We’re almost back at the start of the political season, and presumably that will mean more speculation about the future of Gordon Brown. Earlier in August, Martin Kettle wrote about the prospect of a new Prime Minister in the Guardian. Should there be a general election if Gordon Brown is forced to step down? No, says Mr Kettle, because Governments depend on Parliamentary majorities, which a Straw or Miliband government would still have. His conclusion:

If you accept - which it is clear the angry, the disillusioned, the supercilious and the merely hostile do not - that Labour is entitled to defend and where possible advance its own collective self-interest within the rules of the political system, then it follows that Labour is entitled to change its leader again and then to stay on until a time of its own choosing, not that of its enemies. It may even be the more honourable course as well as the more politically advantageous one.

While I don’t argue with the constitutional rightness of his argument - British governments do depend on the support of the Commons, not the support of the general population - I think the democratic case is more complex than Mr Kettle suggests.

At base, this is another issue where a legal/constitutional position is up against a vaguer concept of popular legitimacy. The constitutional position is clear, the popular legitimacy one is less so. There are two main arguments as to why a new Prime Minister would not have popular legitimacy:

First, the argument that changing leaders now was not part of the deal at the election. Voters expected Tony Blair to go, and Gordon Brown to replace him. They didn’t expect anyone other than Brown to be Prime Minister at the time of the next election, and so any new Prime Minister should seek an immediate personal mandate.

This argument depends on the idea that people vote for personalities rather than parties at election time, and there is some evidence for that. Even if the research is mistaken, and voters are secret policy wonks, the parties have been putting personalities of leaders front and centre at election time for a while, so there is a plausible case that the terms of the sale are based to some extent on personality (whether that is philosophically a good thing or not).

The second argument is that the ‘natural’ electoral cycle is nearly at an end. If there were a challenge in late 2008, almost four years would have passed since the last election. As elections that governments think they might win are generally held every four years (1979-83-87 and 1997-2001-05), it seems to be against the spirit if not the letter of the law to change Prime Minister and then stay on till the bitter end.

These arguments are strong because they point out ways in which what a Government is going is contrary to the general way in which people expect things to be done. This is a particularly strong argument in a country without a written constitution, where practices enforced by public feeling often crystallise into accepted conventions. Why could there not be a Prime Minister from the House of Lords, for instance?

This is not to say that public disapproval outweighs the legal position as set out by Mr Kettle - democratic constitutions, even unwritten ones, are vital checks on popular passions. But if Mr Brown is replaced, the call the Government makes on election timing might be a little bit of constitution-writing in action.

The reaction to Number 10’s Clarkson video is an interesting example of the no-win situation for Governments in trying to vary the ways in which they interact with people.

For those who hadn’t seen it, there was a petition on the Downing Street site to ‘make Jeremy Clarkson Prime Minister’. This was, as you can tell, a joke petition (or put forward by someone without much knowledge of the British constitution).

So Number 10 put forward a joke response on YouTube - nothing extravagant, just some stock footage banged together in iMovie or something similar. It’s not going to win the Golden Rose of Montreux, but it’s a jokey response to a jokey petition. Fair enough for a slow August, you might think.

But what is the media story? An attack on the Government by the opposition, for ‘wasting public money’ on producing the response.

No wonder Governments get nervy and defensive about new methods of communications.

The Joint [Lords and Commons] Committee on Human Rights has, reports the BBC, called for the Government to bring forward a new Bill of Rights (an issue that is currently out for consultation). The Bill, which would extend the existing Human Rights Act and European Convention, could include rights such as the right to trial by jury and various additional rights for vulnerable groups.

I’m not sure there’s a lot to be gained from adding to the existing rights in the Human Rights Act/European Convention, which are broadly drawn. (It should be noted that the Conservatives are apparently proposing that the new Bill would replace rather than supplement the HRA).

Human Rights is a powerful term, and I think it’s risky to overload it with lots of new soft rights like the right to work. These sorts of rights are hard to define and enforce, and are in some constitutions even have the rider ‘as far as the state can reasonably afford’. I worry that the non-absolute nature of these additional rights could pollute already established rights, and imply that budgetary constraints are a factor there too: a right to housing has to be ‘within reasonable budgetary constraints’; the right to free speech should never be.

One can put in safeguards to ensure that this doesn’t happen - say, by making some of the rights non-justiciable - but this leads to two bad endings. Either judges find ways round the safeguards and start making decisions that are properly the work of other branches of government; or there are two different sorts of rights - ‘real’ ones like freedom of speech and assembly, and ‘pretend ones’ like the socio-economic rights.

John McCain’s presidential campaign has started a programme whereby supporters are rewarded with loyalty points for posting positive commentary on various blogs and political websites. The points can be redeemed for McCain merchandise and books. The current featured sites include both left-leaning blog Daily Kos, and the right-leaning Red State.

This move is both depressing and entirely predictable. If you have an army of fired-up activists, what could be easier than getting them to push your message on the internet? Not only is it cheap labour and free advertising, the commenters may well be taken for regular Joes or Joannas, giving them much more credibility than a politician or a campaign staffer.

The payment angle feels a little more sordid. The participants in the scheme are almost certainly going to be McCain supporters already, so maybe the benefits won’t make much difference, but the reward element has an unpleasant odour of buying opinions for cash, or at least a signed copy of Faith of My Fathers. I appreciate that this may be a rather British view, given the fuss that paying MPs cash to ask questions caused in the 1990s.

Whatever the moral pros and cons, in starting this off, Sen. McCain has driven another nail into the coffin of emergent democracy - the idea that a representative popular will could arise, cloud-like, from the blogs and comments on websites. With enough cash and enough motivated people, the tenor of the comments can be whatever you like.

What’s more, he has dented the credibility of anyone supporting him in an internet discussion - the obvious rejoinder is “how much are you getting for this comment?” or “what’s in this for you?”. Could this be the first lurch downhill for public credibility of the public?

Political party membership numbers are steadily falling, reports Liberal Conspiracy.

David Lammy, the MP for Tottenham, gave a talk at the Fabian Society a little while back, on what lessons the left can learn from the American elections. One section of his speech is devoted to widening participation in political activities, and is worth a read. The summary line:

I think we have been far too cautious in finding new ways to lower the barriers to involvement in politics itself.

Libertas, the Irish group that defeated the political establishment over the Lisbon Treaty, may stand Europe-wide in next June’s European Parliamentary elections. Declan Ganley, the businessman who leads the group, is quoted in the Telegraph and the Irish Times, saying that the campaign, if it happened, would be a proxy referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

The idea of a referendum through a normal Parliamentary election has just been tried in our very own Haltemprice and Howden, and was not a great success. If Libertas and Mr Ganley are serious, they would not be able to run the Parliament on the basis of blocking the Lisbon treaty, even if they campaigned on that basis. They would need to have a proper set of policies and platforms, which would presumably come from the centre-right pro-business space that Mr Ganley himself occupies.

From the Society’s non-partisan position, I think that this would be an excellent development for European politics. If Libertas were to stand, and campaign strongly in all member states, it would be a big step towards a single European democratic space, the absence of which has long been a problem for the EU’s legitimacy (see previously on this blog). Although doubtless sceptical about business regulation and harmonisation, Libertas would not be a wrecking crew like UKIP and other organisations - they would believe as a baseline in the continued existence of the EU, and of Ireland’s membership within it. It is richly ironic that all this potential development comes as a result of a no vote in the Irish referendum.

A successful Libertas campaign could seed a European political space, with Libertas as one of the centre-right players. However, if Libertas are serious about democratising the business of the European Union, there is one other step that I am sure they would welcome: the creation of a similar pan-European movement to put the opposing case. It would be disastrous for debate if the Libertas argument were to come up against a ragbag of national establishments and national political parties - we have already seen the political outcome of that sort of tussle.

Hence the title of this post - if Libertas are going to create the field of pan-European democracy, they must not be left to march around it alone, or be attacked by a poorly co-ordinated army of midgets. One or more parties similarly committed to EU democracy must be created to put the case for closer integration, more social action and more regulation. Then we could have a meaningful election in June, and a stronger democracy in Europe.

If we are going to get more rational debate into online politics, we can’t do without the views of civil servants and policy makers. The new rules on civil service blogging are a good start. Ingrid at Policy & Performance reports from an FCO session on the role of blogging and social media in the Civil Service.

For those who don’t know, the New Yorker has caused a minor ruckus in the political world by running a satirical cartoon on its front cover, showing one of the US presidential candidates as a Muslim terrorist, standing in the White House with the US flag burning in the fireplace and a picture of Bin Laden on the mantelpiece.

In the standard unit conversion table of the political internet, one minor ruckus equals nine million anguished blogwords, and the present case is no different.

The scandal itself is not of much consequence - read up on it at the Guardian or CBS if you want the full skinny - but it is a good example of one of the intellectual fallacies of political commentary.

This is the idea that a single comment (or cartoon) is going to make much difference to voters’ attitudes. This fallacy is general, but particularly ridiculous when applied to the New Yorker, a magazine that - as as Gary Kamiya says - only makes the political weather between 110th Street and Canal.

It’s also a fairly patronising fallacy, assuming as it does that citizens in general are mere automatons, much more gullible and easily-led than readers of [your blog name here] (even though they apparently read the New Yorker). To give it a name, let’s call it the ‘outgroup gullibility fallacy’.

The church service used to say ‘fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ - perhaps the online catechism should be ‘respect for others’ intellect is the beginning of wisdom’.

Appropriately enough, the Government published its plans for dumping the aristocracy on Bastille Day. The revolution itself, however, is likely to be postponed.

The White Paper An Elected Second Chamber was published (pdf) yesterday, and contains proposals to remove the last vestiges of hereditary membership from Parliament’s second chamber.

It proposes:

• Elections for the new body, probably called a Senate, from multi-member constituencies
• Senators would serve for one term only, but their term would be three parliamentary cycles - between twelve and fifteen years
• A smaller house - down to about 450
• A possibility of some appointed Senators, also serving three-Parliament terms
• Some appointed seats (if there were any) would be reserved for bishops and judges

Reaction has varied. The Telegraph, perhaps unsurprisingly, is in favour of the status quo, while the Guardian thinks change can’t happen soon enough.

Anything that moves Parliament towards being a properly elected body is to be welcomed, but it is rather a shame that having had years of delay on this issue, we are now promised a bit more. The Justice Secretary, Jack Straw, said in his statement to the Commons that there would be no legislation on the issue in this Parliament.

Given the current state of the opinion polls, and the likelihood that the Conservatives will not move forward on reform with much enthusiasm when they are in power, this may be putting off the start of the transition for a decade or more. Even if reform is enacted in 2011 after a general election, the first new elected members would not be through the doors until the next one, in 2014 or later. Their Lordships don’t need to fire up the Guardian Jobs pages just yet.