Standing Constitutional Convention aka “People’s Assembly”

This is just a stub, a holding post, for something I promised to write.

Establishing a standing constitutional convention is THE PRIORITY OF OUR TIMES in a UK context if not wider globally. Everywhere from the urgency of anti-establishment, anti-global-capitalist, eco-sustainability SJW agendas, to issues of reform of day-to-day governance, we are led back to this missing piece of the UK jigsaw. With so much constitutional tradition and convention misunderstood and in danger of being thrown out with the anarchic revolutionary bathwater, we don’t so much need a (new) written constitution as a new vehicle for a continuous improvement process.

I first heard of the idea of a standing”Constitutional Convention” from xxxx back in 2015, but it stuck with me because it gave a name to something I had already been wrestling with for a couple of decades, about the direction of social evolution. Since the Brexit / Trump fiascos, every commentator seems to be gravitating to similar “people’s this / people’s that” ideas, including spokespeople for the so-called Extinction Rebellion movement. It’s so important long-term, that it could easily be set up along the wrong lines by those with specific narrower agendas than a better future for all. I fact, almost it’s most important feature is to be a self-bootstrapping process that is not limited by any one party’s values and aims.

I outlined what it should look like most recently in this Brexit-related post, and mentioned it in this series of three posts and related Twitter dialogue – on eco-sustainability – threads which continued beyond those tweets already captured in the blog.

I hesitated to follow-up on the promise immediately because Rupert Read voiced some (IMHO) dubious objectives of his own regarding a People’s Assembly and, wanting to keep the idea politically neutral, I didn’t want to start a  polarising political distraction in the proposal itself.

But – I am drafting the necessary proposal.

Ironically in the last Twitter exchanges with William Peltzer, we noted that the CA (CC / PA) idea was not only not new in recent 21st C times but, as described, it was fulfilling the originally intended role of the 2nd chamber check and balance on the direction of parliament. Ironic because one of the first “reforms” for the CA was to be the Lords itself. That kind of ironic and circular correlation is rarely entirely coincidental, even if causation is almost always infinitely more complex. I’ll be back.

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• Values it proceeds by. Education of why and how it works. Understanding the bootstrapping.
• Mechanisms for initial constitution and function. Agenda of currently foreseeable issues. Mechanisms for sustainable evolution.
• Discussion and reasoning “why” distinct from “what and how” mechanisms and requirements.