Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to Extinction Rebellion’s Sarah Lunnon, representative democracy, at least on climate policy and economic management, should be subordinated to citizens assemblies composed of people who are already running citizens assemblies, and people nominated by organisations invited to participate.
…
Farage: Do you understand the argument, if I was a London taxi driver, right, I would say there are people being paid to sit in the street to stop me earning a living. Do you understand how upset some people in central London are about your behaviour?
Sarah: Yes of course, and the whole philosophy of Extinction Rebellion is to disrupt, that is what we set out to do. There is no easy way of saying that, and every time I say that I am sitting in studios and I say to somebody, I am setting out to disrupt your every day life. I feel very, very uncomfortable about it. And it’s accepting that it has been the lack of action for over 30 years from our governments that has meant we have had to take this action to raise this action to raise these issues. If we stand on the streets and hand out leaflets, nobody takes any notice of us, the politicians don’t take any notice of us, and interestingly Nigel, the only reason I am on this programme today is because we’ve camped out on the streets of London for the last week.
Farage: To some extent that is true. But if you really want to move this on, I am somebody who 26-7 years ago, I took the view that our relationship with the European Union was heading in the wrong direction, I wanted to do something about it, I found at the time there were no more than a couple of dozen people in Westminster who were even interest frankly in the issue, and so I had a point of view that was very, very very polar opposite to where political debate in Britain was, and so what did I do, I went out and campaigned around the country, helped formed political parties, gained elected representation, and managed to succeed. I don’t think I’ve ever broken the law in doing what I am doing, so isn’t the real argument here that we are a peaceful democratic society, and that what you have brought to London is frankly anarchy in the last week.
Sarah: So, that’s a really good question. And you, and the idea that we can address the ecological emergency via our democratic system has been one that has been taken forward over the last 30 years. We’ve tried very very hard, like through the green party, through motions, through campaigning, through marching, we’ve tried very very hard to do that, to raise it up the agenda, and to be honest, we haven’t done it as well as you raised the issue of our relationship with Europe,
Farage. Maybe your problem Sarah, maybe your problem is you are making claims which are frankly hysterical. Your website says that there is the possibility of billions dying. That is just not credible, is it?
…
Farage: … What is it you actually want the government to do? Would people be able to go to Marbeya on their holidays? Would they be able to to own a 4×4 motor car? What is it you actually think government needs to do? Government here has actually already made a commitment which is impossible to keep, by saying that by 2050 we shall be zero net neutral on carbon, but you want this to happen by 2025. To do that we would effectively have to close down the whole of British industry, wouldn’t we?
Sarah: We should have to totally refocus British industry, it would be a mobilisation like we did in 1939…
Farage: Hang on, hang on, it’s the opposite, isn’t it, in 1939 we built factories to produce munitions for war…
Sarah: Actually we refocussed our factories, Nigel is what we did. We took the infrastructure that was in place, and refocussed it towards the war effort, and also what we also did was we rationed what was available, and brought the country together, we unified the country and we mobilised to fight a common enemy. Unfortunately the enemy that we’re looking at at the moment, we can’t see it. But it is there, and that is why we are calling for zero carbon by 2025, to defend and protect.
Farage.: So steel would go, chemical production would go, refining would go, what would we have left?
Sarah: So the choices that we’re looking at are really, really grim. And that’s why Extinction Rebellion is asking for a citizens assembly, so the people come together to decide how and what the change that is required looks like. Rather than politicians sitting in Westminster and saying you have to do this, and need to do that, we bring together a…
Farage: How?
Sarah: Well we do it in various ways, we already do it for juries for example, and in the past juries decided life or death of people, we bring it together using um…
Farage: Who? Who brings them together?
Sarah: Well there are a number of people who are already running citizen’s assemblies, there are external bodies, you ask a body of people to set up the citizens assembly, you bring together people from across the united kingdom so it represents people in terms of their age, in terms of their social status, in terms of their wealth, you get a cross section of people, you explain to them, you educate, and then you ask their opinion of how to move forward. Its what the Irish did in terms of their abortion question, which was very controversial…
Farage: And then what do you do, do you put this to a referendum?
Sarah: You implement it through government. You have to keep the structures of the state in place…
Farage: An appointed citizen’s assembly would tell government what to do?
Sarah: They would lead and advise government, and it then becomes very difficult for government to say we are not going to do this, because it has been requested by the people, by representatives of the people.
Farage: I have to say I am very skeptical about that.
…
British politician Nigel Farage, a friend and supporter of President Trump, is living proof that the democratic process works if your cause is legitimate.
Over 30 years Farage has overcome every obstacle, and built what is hopefully irresistible public support for Britain to leave the European Union.
By contrast Extinction Rebellion’s Sarah Lunnon has experienced 30 years of utter frustration. People simply don’t care about her cause. She is so fed up with people not listening to her she wants to change the rules of the game, to force people to listen.
Sarah demands elected government representatives subordinate their decision making to self appointed citizens assemblies, at least when it comes to climate change and economic policy.
If I have understood correctly, Sarah intends that Citizen’s Assembly members would be composed of people who already call their group a citizens’ assembly, and representatives nominated by organizations invited to participate.
Citizens assemblies would advise on the “grim” task of imposing wartime levels of rationing, and would decide what economic activity would be allowed to continue, to fulfil their paramount goal of drastically cutting Britain’s carbon footprint to address the climate crisis by 2025.
Sarah compares citizens assemblies to court jurors, who once decided on whether people could live or die, before Britain abolished the death penalty.
Extinction Rebellion’s intention is that “advice” provided by the assemblies would be very difficult for elected politicians to refuse.
Breaking news: the British Conservative Government has just agreed Extinction Rebellion’s demand to form a climate change citizen’s assembly. 30,000 invitations will be sent at random, then 110 of the respondents will be chosen to sit on the assembly. The budget allocated for the assembly is £520,000. £120,000 will be provided by the government, the rest will provided by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the European Climate Foundation.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
“Breaking news: the British Conservative Government has just agreed Extinction Rebellion’s demand to form a climate change citizen’s assembly. ”
They’re out of their bloody minds. That’s not a mistake. It’s suicide.
So much for Boris, the savior of Britain.
Back in the day, what she is proposing were known as Soviets. But since even every Dog and Cat in the world is aware that Marxism turned out to be a total bust, the beta types have taken to rebranding, hence Citizen Assemblies, and Socialism being co-opted to mean Communism. Added to which, and having recently performed jury service, her comparison to juries hardly fills one with confidence.
I’m still tending towards thinking that XR and Greta are so ridiculous that they must have been inserted into the game to slow things down, sort of like boron control rods 🙂
Exactly what is happening in Chile now.
Cuba and Russia are funding a revolution. A revolution because the stupid democrattically elected government bowed to the climate scam to impose higher prices on the middle class.
Yep, as soon as stupid rules, the organization falls apart. I happens to town councils, large corporations, and great nations.
That’s bull.
Pinochet, the Chicago Boy, put in place a fascist Constitution, and Pinera, the multi billionaire has a problem. The people want a new Constitution.
Interestingly Maggie Thatcher invited that fascist. Pinochet, to tea.
I know a bit or two about Chile, having lived there. And I also know that I will not believe anything you say about anything.
Here is “A Purge for Legislatures” by H.L. Mencken, which
advocates sortition in his inimitable style:
https://equalitybylot.com/2018/10/06/mencken-a-purge-for-legislatures/
The idea of electorates or legislatures composed of a sample of the citizen body has been getting a lot of attention in political science circles in the past decade. There are hundreds of academic articles on “sortition,” as it is technically known—many are on the academia.edu site; others can be found in Google Scholar.
A recent best-seller in Europe has been Against Elections (intro by Kofi Annan), available on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Against-Elections-David-Van-Reybrouck-ebook/dp/B071DZ1KR1/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Against+Elections
See also https://equalitybylot.com, where ongoing news and views on sortition are presented. The site’s owner is a radical egalitarian and leftist, but he is tolerable, and the contributors are more balanced. They are mostly academics. The discussion is quite advanced.
I myself believe that we should replace mass democracy with “mini” or “micro” democracy. I.e., democracies in which officials are elected by grand- jury-sized electorates (of 23), chosen in part by lot and in part by “ballotery,” in which names are drawn from a pot containing ballots cast by citizens for their fellow citizens. I’ve written an 8-page article on this proposal, titled “Demarchy—small, sample electorates electing officials.” It’s at:
https://www.academia.edu/38701375/Demarchy_small_sample_electorates_electing_officials
In theory, it’s a much better idea to randomly choose people instead of having votes. A large-enough, truly random selection would guarantee to represent the people.
But…
That then puts control of the country in the hands of those who choose.
Today, elections are rigged, but it’s hard work. They have to fake enough votes to put their men in place, or they have to ensure that they own all the candidates who are likely to win, so the result doesn’t matter.
In the future, they’ll just need to rig one algorithm on one computer and they get all their people in place.
“But… That then puts control of the country in the hands of those who choose.”
No t at the first stage, because the phone numbers of the persons called are generated randomly by a computer. That’s how it’s being done in France.
The next stages would be heavily scrutinized to ensure fairness. They involve profiling each of the contacts who’s willing to serve by various personal characteristics, to ensure the social and economic representativeness of the ultimate sample. Then drawings are held from names in various characteristic-boxes in accordance with their proportion in the whole populace. (This is why, I assume, so many invitations are sent out—to ensure that every combination-of-characteristics box is filled.)
There wouldn’t be much room for hanky-panky here, especially if respected figures from all parts of the political spectrum were involved in overseeing the process.
As for the bias in membership arrising from the disinclination of skeptics to be part of a group deciding which sort of “climate action” to take, that could be countered by mentioning that “adaptation” rather than “mitigation” would be an option, and so would “nuclear power” instead of “renewables.”
Citizen’s Committee = “Soviet” – only less democratic.
In Australia, coal causes drought;
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/thunderstorms-heading-for-sydney-bring-welcome-rain-to-parts-of-western-nsw-20191103-p536y6.html
Regarding Boris Johnson putting taxpayers money into a political movement which wants to destroy democracy, I am reminded of what happened in Egypt.
The Army had run the country for a long time, and war unpopular. So they had a election, a real one , and the Moslem Brotherhood was elected. Then all of
the previously secret members came out of the woodwork.
A few months went by and the real policies of this new government came out.
Then we had crowds rioting and asking the Army to get rid of the Brotherhood, the Army obliged and was back in Government and they then arrested all
of the now known members of the Brotherhood.
Now if you think that such a thing could never happen in the UK, the country which created Parliament I suggest that you bring up a old BBC series called “”The Guardians”.
And if during the election due soon that Labour is elected, read “”The Forth Protocol” as to just what can happen in a legal political party.
MJE VK5ELL
See Mark Curtis, Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam (London: Serpent’s Tail Ltd., 2010).
The UK has an election on November 12. Watch it anxiously.
Whatever the polls show right now, there is a serious chance of a Corbyn government. If that happens it means that the UK will be in the grip of an anti-Semitic clique of Trotskyite terrorist sympathizers. The agenda will include leaving Nato, disarming, recognizing Hamas as the legitimate ruler of the territory of present day Israel, wholesale state takeovers of businesses and property confiscations, punitive taxation, and the breakup of the United Kingdom. It will be the economics of Venezuela, the politics of the Soviet Union, and the hatred of Jews of the Nazi Party.
Continued toleration and encouragement of the kind of anti-Semitic abuse that has come to dominate the party at a local level.
What is happening in the UK is the same as happened in Germany in the late twenties and early thirties or in the Soviet Union in the thirties. You have a bunch of deranged fanatics targeting a particular group over and over again with abuse and threats. You have the majority members of the Labour Party passively going along with it, while wringing their hands, but still campaigning for Corbyn. And the rest of the population simply says, well, its not us is it, nothing to do with us.
Until it is something to do with us.
Or, when it finally starts to happen, it may be that the British will wake up and say no. Either way its going to get very, very ugly.
Just under 50% of British Jews say they are actively preparing to leave the country if Corbyn comes to power. Its appalling. But we should also congratulate them on their realism. Its the only sensible thing to do. And not just for them.
December 12 of course. Sorry!
The comments here seem to think that a Tory Party flirting with the green obsession is the worst thing us Brits face. They ignore the Big Watermelon in the room, the Labour Party, determined to ruin the economy to pay for a massive green movement. They seem to think Farage and the Brexit Party can stop that. Just the opposite, Nigel is working hard to make it a reality.
The green obsession will hurt rural areas and businesses in rural areas and destroy a way of life, this is not about conning a section of society for there vote and it will go away, there forward planning laws,infrastructure and environmental laws are either on the statutory book or waiting in the wings, the climate/green agenda is a cross party conspiracy without any mandate from the people,they the politicians have circumnavigated democratic decisions through the electoral mandate of the people.
In many ways I don’t disagree but the people do give the different parties a mandate to go green – they don’t complain. They lap up the BBC output. Only the cost and hardship of cutting CO2 futher can undo this obsession and we’re not there yet. The Brexit Party don’t yet have a single MP and threatening the Tories would have made those in a Labour stronghold think twice before endorsing TBP with a vote.
Well, now at least the gloves are off. Anyone that votes Tory in this election will be showing themselves to be supporters of Extinction Rebellion and their extremism. As far as I’m concerned at least, they will have made themselves into traitors to our human civilization. And that can never be forgiven.
Hopefully Farage will pick up his cudgels and go full-on anti-green, which is what I and others have been suggesting he should do. It won’t win an election, but it can provide the nucleus for a major backlash against the establishment when the time comes.
You’re missing the point (as are the two commenters above).
Britain is facing an election on Dec 12 in which one of the two main parties is, institutionally and at a constituency and membership level, openly anti-Semitic, and the country is sleep walking into it.
Open to the point that it is under investigation by the Equalities Commission, joining one of the tiny neo-Fascist parties as the second political party ever to be investigated for this.
Open to the point that British Jews are making serious plans to leave the country if Corbyn is elected.
Open to the point that its leader associates with the most extreme elements in Islamic terrorist circles. No, he did not endorse IS. But he’s associated with others who were as extreme but less successful. He attended a ceremony in Algeria at which Black September were honoured. His explanation: he was present but not involved.
This is the point. Britain is unique in the West in this respect. The British look back on the Germany experience of the 1930s as if it has no bearing on their situation, and mainstream politicians, particularly the Labour moderates, go along with it, and are campaigning for Corbyn. Britain is replaying it.
Climate is trivial by comparison. It starts with the Jews, but it never ends with them. They are simply the first target. If Corbyn gets in, Britain will be ruled by a gang of anti-Semitic terrorist sympathizers. Be afraid. The implications don’t end with the Jews.
They certainly do not- if Corbyn gets in and he and his band of lunatics and terrorists will do all they can to make sure it will be the last free, democratic election we ever have. You have Abbott saying Mao did more good than harm, they favour Hamas and North Korea- be afraid? Be bloody petrified!
I think that XR’s idea of a Citizen’s Assembly is a cunning trick to avoid the need to do tedious stuff like having a sane manifesto, finding credible candidates, standing for parliament and winning enough seats to actually achieve change via our established democratic process.
Er, and by the way to avoid being seen to be guilty of:
Subversion – “the act of trying to destroy or damage an established system or government”
XR are just a bunch of thinly veiled Marxists, using the fiction of a ‘climate emergency’ to achieve a socialist revolution instead of Marx’s similarly fictional ‘class war’ theme.
Any government that cannot see through this trick deserves to be given the ‘Order of the Boot”, as Churchill called it.
As the British-born UK citizen I am deeply ashamed at the parlous state of UK politics, and gobsmacked by the lack of any capacity for objective political analysis by the parliament. Except for Nigel Farage, of course.
The Bolshevik “Soviets” are exactly the same thing as citizens assemblies. Soviet means council in Russian. Soviets were established in every organisational structure – factories, hospitals, government departments, service providers, police, etc. XR are following the Bolshevik model to the letter.
“The Bolshevik “Soviets” are exactly the same thing as citizens assemblies.”
No, because members of soviets were 1) elected rather than chosen at random and 2) communists—no other political parties were allowed.
Google “Citizens assemblies” for links to what they are really like, or click:
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=citizens+assemblies&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
Citizens assemblies will be publics that will finally give a fair hearing to the skeptical side of the climate change story. I hope Monckton is warming up his vocal chords. ER has shot itself in the foot. These councils embody the common sense and common decency of the community, far more than do covens of careeristic professional party politicians beholden to or terrified of special interest groups and the media.
Where’s my effing invitation then?
Having spent the last ten years or so examining claims about climate change from both sides, I can confidently conclude that a Warmer planet is, without a doubt, much better than a Colder planet!
Only 110 will be chosen. If you seriously think that those 110 will be representative of the 30,000 invitations that are to sent out (and I would like to know just how “random” those invitations will be anyway!) then, as the saying goes, I have a bridge you may be interested in!
If you think any of the 110 will be anything but members of the Green Party, I have a bridge to sell you.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the 30,000 invitees came from the list of Green Party contributors.
So the difference is, the Soviets elected people from withing their party, whereas the ‘assembly’ will be chosen. Only a group like the XR could make the Soviets look democratic.
It’s being organised by John Selwyn Gummer AKA Lord Deben.
A notoriously corrupt Tory who has had his trotter in the Green trough for years.
It will not be an honest discussion.
When Corbyn talks of Green and the poor you know he is genuine about not hurting the poor. He is genuinely Socialist. Johnson is not genuine about anything. Chaos abounds where the clown blunders and the leeches are ready to suck up the bloody remains of the UK.
No bloodsucker worse than Deben.
Corbyn might be genuine about not hurting the poor but in the same way priests saved children by beating them to death. Saving them from themselves.
In the 1930s Germany made concessions to Hit1er in order to “placate” him. And we know what that led to.
For the second time I have been blocked from commenting on extinction rebellion’s Facebook page, obviously heretics are to be banned.
This is old stuff from 3 weeks ago.
Eric Worrall writes, “you bring together people from across the united kingdom so it represents people in terms of their age, in terms of their social status, in terms of their wealth, you get a cross section of people, you explain to them, you educate, and then you ask their opinion of how to move forward. Its what the Irish did in terms of their abortion question, which was very controversial…”
I don’t think so. Here’s the exchange between Sarah Lennon & Farrage:
Farage: Who? Who brings them together?
Sarah: Well there are a number of people who are already running citizen’s assemblies, there are external bodies, [she means, I think, that in other countries there are such organizations already in existence—RK] you ask a body of people to set up the citizens assembly, you bring together people from across the united kingdom so it represents people in terms of their age, in terms of their social status, in terms of their wealth, you get a cross section of people, you explain to them, you educate, and then you ask their opinion of how to move forward. Its what the Irish did in terms of their abortion question, which was very controversial…
Farage: And then what do you do, do you put this to a referendum?
[This is what was done in Ireland.—RK]
Sarah: You implement it through government. You have to keep the structures of the state in place…
[This is another alternative—there is no referendum, but the advice is not binding on the government.—RK]
Farage: An appointed citizen’s assembly would tell government what to do?
Sarah: They would lead and advise government, and it then becomes very difficult for government to say we are not going to do this, because it has been requested by the people, by representatives of the people.
[Nothing wrong with that.Provided no funny business goes on in the decision-making process. There’s been a lot of writing on this topic over at least the past ten years. WUWTers need to get up to speed. Check out Wikipedia on Citizens Assemblies at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_assembly. Or browse through the 46,000 papers on the topic at academia.edu, at https://www.academia.edu/people/search?utf8=✓&q=citizens+assemblies—RK%5D
” … you explain to them, you educate ”
This would seem to be the problem with Sarah’s conception of a citizens’ assembly. Bet any money she and her confreres consider any degree of scepticism an indication of uneducatabilty. I find it a bore just to hear out the Green idiots in the local garden club once a month. Basically, if you do not believe ‘all chemicals’ are ‘bad’ by definition, you are an ‘outsider’ in a mostly woman’s group. There is a considerable literature on how women deal with outsiders, and it is not pretty.
“Bet any money she [Sarah] and her confreres consider any degree of scepticism an indication of uneducatabilty. ”
Sure, but they wouldn’t have veto power over the membership.
“There is a considerable literature on how women deal with outsiders, and it is not pretty.”
It wouldn’t matter much if, as I propose, gatherings occur over the Internet.
Brexit is against the wish of the majority in Scotland. Leave was not an overwhelming vote. In fact under the younger voters overall there was an overwhelming vote for remain.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-45098550
Scotland is not in the EU.
Scotland is as part of the UK as of 1973.
Correct. The UK is in the EU. And the UK’s decision counts.
Scotland’s decision, London’s decision, Luton’s decision, or the decision of 52 Festive Road has no right to over-rule the member’s decision.
The member is the UK.
Hans Erren: Scotland is not a separate country. It is part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Membership of the EU is a matter for the entire nation, collectively. A democratic vote was held and a vote in favour of leaving was returned by majority 52:48. Regions don’t get an opt-out or veto.
As for the “young voter” argument, its pathetic. I was too young to vote in the original referendum to join the Common Market in the 1970’s. Since then successive governments have extended membership to the EU, to join the ERM, to join a Customs Union etc all of which has been done without any mandate from the people.
I have been denied for 40 years (my entire adult life) from having my say on our EU membership, but now you say that finally after I get to vote on the matter, after just a couple of years my vote is meaningless and that young people who were 16 in 2016 should be given a veto? What wisdom have 16 year olds suddenly acquired in the last 2 years that negates my experience of the EU over the last 40 years as an adult? My future based on a choice I would have made was stolen from me for 40 years by not allowing a vote on the huge decisions taken by government over that period with respect to ever deeper EU integration, decisions that had no mandate from the voters.
+1 Kids have been as easy a target for the Brexit catastrophists as they are for warmists. The alarmist claim the other day was that Brexit would cause a loss of £70 billion over 10 years… in growth. Looking at the chart it was obvious that we’d still grow under the scary headline just not as much as the concocted figure they came up with for remaining in the EU. Kids think we’d become a 3rd World basket case… ironic when kids also support Labour.
Yes. The same Scots who want ‘independence’ also want to suck on the EU’s teats.
Britain would be in a much better position today if the English had been allowed to vote in the Scottish Independence referendum, because they would have voted to kick Scotland out.
Hans, Scotland is part of the UK. It doesn’t get to veto what the UK decides. The UK decided via referendum to exit the EU. As long as Scotland is part of the UK, they have to abide by the decisions of the UK government, same as any other part of the UK. like it or not.
Oops. My lead-in quote from Eric Worrall wasn’t the one I meant to use, which was actually:
“According to Extinction Rebellion’s Sarah Lunnon, representative democracy, at least on climate policy and economic management, should be subordinated to citizens assemblies composed of people who are already running citizens assemblies, and people nominated by organisations invited to participate.”
She didn’t mean that, I don’t think. She meant that in other countries, or perhaps in a few British cities, there are people already running and participating in such bodies—not that the membership of the climate change assembly she wants has already been chosen.
Note: There are 206 books on Amazon on Citizens Assemblies, at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=citizen+assemblies&i=stripbooks&ref=nb_sb_noss
Another term to look for is Deliberative Democracy—376 titles at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Deliberative+Democracy&i=stripbooks&ref=nb_sb_noss_2
Yes, Sarah’s statement was a bit ambiguous, which is why I said “if I have understood this correctly…”. Either way she is describing a pretty murky process for choosing people whom Sarah expects to be more sympathetic to Extinction Rebellion’s goals than politicians chosen by the people.
Citizens Assembly, is that a Soviet Union?
Nothing novel about this. Every time the Government wants to avoid controversy, they set up appointed arms length bodies to ‘produce reports’. They then quote those bodies to say ‘it wasn’t me, guv, honest!’ Every public enquiry is like this. Child sexual abuse, Grenfell fire, you name it, they want some unelected figure ‘guiding them’.
Politicians are just glorified PR Executives nowadays. The thought that any of them might actually develop and guide policy is for the birds.
What the hell is the British government doing! Time for me to move!
Can anybody help greta, she needs a lift back to spain.. she used her fossil fuel made mobile phone to ask this on Twitter…
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/03/greta-thunberg-asks-for-lift-back-across-atlantic-as-climate-meeting-shifts-to-madrid
HA! Funny. Start walking, you can make Alaska in a few months and get a boat there, then walk again. Good luck!
It’s the good old Paris Commune all over again. And look what happened to them.
The unasked question here is: – Who decides which people serve on these citizen assemblies? Some hidden elitist cabal would do that and woe betide anyone who was considered persona non grata.
Your voting rights would be totally subject to the current consensus opinion.
In fact what is proposed by this ER organisation is what is happening in the climate debate.
If you happen to query what is going on you get classified as a Denier and thus subjected to all manner of disciplinary measures.
Escalate that into the general political system and you wind up with either a Nazi or a Communist situation. This is what Extinction Rebellion is proposing. All piggybacked on the now consensus fears and hysterias over a changing Climate.
“Who decides which people serve on these citizen assemblies? Some hidden elitist cabal would do that and woe betide anyone who was considered persona non grata.”
It’s all being done by computerized formula in France, and as it has been done in selecting members in other, lesser-known, Citizens Assemblies. Potential members are not questioned about their beliefs and positions—that’s a no-no.
France is setting up a Citizens Assembly on climate already—it voted to do so a couple of months ago. The UK is just following along. Here are links to some threads about them on the Equality By Lot site:
“The French Citizen Convention on the Climate”
[Lots of info on the mechanics, which the UK will probably follow.]
https://equalitybylot.com/2019/09/12/the-french-citizen-convention-on-the-climate/
“Sortition in France – discussion and application”
https://equalitybylot.com/2019/09/20/sortition-in-france-discussion-and-application/
“Minipublics beyond representation”
https://equalitybylot.com/2019/10/08/minipublics-beyond-representation/
‘More on the French Citizen Convention on the Climate”:
https://equalitybylot.com/2019/10/18/more-on-the-french-citizen-convention-on-the-climate/
BTW, here is criticism of Extinction Rebellion and sortition, by Michael Cook:
Cook: “Sortition is an element in a war on civilization”
https://equalitybylot.com/2019/10/11/cook-sortition-is-a-element-in-a-war-on-civilization/
Keep scrolling down the Blog’s home page for snippets of and links to other recent threads (often reprints) on the topic and recent developments in it.
I’ve been very interested in sortition for over 50 years, but never mentioned it here, fearing I’d jinx it. I.e., fearing that the PR specialists who advise the warmist movement would recognize that these citizen assemblies would give a public platform to climate skeptics and thus enable a public debate on the matter—something that they have strenuously advised warmists to avoid. This is a fantastic opportunity for our side to finally get a “public” hearing. Let’s just hope we get more than just an opportunity to get a word in edgewise.
Oops—I’ve just checked out the first Equality By Lot thread I listed above, “The French Citizen Convention on the Climate” at https://equalitybylot.com/2019/09/12/the-french-citizen-convention-on-the-climate/ It states:
The allotment of 150 Frenchpeople who will take part in the Citizen Convention on the Climate has begun on Monday, August 26th and will last until the end of September, before meeting for the first time at the beginning of October. This citizen convention, aimed by Emmanuel Macron as one of the responses to the grand debate that followed the “Gilets Jaunes” crisis, will propose measures to combat global warming, as France is far from meeting its obligations.”
Oops—That implies that skeptics will not have a voice—that the science is settled. Maybe the elite in France can get away with that, but I doubt that the organizers in the UK will be able to. If the attempt is made, I trust Farage, Monckton, and others will say that the CA is illegitimate.
“Telephone numbers are going to be automatically generated – 85% mobile numbers and 15% landline numbers – and about 25,000 people will be called, in order to select 150.”
So all of the final 150 must volunteer to serve.
Six three-day weekend of work are planned, with a final day at the end of January 2020. “The 150 citizens will receive compensation based on the jury-member model [86 Euros per day and reimbursement of loss of income]. The cost of transportation, lodging and meals will also be reimbursed, as well as the cost of child care”
So everyone will have to travel to Paris six times. This, plus the volunteering requirement, will bias representation toward highly motivated activists.
Some criteria have been set in order to get the best representation: 52% women and 48% men, 6 age groups (starting at age 16), levels of educational attainment, a diversity of professions. Regional population will also be taken into account with 4 oversea representatives, as well as representation of urban centers, their surrounding areas and the rural areas.
This is known as stratified sampling. OK by me.
In the US, the House of Representatives and the Senate are citizen assemblies, and we have them in each state, called state legislatures. The last thing we need is more government, especially unelected government.
The only exception I would make would be for temporary assemblies that addressed a specific, single issue for the purpose of implementing a Constitutional Amendment that a bureaucratically-heavy government refused to address, like a balanced budget amendment or term limitations. Addressing a major overhaul of the country for any reason is far too nebulous for such an assembly.
jtom says: “In the US, the House of Representatives and the Senate are citizen assemblies, and we have them in each state, called state legislatures.”
Elected professional (careeristic) party-politicians lack the quality of mere citizens, and mostly in a bad way.
“The last thing we need is more government, especially unelected government.”
Under Mencken’s version of sortition (and mine), existing legislatures would not merely be supplanted, but replaced. (My version is at https://www.academia.edu/38701375/Demarchy_small_sample_electorates_electing_officials )
“Addressing a major overhaul of the country for any reason is far too nebulous for such an assembly.”
We can start small, at lower levels of government, and/or with a Citizens Assembly having authority over only a small segment of public life—for instance, it might investigate politicians and public officials (say police departments) for malfeasance, and indict them if justified—or report them to prosecutors.
Here is the meat of Mencken’s “A Purge for Legislatures”:
———-
So I propose that our Legislatures be chosen as our juries are now chosen—that the names of all the men eligible in each assembly district be put into a hat (or, if no hat can be found that is large enough, into a bathtub), and that a blind moron, preferably of tender years, be delegated to draw out one. Let the constituted catchpolls then proceed swiftly to this man’s house, and take him before he can get away. Let him be brought into court forthwith, and put under bond to serve as elected, and if he cannot furnish the bond, let him be kept until the appointed day in the nearest jail.
The advantages that this system would offer are so vast and so obvious that I hesitate to venture into the banality of rehearsing them. It would in the first place, save the commonwealth the present excessive cost of elections, and make political campaigns unnecessary. It would in the second place, get rid of all the heart-burnings that now flow out of every contest at the polls, and block the reprisals and charges of fraud that now issue from the heart-burnings. It would, in the third place, fill all the State Legislatures with men of a peculiar and unprecedented cast of mind—men actually convinced that public service is a public burden, and not merely a private snap. And it would, in the fourth and most important place, completely dispose of the present degrading knee-bending and trading in votes, for nine-tenths of the legislators, having got into office unwillingly, would be eager only to finish their duties and go home, and even those who acquired a taste for the life would be unable to do anything to increase the probability, even by one chance in a million, of their reëlection.
The disadvantages of the plan are very few, and most of them, I believe, yield readily to analysis.
Do I hear argument that a miscellaneous gang of tin-roofers, delicatessen dealers and retired bookkeepers, chosen by hazard, would lack the vast knowledge of public affairs needed by makers of laws? Then I can only answer (a) that no such knowledge is actually necessary, and (b) that few, if any, of the existing legislators possess it. The great majority of public problems, indeed, are quite simple, and any man may be trusted to grasp their elements in ten days who may be—and is—trusted to unravel the obfuscations of two gangs of lawyers in the same time. In this department the so-called expertness of so-called experts is largely imaginary. My scheme would have the capital merit of barring them from the game. They would lose their present enormous advantages as a class, and so their class and so their class would tend to disappear.
Would that be a disservice to the state? Certainly not. On the contrary, it would be a service of the first magnitude, for the worst curse of democracy, as we suffer under it today, is that it makes public office a monopoly of a palpably inferior and ignoble group of men. They have to abase themselves in order to get it, and they have to keep on abasing themselves in order to hold it. The fact reflects itself in their general character, which is obviously low. They are men congenitally capable of cringing and dishonorable acts, else they would not have got into public life at all. There are, of course, exceptions to that rule among them, but how many? What I contend is simply that the number of such exceptions is bound to be smaller in the class of professional job-seekers than it is in any other class, or in the population in general.
What I contend, second, is that choosing legislators from that population, by chance, would reduce immensely the proportion of such slimy men in the halls of legislation, and that the effects would be instantly visible in a great improvement in the justice and reasonableness of the laws.
I later commented on EBL:
Here’s how to get the rejection rate way down, which is crucial to the acceptance of sortition: Let minipublics “gather” over the Internet, in a site accessible only to members and officials. Persons lacking a personal computer would be given one—or they would be given the use of one in a public building. Assemblies would occur in evenings and weekends. This would be much less inconvenient to initial contactees.
(I assume a personal computer’s full screen will be more useful for such Citizen Assembly deliberations than the restricted screen of a smartphone. (But in poor countries smartphones may have to be accepted.))
If there is felt to be a need to insulate proceedings from public view, or to protect members from being influenced by outsiders, a policeman or other official could visit members’ homes and ensure they were alone in a room while participating.
And: avoiding physical get-togethers ought to defuse the operation of “crowd psychology” to some extent. But it would also be wise, I suspect, for members to be assigned to subgroups-only chatrooms, to create fire-breaks against the entire group being swept away by some bit of heated rhetoric or ill-considered brainwave.
“Unfortunately the enemy that we’re looking at at the moment, we can’t see it.”
Really? I’ve heard countless times that you can look out your window and see climate change.
How do YOU spell communism?
Well, if that ain’t a smack upside the head! Who knew the XRs were really after political power??? Holee Molee!!
Those XR peeps generally inhabit London, right? And they’re on welfare, too? Never done a lick of work in their lives, probably never will, but they want everyone off of the use of carbon-based stuff.
Okay, well, my proposal is simple: round them up, tell them they are going to a wonderful place where there is no use of carbon-based anything, free ride with meals and all that, and drive them to the part of the UK where there is little to no population (I think that’s mostly northwest, along the Atlantic coast where it gets stormy, isn’t it?) and drop them off, tell them ‘Bye, now, have fun”, and drive away. I want to see just how long they’d survive, especially with winter coming on. Since they have no skills and probably buy all their food as ‘made in the shop’ stuff, I don’t think they’d last more than about an hour and a half before they’d start calling for help and getting no response on their electronic gadgets.
They aren’t about having a greener Earth, at all, never were. They’re about controlling everyone else. How is that different from Hitler’s Nazis and Stalin’s Commie goons???
Sara,
There’s an aspect of this you’ve missed. The green agenda is supposed to be about “sustainability.” When have the greens ever proved that the system they propose is actually sustainable? Have they ever founded a colony on (say) a remote Scottish island, and followed its progress for – I’ll be kind – one generation? 25 years? Is their vision of the world “sustainable?”