A different democracy for Scotland

Robin McAlpine

We're all fretting about democracy these days, so just to persuade you that this shitshow isn't the end of the story, here is a quick reminder of how Common Weal would revolutionise Scottish democracy if we had the chance.

First, centralised Scotland needs the capacity to decentralise, so we need something to decentralise to. But we don't need even more time-wasting bureaucracy and soul-destroying compliance regimes. That's why we proposed town-level Development Councils. 

To make this work Scotland would have a system of reserved power. At each level of government from Holyrood to a town council, a specific statement of what (minimal) range of powers must be reserved at that level would mean any layer of democracy below it would be able to draw down any non-reserved power, along with the money to carry out that function itself.

Not that it has to. If your town doesn't want to empty its own bins it doesn't have to, but if there is a particular problem (like being in a busy tourist area) that means there is a litter problem, then you can take on waste management if you're not happy about what your regional authority is doing.

Because that's what we have – regional authorities. There are far too few to be locally responsive but far too many to be regionally strategic. Every community should be able to decide its own boundaries (a rural town council might include surrounding villages, or they might choose to have their own council or councils). The remaining regional authorities should merge to be genuinely regional.

The focus of Development Councils is therefore not management but change. They are like democratic development trusts with a proper budget and statutory powers. And for me, political parties should be banned from standing. Our local democracy should be independent and local. Regional authorities need a party system though.

This gives communities power for change without the burden of bureaucracy and unlocks a wealth of talent and ideas right across Scotland that are currently repressed. Regional authorities must then have autonomous budgets so they're not being micromanaged from Holyrood. That means a local tax (we favour a Property Tax) or a package of taxes that fund the local authority in full.

National tax rates would be cut accordingly to make the system cost-neutral, with only a central grant to equalise funding to reflect rurality or deprivation. And remember, regional authorities would then have the power to draw down any non-reserved powers they wanted to, empowering them further.

Sitting atop that we would have not a bi-cameral parliament but a tri-cameral one. Rather than a legislature and a revising chamber both effectively working on the same issues (like the Commons and the Lords), we'd have three chambers with different and separate roles and responsibilities.

The Parliament would be as the parliament is, forming a government, passing laws, guiding policy and so on. I'd adjust it to enable variable membership and move to national rather than regional lists. This achieves greater proportionality, because while a national list is more proportionate in itself, variable members means Scotland could adopt the German system.

Every party that crosses a minimum threshold (say five per cent) would be guaranteed representation and all parties are guaranteed a number of seats directly proportionate to their overall vote. If that can't be achieved with 129 sitting members, you add a few more until it is. This gets rid of the last vestiges of first past the post's distorting effect and provide proper democratic justice.

And the committee system at Holyrood needs to be made independent of the parties and their whipping, as best as is possible. While a lot of this would mean a culture change (politicians can't really be forced to be independently-minded...), there are procedural steps that would be added to insulate them from party politicking.

Oh, and I would move to a system of public funding for political parties and would then ban them from taking donations or sponsorship from commercial interests. Politics just shouldn't be there to be purchased by the highest bidder.

But while parliaments provide the democratic underpinning that enables laws to be passed and taxes to be levied, it is godawful at long-term thinking. In fact it is questionable how good they are at original thinking at all, partly because of the adversarial nature and partly because of the volume of workload.

So sitting next to the Parliament we would have the Forum. This was originally conceived as part of the devolution settlement but was allowed rapidly to wither and die. A Civic Forum would have no statutory power at all other than to be consulted. It would be made up of a series of individual forums – a housing and place forum, a health and care forum, an industry and economy forum.

Any national group which was not a commercial interest or directly representing a specific commercial interest would be invited to join the relevant forum. These would then be equipped and instructed to do original thinking, and in particular to think in longer timescales than Parliament can. It would produce recommendations (these could be split – there is no need for the Forum to have only one opinion).

Parliament would be obliged to look at and properly debate and consider these recommendations, and while it would not be compelled to implement them, it would be obliged to respond to the Forum setting out full reasoning as to why not. The Forum would also be able to produce reports on current policies and would be statutorily empowered to advise on legislation as part of the formal legislative process.

Also alongside the Parliament and Forum would be the Assembly. The purpose this would have would be to hold Parliament properly to account and to take away the inherently conflicted power of patronage from elected politicians. A Citizens' Assembly would be made up of 100 people selected at random to represent the nation as a whole who would be paid to serve for two years, elected in three staggered cohorts to maintain continuity. 

It would be illegal to lobby an Assembly Member; absolutely all business should be 'in camera', in public and recorded. They would have a legal team working for them and would have the power to scrutinise legislation, institute reviews and inquiries into government business and to publish reports with sanctions if they believe incompetence of malfeasance is involved.

All public appointments would be made by the Assembly based on merit, open interviews and proper job descriptions with person specifications. There would be no hiding place for politicians and they would lose the ability to stuff the public realm with their place people.

Anywhere else that there is a body discharging public duties it should always be a Council, an elected body selected from the relevant constituency. For example, a Health Board should become a Health Council and be elected from among NHS staff and patient representative groups. No-one should exercise public power in Scotland without a democratic mandate.

This does not fix all our problems, because the civil service itself is culpable for the mess we're in. It needs serious reform. First, every single agency, quango and NDPB should be taken directly into the civil service unless an absolutely compelling reason not to do so can be made. Arm's-length are supposed to create a degree of autonomy from politicians, but if autonomy from politicians is needed then the role should be given to the Assembly.

The civil service should then be split between policy design and policy implementation. The 'black box' where the public never knows whether something was designed to be good or designed to be easy to implement must be cracked open. Those involved with policy design should be seconded to Policy Academies. These would be effectively big public think tanks.

They should be attached to universities with specialisms in the area and should be categorised like the various subject forums in the Civic Forum so there is coherence. These should be staffed by the civil servants but should also draw in academics, civic experts and anyone else without a vested commercial interest but who knows the subject.

Ministers would then commission policy from the Academies, and they might produce proposals with varying options, or even parallel and competing proposals. The process of choosing from these and making compromises should then be done by the government at the legislative stage and then it would be handed to the civil service itself for implementation and running. This would produce much better policy.

We have already banned lobbying of Assembly Members above, but there needs to be much, much greater control over all commercial lobbying. At the very least there needs to be a very substantial tightening of the current disclosure regime, but as a former lobbyist I'll tell you that there is nothing at all that I did that can't be done in public. Lobbying meetings should be recorded for the public. None of this is private. This is a public institution publicly funded.

Likewise we need to move to open data. A person-centred public data system where you control your own data should underpin this. There should then be an assumption of 'glass walls' in public life. Freedom of Information should be an automatic right and there should be a serious sanction for delay, obfuscation or egregious redactions on the part of government.

This is a massive change of culture and so needs support to enable change. A Democracy Academy would support the change and then underpin the new system. It would help communities get to grips with their new powers, teach civil servants how to co-design policy, explain to MSPs that their primary responsibility isn't to their party and so on.

All techniques of participatory democracy should be taught – and embedded. When government reaches certain trigger points in legislating or implementing policy it should be obliged to use participatory decision-making processes whether it likes it or not. There isn't space to explain these here but you can follow the link.

And I personally would require the Democracy Academy to teach that New Public Management (the private sector model of targets and performance indicators driving public policy implemented by Thatcher) is only one way to run government. Politicians and civil servants should be shown that there are much better ways to run public policy.

Finally, none of this works without a functioning democratic media. There is no business case for such a thing any more so it should be publicly funded, effectively a public news agency producing commentary-free reporting on what is happening. This would seek plurality rather than absolute balance in each story and would both provide news direct to the public and also effectively act as a free news agency to legacy media.

This has been a fair-old tear through our vision and clearly doesn't do it justice. But if this was the system of democracy we had then to be honest I really doubt that we'd all be spending so much time scratching our heads and asking 'how on earth did it get this bad?'. Which would be a win.

It. Doesn't. Have. To. Be. Like. This.