Direct Democracy; An Agenda for a New Model Party

Citation

(2005), "Direct Democracy; An Agenda for a New Model Party", European Business Review, Vol. 17 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2005.05417eab.006

Direct Democracy; An Agenda for a New Model Party

Direct Democracy; An Agenda for a New Model Party2005Various AuthorsReview DOI 10.1108/09555340510620410

The recent General Election highlighted the need to rethink the political system in a fundamental way. The Daily Telegraph was so impressed by this book that it serialised four extracts on four successive days. The book is written by 23 young politicians who, fresh from listening to people on the doorstep, feel strongly that an entirely new approach to political organisation is urgently needed. The recipe they offer has become known as the New Localism. A preponderance of the authors are Conservative and this is probably because of the present state of the Conservative Party, but the Telegraph in its editorial (6 June 05) wisely makes the point that: "We do not, as a newspaper, endorse all the proposals. But we warmly applaud the philosophy and spirit that infuse the programme and think it worthy of consideration by all political parties, not just the Conservative leadership contenders."

The first extract is headlined: "Parish Politics may be the key to success". It points out that the Conservative Party was in power during most of the twentieth century and showed little interest in diffusing power and is now "in no position to benefit from the rising resentment against government". It reminds one of the popular saying in America: whichever way you vote the government gets in. Socialists in the last century had an even more marked taste for centralisation. A wholly new approach is certainly required. Hospitals, schools and crime are among the themes covered in the book, but the reorganisation of the taxation system is perhaps the most important. The present method needs to be turned upside down: tax needs to be collected locally and mainly spent locally so that people see what they get for their money – no taxation without representation, and seen to be representation – and central government would have to keep on its toes to get its share of the cash from the localities. The range of changes discussed is too extensive to include them all here, but it is not so new. Professor Northcote Parkinson (of Parkinson's Law fame) expressed something like this view in the middle of the twentieth century. So did Leopold Kohr in his book mentioned earlier in this issue, The Breakdown of Nations, and John Papworth has written a book called Small is Powerful (obviously an adaptation from E.F Schumacher's famous Small is Beautiful), and has just finished writing another entitled Village Democracy (including local communities in cities within the meaning of term). Business people are also beginning to think along these lines. The CEO of Satchi and Satchi Worldwide recently said on a BBC radio programme that, whereas in the 1960s business leaders were thinking in terms of dozens of markets of millions, that was now reversing and they had to think of millions of markers of dozens. He referred to the industrialists, who were still stuck in the old mindset as dinosaurs.

The conclusion must be that, if the broad conclusions of this book are sound, then both politics and business should be moving in this new direction as rapidly as possible. Although a few people have been banging their drums on this issue for a number of decades, it is now an idea whose time has come.