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.

The CLG discussion forums about the Empowerment White Paper (here) are eerily deserted. I don’t think this is because people aren’t commenting: I commented myself. But evidently they are not getting round to moderating any of the comments. It’s a busy day for them, but three hours to moderate a comment on the one day when they might expect a spike in traffic? It’s not very social-web-savvy.

The Empowerment White Paper is out, and a summary is available here as a PDF. The full monty is here and is accompanied by a separate Evidence Annex

I’ve read the summary, and although it’s not earth shatteringly radical there are a few good ideas. In particular, it has a helpfully political take on citizenship- it sees the citizen primarily as a political actor rather than merely a consumer of government services.

Here are a few instant personal reactions.

Definitely good things:

• the duty on councils to respond to petitions, and ability for petitioners to force debates in full council where responses aren’t satisfactory
• public sessions to quiz leaders of public sector bodies such as hospital trusts
• £7.5m to support empowerment, as long as it’s used wisely
• community pledgebanks (hello, Tom)

Interesting ideas, but risky or unproven:

• participatory budgeting in every council

• community asset transfer
• changes to rules on political neutrality of local government officials (to increase the number of people standing for election as councillors)
• a duty on councils to promote democracy
• removing barriers to commissioning from faith-based groups
• community justice. It sounds rather like ‘people’s lynchmobs’ but means that community service orders will be more obviously linked to areas where local people think work is needed

Disappointments:

• the obvious padding - if the executive summary includes a pledge to continue working with various forms of media, the writers must have been running short of ideas

• the absence of anything really radical or directive around neighbourhood councils or involvement
• incentives for voting, which makes my toes curl - if you need to be given a scratchcard to vote, perhaps you don’t understand why it’s important

David Cameron spoke at last week’s Local Government Association conference, and both he and Eric Pickles have been telling their local government troops not to co-operate with the current government.

A friend who does a lot of work with local government asks:

If Local Government is working to one set of policies, and Central Government (i.e. police, the courts, some Fire and Rescue Services, Health etc) to another where does this place us? Do we side with the decisions made by Central Government, or side with our (often) primary partner at both local and regional level if they are adopting different policies? Which set of electors do we pay attention to? Those who elected the Government or those who elected the local authorit(ies).

This is a conundrum that many local government partners may have to face over the next couple of years, particularly if the Conservatives’ civil disobedience agenda extends beyond merely symbolic refusals to co-operate. It would seem wilful for authorities to refuse co-operation in instances where their citizens could really benefit from central government assistance, but it may happen in some cases.

Democratically speaking, if a situation does come down to a toe-to-toe between central and local government, who should you listen to? The starting point has to be that a democratic mandate is a democratic mandate, and one isn’t better than another. Although central governments are generally elected on a higher turnout than local government (about 60% to about 30%, though a bit lower in recent years), they are elected to do very different things, so you can’t compare their legitimacy.

I might think, for instance, that the Conservative Party are the best suited to run the Government, but the Green party best suited to running my district council: to try and look behind the aggregated intention of millions of voters is inviting failure, as well as a migraine.

This is true even where central and local government overlap. If a council disagrees with, say, the smoking ban, it is at liberty to refuse to prosecute those who breach it, as long as it doesn’t do anything against the letter of the relevant laws. If local voters don’t approve, they have the opportunity to remove them from power at the next election.

This doesn’t necessarily help local authorities’ partners in deciding what to do in individual cases, but it’s a partial answer.

The Unite trade union is merging with an American trade union, as the BBC reports. This will mean, I’m sure, difficulties between the UK and US arms in terms of voting rights, policy positions, etc. Will their decision making be the trade union version of the EU - compromise building between independent bodies - or a single multi-national democracy, with the nationalist tensions that implies? We don’t know yet, according to the New Statesman, where a TUC official is quoted as saying:

They (Unite and USWA) seem to be focused on the politics first, rather than on creating an organisational structure and fitting the politics around it.

Today sees another attempt to answer the West Lothian Question - the Parliamentary problem of Scottish and Welsh MPs having votes on legislation that, because of devolution, does not apply in their constituencies. The Conservative Party has a group called, with echoes of Hollywood movies, “Ken Clarke’s Democracy Taskforce“, and they have come up with some proposals (pdf).

The first thing to say is that with the SNP in power north of the border, and a referendum on Scottish independence a question of when not whether, answering the West Lothian Question seems slightly passé, like publishing a position paper on the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty.

Still, working within its limits, the taskforce has come up with a compromise that is only slightly unworkable - a great advance on earlier ideas. The Question is really impossible to answer fully because the Conservatives are unwilling to consider the only answer that gives equal representation without abolishing existing devolution: the creation of ‘devolution-level’ bodies in England or the English regions. This is politically unacceptable to the unionist strand of Conservative thinking, and a watered-down devolution has already been rejected in 2004 by voters in the North East.

Any Parliament-only solution is in difficulties right away - either the English and UK majorities are the same party, in which case the distinction is not very relevant, or they are not the same party, which creates competing majorities within the same Parliament. The taskforce tries to get past this with a rather neat bit of footwork.

The compromise proposed would have the whole House voting as now on all legislation during the main stages of its passage. The difference from today would be that for ‘English Bills’ the Committee Stage, where the detailed work is done, would be reserved for English MPs in proportion to their overall numbers on the floor of the House. Thus, a Bill’s broad outlines would be handled by the UK majority, but the English majority would be able to block elements of it they didn’t like, or even rewrite it (at the risk of having it voted down by the whole House later on).

It’s a sort of double-key system - where each side has a veto - which the taskforce suggests would push people towards compromise. This is certainly going to be true in some cases, but on the most important issues (NHS funding, for instance, or schools) it seems more likely to lead to deadlock and stagnation. The report also rather airily dismisses problems with hybrid bills - not in the technical sense, but Bills that deal with some issues UK-wide and some issues for England only. These, it suggests, might be separated out into their UK and England-only clauses, but this seems like a recipe for confusion and legal uncertainty.

Politically, too, the double-key system would mix the currently clear messages the opposition can send about the Government messing things up. If the national opposition were in a position to decisively influence England-only legislation, whose fault is it when something goes wrong?

Perhaps it’s time to find a better regional devolution offer, and ask the North-East to vote again?

Farhad Manjoo, author of True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post Fact Society, is the guest on the WELL’s open discussion conference Inkwell.vue at the moment. Here’s an extract from his introductory post:

For many Americans, on many issues, objectivity has been supplanted by subjectivity. In my subtitle, I call this the “post-fact” society.

But why? Let me summarize my thesis. New technology has given us more information than ever seemed believable. Think about where you get your news — not just newspapers and network TV, but also blogs, cable news, talk radio, podcasts, etc., all these rich forms of media that we’d never dreamed of three decades ago. We also have more power of that information than we once did. With tools like iPods, Digg, blog networks, and other new mechanisms, now we can easily pick and choose our media.

There’s something wonderful about this new freedom; we’re no longer reliant on an institutional media for our facts about the world. But the shift also creates a problem. We humans have an innate preference to seek out information that confirms our worldview. That’s just how our brains work: If given a chance, we’ll avoid news facts that we don’t like.

Digital technology allows us to indulge those human desires better than we could in the past. On the Web, television, radio, and all manner of new devices, today you can watch, listen to, and read what
you want, whenever you want; seek out and discuss, in exhaustive and insular detail, the kind of news that pleases you; and pursue your political or social or scientific theories, whether sophisticated or naive, extremist or banal, grounded in reality or completely insane.

I’ve already written here about the mixed messages that come out of the Irish referendum result – and the waters are muddied further by opinion polling (reported by Mark Mardell) that suggests almost three quarters of Irish voters saw the no vote as a the start of a negotiation rather than a final answer. Today, with the dust having settled, and another period of reflection underway, I want to think a bit more about the contesting visions of democracy that the referendum and its aftermath set out.

‘Democracy’ has been one of the most overused words in Lisbon-related newspaper commentary and on blogs. We are told the Irish referendum result is democracy in action (or it is not democracy at all). It’s not democracy if the British people aren’t allowed a referendum, but it’s also not democracy if a hundred thousand Irish voters (the difference between the two sides) can dictate to half a billion Europeans. It’s even, some say, disrespectful for other national governments to ratify the treaty following the Irish no vote.

So what’s the truth? Every democratic system, from the EU down to your local cricket club, has to reach a compromise between the ideals of democracy as the rational form of government (where decisions are based on facts and reason rather than religion or the personal whim of a monarch) and democracy as the expression of the (ever changing and self-contradictory) popular will.

This is not just a question of sly technocrats versus noble democrats. Rationalist models of democracy, like the Westminster parliamentary model, can make a case that they are operating on the basis of a generally-expressed popular will (a sort of ‘popular will averaged over time’) that comes from their election. In this view, the desires expressed during the election campaign are acted upon over their time in office, allowing for consultation with affected parties, and changes resulting from professional and expert opinion. This is not an unreasonable argument on an intellectual level, though it’s hardly populist. Even the archetypal democracy, in Athens, had constitutional provisions preventing established laws being changed on the spur of the moment.

Right at the other end of the spectrum from this rationalist approach is the referendum. Citizens can vote in them without doing any research, for the wrong reasons, or on the basis of completely irrelevant issues, but they are still citizens, and their votes a true reflection of the popular will at that moment. To say that is not to imply, as many have done in the wake of the Irish vote, that referendums are automatically more legitimate and more authoritative than decisions of elected governments. Referendums are snapshots of a view, taken in isolation from other issues, and are different from, not better than elections. Given the media and political structures within which referendums take place, they are not even necessarily better or more honest than elections or the decisions of democratically-elected governments

The Irish referendum vote, and the commentary after it, was an excellent opportunity to see the rationalist and popular-will ideals of democracy go head-to-head.

The EU is perhaps the ultimate example of a rationalist government. All its main arms of government have some democratic element to them, but – as you might expect for an intergovernmental institution – the democracy they contain is at one or more removes, rather than from direct popular support. The Commission is appointed, though by democratically-elected politicians. The Council of Ministers, made up of members of elected Governments, has a form of mandate, but its members in theory act as representatives of national governments rather than as party politicians. Only the Parliament has a direct connection with the popular will, and even that comes from elections that are not fought on Europe-wide campaigns and have low turnouts.

The referendum was not the Irish government’s choice, it was mandated by their constitution, and as the only referendum taking place anywhere in Europe it was freighted with all sorts of expectations, from nationalists in the UK who wanted less Europe to socialists in France who wanted more.

So the Irish referendum was a tussle between two ideals, and looking at the coverage that has followed, it’s clear that the referendum easily won the popular legitimacy contest over parliamentary ratification in the other 26 member states. It’s fair to say that some of the cheering for the referendum result is motivated by partisanship, and comes from newspapers and bloggers who would have praised the wisdom of the coin if the treaty had been decided on a coin-toss. But scorning the result as worthless and the commentators as partisan doesn’t answer the whole question – after all, many general election voters don’t really know what they’re voting for, either.

To leave the pros and cons of the EU aside, and use the Irish vote as a political marker, it provides another example of how rationalist approaches to democracy are losing the battle for legitimacy with more direct forms. This is not to say that people in general want to tear down the Parliaments and distribute power to the people, whatever they say on blog comment pages. Few people would want to be governed solely on the basis of referendums, if it were a realistic prospect. But they should be believed when they indicate - repeatedly - that the current system is not close enough to the popular will.

This is a problem that all governments in the democratic world face, not just the institutions of the European Union. With few exceptions, western democracies rule through rationalism tempered by quadrennial expressions of the popular will. One of the Society’s aims is to create spaces where the popular will can be moulded by rationalism, and rationalist politicians can get an honest unmediated window on the popular will. The Irish referendum, and the reaction to it, shows how pressing that need is.

Steven Clift at Do-Wire notes new guidance for civil servants about their online participation. The guidance encourages civil servants to participate as civil servants in online discussions, as long as they follow certain sensible principles.

This is something that is very welcome. Civil servants - and, full disclosure, I used to be one myself - are used to hiding behind Ministers and well-staffed press offices when people ask difficult questions, even in situations where they themselves know the logic of policies better than anyone. There is too much commentary on the Internet for them to be everywhere, but rules that give them a green light to participate where they can are good for the officials and - thanks to their professional expertise - good for the quality of debate online.

No-one wants to see middle ranking civil servants getting papped on Mortlake High Street, but a decorous shuffle slightly farther into the limelight is not before time.

At Telegraph Blogs (via NTAH)