Robin McAlpine – How to make people non-disposable

There is something very jarring about the political media class’s sudden discovery that Epstein was doing terrible things, his victims were treated horribly and anyone close to complicit either in supporting Epstein or turning a blind eye to it is an appalling person.

It isn’t that they’re wrong, it’s how much less they thought it last week and how they managed not to think it at all when Mandelson became ambassador. It reveals a terrible truth about contemporary politics – it has an in-built assumption that some people are disposable. Only when this is dragged into public by a photo of a dead refugee child on an British beach or with the release of the Epstein Files do we see them.

Yet it’s stupid, because no man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main (words written in 1623 when women didn’t count). From the breakdown of confidence in democracy to international terrorism, disposable people find ways to make themselves felt. It does no good for any of us, and realistically most of us are pretty disposable.

Literally no-one in politics does not think large swathes of the population are disposable, both domestically and globally. Different ideologies may make different sets of people seem disposable, but there is always someone who ‘doesn’t count’. And there’s always a reason why they can be ignored. None of us are immune from this.

It is the point I was raging about last week. In the ranking of priorities, we know the ranking of corporate GDP growth versus poor people. We know how that ranking goes if its growth versus child mental health. Or versus environment. Or versus community development. In fact, it comes above literally everything else. Current governments would abolish the police before deprioritising corporate growth.

My first draft of this article then went on to offer other examples of how some people rank higher than others in political importance but then I realised it was just wasting time. You know this. Everyone knows it. Some people just count more.

So how would we create a society which doesn’t treat people as disposable? For me this is one of the biggest questions of our era. People who write about democracy fret about its decline but take insufficient pause to consider why it has served so many so badly. They know democracy needs ‘refreshed’, but remain wedded to something like our current concept of democracy.

And that was effectively created in the feudal era. Our democracy began as a way for the aristocrats to manage the population and enforce consistent rules designed to maintain the hierarchy, and it hasn’t really c hanged to this day. Intellectual property rights block the vast majority of humanity from access to new knowledge but there are no price controls on food no matter how much profiteering goes on.

These are hierarchical assumptions. One sweeps away the ladder that might help some climb, the lack of the other protects the snakes which suck down our wealth. These are priorities that emerge from our conception of how democracy is supposed to work; from the top down.

Let’s call this what it is; power management. It is about managing social and economic power in a way that maintains hierarchy. There is more assumption about the right to commercial confidentiality (a human construct which says giant businesses should be allowed to operate in secrecy) than there is about the right to protest (which lets a giant business’s victims push back).

And then we hope the resultant mess can be fixed by the winners of the old system being willing to be ‘a bit better’. We always start from here on a road with the exists blocked.

In Britain and America, democracy is something that travels downwards. It is something the top gives the bottom and, as we can see, can be taken away. But democracy should more accurately be seen as something that flows upwards. Contemporary politics acts like elections select an autonomous chief executive when in fact they produce representatives who’re supposed to work for us.

So what does this look like? Well, it starts with a proper constitution. If you think of the law as something that constrains the public and protects the powerful, a constitution constrains the powerful and protects the public. If you want a democracy which doesn’t treat people as disposable you need to build in much stronger assumptions about the sovereignty and rights of the people.

But as we see in the US, that is no guarantee of anything good if you get it wrong. It has an 18th century aristocrat’s constitution that it is almost impossible to change because aristocrats wrote it to protect themselves.

So we need a conception of what our democracy is. It should send the message that government is authority delegated upwards. Common Weal supports a system of ‘reserved powers’. The lowest level of democracy you have should be assumed to be in charge of everything other than a limited set of explicit responsibilities that are reserved at a higher level.

And it obviously needs to be much more local. We would create Development Councils at the local level (like elected, publicly-resourced development trusts) and would merge some existing local authorities to create proper regional authorities. And it would be codified that the Development Council can do absolutely anything which isn’t reserved to either regional authorities or the national parliament.

In that model, power flows upwards. We’d also like to see public resources flow upwards rather than downwards. To begin, local authorities should be given extensive new tax powers and the Scottish Parliament should cut tax accordingly, shifting the relationship so local democracy is raising its own income and is not a charity at the behest of central government.

And I must say I’m increasingly attracted to the model which is used in some Nordic countries where most tax is collected locally and then some of that is remitted upwards to provide services from higher tiers of government. It is the purse strings of centralised government which are most likely to end up strangling disposable people.

But that isn’t enough. Codification of rights is also essential and these should include a right to live a decent life, to afford a house, food, heating. As long as those rights are legally enforceable (and people can afford access to justice), and as long as someone is named as responsible and so can be sued for failure to meet them, it makes it much, much harder to ignore people.

One of the things that really makes you disposable is if you become so disillusioned you no longer vote. Now you really, really don’t count. I swing back and forth on this but I think on balance I favour mandatory voting in elections. It has its issues, but it would put the fear of god in politicians if they thought they actually had to start serving everyone and not just the wealthier, older citizens most likely to vote just now.

There is lots of basic housekeeping that would help – I have never liked the idea that it is a government which gets to choose when the public assesses its performance. I would have constitutionally guaranteed four-year fixed-term elections so politicians don’t get to game their polling by timing an election. We definitely need much stronger committees in the Scottish Parliament to balance the power of the executive.

Another major shift would be in measurement. At the moment the metrics that really affect policy are ones designed to measure the interests of wealth (GDP). If you shift the primary metric to household income (which measures the interests of everyone) you immediately get a different picture. An incomes policy greatly reduces disposability.

But there is one step which I believe is more important than any, and that is to knock on the head the idea that we give king-like powers to a government at an election and we can then repent at our leisure afterwards – but we can’t do anything about it for half a decade. Elected kings are better than unelected kings, but they still rule over us at their whim.

My constitution would bring this to an end. It would write in law that government is a participatory process. Rather than a king to our commoner, government would become an executive to our shareholder, giving us the ultimate power over them. At the most basic we should have the ability to call an Extraordinary General Meeting – by which I mean a recall election.

If a petition achieves a given proportion of verified signatories it would trigger an election. No more politicians going ‘phew, that’s me in for five years – fuck the public until then’, they’d have to look over their backs.

And that is why my view is that the most important single step would be a Citizens’ Assembly as a second chamber of our parliament, made up of a representative group of randomly-selected citizens with power to scrutinise the government. A recall election means the politicians know they could be fired any day, but a Citizens’ Assembly means they know they will be scrutinised every day.

A Citizens’ Assembly would also gain all the powers of patronage (it would make public appointments so they were no longer sweeties to be dolled out for obedience – no more empire building, no more cowed officials). And it would be the guardian of the constitution, not the politicians whom it is meant to restrain.

But I would follow Common Weal policy and create a series of ‘triggers’ which automatically require government to use participatory processes like citizens’ juries or mandatory ‘co-design’ of new policies.

There is lots more I would do – commercial lobbying is the engine that makes people not count and should be regulated to within an inch of its life,. All of this needs really good availability of information so a strong presumption that all public information is publicly available should be put in place. We need a national statistics agency that actually creates the data from which to form people-centric policy.

But – and this is the depressing part – we’re currently trapped. To stop democracy being centrally controlled from the top it requires someone to take power at the top of a centralised, hierarchical governmental system and use that centralised power to do the right thing. And that is a ‘right thing’ that will make their lives harder. There is a clear in built bias to keep democracy top-down.

That said, I think that the first politician to offer a clear platform of this sort and a clear narrative explaining how it will rebalance power in society will suddenly become very popular. If they had the courage to follow through, it would be a different Scotland. One where no-one is disposable.