny and debate’.

Indeed, last week, the House of Commons was consumed by an unedifying - not to mention pointless - row over a ‘ceasefire’ in the Middle East, while seemingly rather less interested in pressing matters here in the UK. But still, I’m with Hill on preferring the testy, if tiresome, rough and tumble of Westminster to the carefully curated consultative bodies used to bypass messy politics and awkward differences of opinion. 

Having said that, I’ve more time than Hill has for the ‘random amateurs’ who sit on them. We badly need those amateurs, random or otherwise, if we are going to revitalise real democracy. Indeed, we are those amateurs, and we are more than capable of getting together and - yes - deliberating the problems our society faces, by and for ourselves.

Read on:
Battle of Ideas festival speaker Nick Busvine offers his thoughts on citizens’ assemblies - ‘a threat to democracy’ - for Briefings for Britain.