Concrete Achievements

Tag: democracy

  • Last Brexit tweet, because this is all you need.

    Last Brexit tweet, because this is all you need. Today, almost a month after Brexit was due to happen, the UK is still doing unicorns. twitter.com/tnewtondunn/st…

    And when I say last Brexit tweet, I’m not kidding. Muting the words, unfollowing British journalists, I’m done. I enjoyed Brexitless Easter and I’m going to keep rolling like that.

    There’s enough to be getting on with. European elections. Spain. The whole democracy thing. Go vote. Do democracy right. #ThisTimeImVoting #tymrazemglosuję

  • Last Brexit tweet, because this is all you need.

    Last Brexit tweet, because this is all you need. Today, almost a month after Brexit was due to happen, the UK is still doing unicorns. twitter.com/tnewtondunn/st…

    And when I say last Brexit tweet, I’m not kidding. Muting the words, unfollowing British journalists, I’m done. I enjoyed Brexitless Easter and I’m going to keep rolling like that.

    There’s enough to be getting on with. European elections. Spain. The whole democracy thing. Go vote. Do democracy right. #ThisTimeImVoting #tymrazemglosuję

  • Switzerland is a half-direct democracy, argues @claudelongchamp (at #swissbreakfast) -…

    Switzerland is a half-direct democracy, argues @claudelongchamp (at #swissbreakfast) – popular votes interacting with parliaments. Could be a solution to democratic disaffection in rest of Europe.

    There have been 222 constitutional revisions in Switzerland through popular votes of which 22 have been successful.

    Of the 200 that are lost, about 25% have had some compromise position later passed through Parliament.

    93% of parliamentary decisions have no referendum, 7% are contested, of which about half are approved and half overturned.

    The most important part of Swiss democracy is not the voting but the dialogue.

    Doesn’t Brexit show that some things are just too complicated, asks @niknuspliger?

  • Switzerland is a half-direct democracy, argues @claudelongchamp (at #swissbreakfast) -…

    Switzerland is a half-direct democracy, argues @claudelongchamp (at #swissbreakfast) – popular votes interacting with parliaments. Could be a solution to democratic disaffection in rest of Europe.

    There have been 222 constitutional revisions in Switzerland through popular votes of which 22 have been successful.

    Of the 200 that are lost, about 25% have had some compromise position later passed through Parliament.

    93% of parliamentary decisions have no referendum, 7% are contested, of which about half are approved and half overturned.

    The most important part of Swiss democracy is not the voting but the dialogue.

    Doesn’t Brexit show that some things are just too complicated, asks @niknuspliger?

  • It falls into the very British trap of thinking that finding a compromise within the UK =…

    It falls into the very British trap of thinking that finding a compromise within the UK = reaching a deal. It doesn’t. It has to be negotiable with 27 other democracies. twitter.com/plegrain/statu…

    How do you ensure that a CA can find a *negotiable* position? You can frame the discussions tightly but participants might justifiably feel they were being railroaded.

    You can facilitate in such a way that any 🦄 are shot on sight, but participants might justifiably say “how do you know what’s negotiable?”, particularly after two years of being told the UK holds all the cards.

    You can let things run and see what happens, but it’s quite likely that the answer looks like “we have all the trade but set our own rules and stop the immigrants” because that is a great deal for the British political view. Just not for the 27.

    Then what happens is the whole CA process is ignored, democratic resentment is stoked further and things are only made worse not better.

    A CA in 2015, sure. In 2019, very bad idea. Damages the brand of an important democratic innovation, and moves the UK nowhere at best.

  • It falls into the very British trap of thinking that finding a compromise within the UK =…

    It falls into the very British trap of thinking that finding a compromise within the UK = reaching a deal. It doesn’t. It has to be negotiable with 27 other democracies. twitter.com/plegrain/statu…

    How do you ensure that a CA can find a *negotiable* position? You can frame the discussions tightly but participants might justifiably feel they were being railroaded.

    You can facilitate in such a way that any 🦄 are shot on sight, but participants might justifiably say “how do you know what’s negotiable?”, particularly after two years of being told the UK holds all the cards.

    You can let things run and see what happens, but it’s quite likely that the answer looks like “we have all the trade but set our own rules and stop the immigrants” because that is a great deal for the British political view. Just not for the 27.

    Then what happens is the whole CA process is ignored, democratic resentment is stoked further and things are only made worse not better.

    A CA in 2015, sure. In 2019, very bad idea. Damages the brand of an important democratic innovation, and moves the UK nowhere at best.

  • One of the things that has come up at #cp4d (workshop on innovations in Parliaments…

    One of the things that has come up at #cp4d (workshop on innovations in Parliaments around the Commonwealth) is how the media framing of politics-as-horse-race devalues the work of Parliaments and committees around policy-making and -shaping.

    Linked and probably related is the demise of the policy-focused rather than politics-focused political reporter, which is perhaps most obvious in the UK when it comes to Brexit. Brexit is not simple, but it is comprehensible.

    A reasonable understanding of EU regulation, trade deals, etc, take a bit of reading-in but nothing beyond the wit of humankind. However, we’re sixty days from the detonation point of the biggest crisis in British politics since the War…

    And large swaths of the political-journalist class (often the ones who told us how easy it would be) have still not done the reading. It is a real disgrace – but Brexit is just the cardiac arrest that followed years of eating a chips-only diet.

    I don’t know what we need to do to build up policy journalism and better political coverage (though I’ll share if anything comes up here) but I do know that political and democratic reform can’t happen without it.

  • This is a very good and fair-minded explainer on the Irish border from @pmdfoster but I’d…

    This is a very good and fair-minded explainer on the Irish border from @pmdfoster telegraph.co.uk/politics/0/bre… but I’d quibble with one point.

    This paragraph is not quite right. Rules are not handed to Dublin (or London) by the EU. The Irish and UK governments and the MEPs their voters elect are the ones who pass the rules. The problem with Northern Ireland is the UK is giving up its say.

    That means that voters in Northern Ireland will have no say in the rules governing them, unlike voters in the rest of Ireland. Realistically, the UK will probably have to stay close to EU rules if it wants a decent trade deal of any sort, but at least in return for giving up its

    voice in Europe, the Westminster parliament will have sovereignty to the very limited extent of choosing to be a US rule taker or an EU rule taker. Brexit means – against its democratic will – Northern Ireland doesn’t even get the comfort blanket of fake sovereignty.

  • This is an interesting initiative but doesn’t really have a convincing answer on the…

    This is an interesting initiative but doesn’t really have a convincing answer on the democratisation part tbqh. twitter.com/lemondefr/stat…

    The idea of a european assembly alongside a European Parliament is one democratic assembly for the price of two, and double hatting national politicians didn’t work, which is why we have the European Parliament right now.

    The underlying difficulty is that they are trying to create a sovereign European political space without the member states basically ruling the show. I get why, but this isn’t how to do it. You might think – I do – that nation states are

    on the way out but they are here and (absent the creation of a European republic, which isn’t really on the cards) you’ve got to deal with them.

    And in any case there’s no point in building more democratic institutions up top without rooting them at the base and creating convincing democratic approaches that counter the prevailing feeling of impotence among the public. Nation states are struggling with that,

    A European assembly would struggle ten times (or 27 times) over.

    All for further democratisation of the European government level but don’t see this as the way to get it.

  • Links from the week of 26 November 2018

    Articles, reports and other links I shared on Twitter this week.