Good news! The military is intervening to sort out American democracy. DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency – a branch of the US Department of Defense. It has an annual budget of $3 billion and its mission statement is to “make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security”.

The fact that the agency is putting $10 million into the development of an unhackable voting system signifies some very real concerns over the risk of outside interference in the democratic process.

We’re more familiar with fears over ‘fake news’ and ‘dark money’ – but if someone really wanted to undermine trust in democracy, then they couldn’t do better (or, rather, worse) than to compromise the integrity of voting itself. Once that goes, everything else is called into question.

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Kim Zetter reports on the DARPA funded project for Motherboard:

“The first-of-its-kind system will be designed by an Oregon-based firm called Galois, a longtime government contractor with experience in designing secure and verifiable systems. The system will use fully open source voting software, instead of the closed, proprietary software currently used in the vast majority of voting machines, which no one outside of voting machine testing labs can examine. More importantly, it will be built on secure open source hardware, made from special secure designs and techniques developed over the last year as part of a special program at DARPA.”

In contrast to the pen-and-paper voting systems used in the UK, Americans use machines to cast, count and verify votes. That obviously speeds-up the whole process, but leaves it open to the risk of hacking and other forms of hi-tech fraud.

Then there’s the opacity of the system. In Britain, you can see ballot papers being counted by hand – the piles for each candidate accumulating on tables in a room full of observers from the different political parties. Rigging a system like that requires physical actions that leave physical evidence. But when the count takes place on a microchip, any fraud is invisible to the casual observer – and, just as important, so is the absence of fraud. This provides a context in which malicious actors can spread rumours about hidden algorithms and undetectable hacking. Unable to verify claims and counter-claims with their own eyes, the only thing the public can do is decide whose word to trust – not an ideal state of affairs in such a politically polarised nation.

Making the software that runs the voting machines open source – and therefore verifiable by as many different stakeholders as care to look into the matter – would, therefore, seem like a wise move.

It would help if the voting tech was generally reckoned to be tamper-proof in the first place. To this end, the DARPA project is focusing as much on the hardware (i.e. the voting and vote-counting machines) as it is on the software:

“…most hardware is gullible and has no way of distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. If an attacker’s exploit tells the machine to do something malicious, the hardware complies without making judgments about whether it should do this.”

The example given is of someone “slipping a malicious memory card” into a voting machine so that it recorded one vote multiple times – “as researchers have shown could be done with some voting systems”.

But while necessary, the emphasis on hardware is also disappointing because the real breakthrough would be a voting app so secure that it could allow elections to be conducted through one of DARPA’s earlier projects – the internet. We can access our bank accounts and make major purchases using our smartphones and laptops, so surely it should be possible to cast our votes in the same way.

In a few countries it already is. Estonia has had online voting since 2005 – and despite the constant threat to the country’s cyber security, the system appears to be robust. In large part, that’s because the Baltic republic has a sophisticated ID card system through which its citizens can easily prove who they are and access a wide range of public services. One could argue that a similar system would be a more productive investment in America’s security than building Trump’s wall.

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What would universal online voting do to democracy itself? For one thing, we could afford more of it (once the tech was up and running). For instance, it would be easier and cheaper to run recall elections to remove elected politicians who have let their constituents down. In the UK, the member of Parliament for Peterborough, Fiona Onasanya, was jailed this year after being found guilty of perverting the course of justice. Refusing to resign her seat, a recall procedure has been triggered: a by-election will be called if more than 10% of eligible voters in Peterborough sign a petition. Whether successful or not, the recall petition will cost around £500,000 to administer – with even more expense if there’s a by-election.

And that’s the cost of democracy in just one of 650 constituencies. The direct public cost of Theresa May’s snap election in 2017 was £140 million. Running the Brexit referendum cost about the same. In short, voting is expensive – and thus a practical constraint on direct democracy.

However, the reluctance of politicians to let us vote more often isn’t just about saving money. The argument that “if voting changed anything they’d abolish it” is not only cynical, it’s plainly wrong. Voting can and does change things, which is why the establishment holds as few public votes as it can get away with (and even tries to overturn results when we vote the ‘wrong’ way).

Internet voting would remove the cost barrier to direct democracy, which is the real reason why most governments aren’t rushing to make it happen.

Click here to read our series of answers to the question: how can we fix our democracy?

The burden of ministerial office is a heavy one – quite literally, because those red briefcases they carry around are lined with lead.

That might seem like overkill for a bit of paperwork, but the 19th century design intended that the ‘boxes’, as they’re referred to, should sink if lost overboard on an overseas visit. Any state secrets contained therein would thus be safely consigned to the depths.

The boxes, which cost the best part of a grand, are just as weighty today as they used to be. This might suggest that the documents they carry are of the utmost national importance. But while some of them are, others really aren’t.

A lot of them concern matters that central government shouldn’t be involved in at all – decisions of purely local significance and about relatively small sums of public money. There’s nothing wrong with looking after the pennies, of course – but it’s best to do it where you can see them being spent, which isn’t from a desk in Whitehall.

Nevertheless, choices that should be the business of people and places hundreds of miles away are made late into the night by Secretaries of State who have enough to worry about already.

*

The idea that power is over-centralised in this country is hardly an original one. It’s been a recurring theme of public debate for 20 years or more. These days everyone is a ‘localist’; no one claims to be a centralist. And yet the centralised micro-management of local matters continues day-in, day-out.

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David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ was supposed to put that right. And up to a point, it did. Through the groundbreaking City Deals programme – followed by the Growth Deals and Devolution Deals – more was done to decentralise power from London to England’s other cities than by all the other governments since the war put together.

It was an object lesson in good policy design. A named minister was put in charge and left in charge. He was supported by a small and dedicated team that was allowed to recruit from outside the civil service. And best of all, the process of decentralisation was itself decentralised. Instead of Whitehall unilaterally deciding on a one-size-fits-all, take-it-or-leave-it package of devolved powers for all the cities, each city was allowed to negotiate its own bespoke deal.

By 2017 metropolitan areas across the nation had their own elected ‘metro mayors’ and combined authorities capable of directing millions, even billions, of pounds of investment. It went down well in the cities themselves, especially in the North of England which really took to the idea of the ‘Northern Powerhouse’.

So what did Theresa May do with this legacy when she became Prime Minister? She dropped the ball, of course. Despite promising “an economy that works for everyone” she forgot that means empowering every part of the country to take back control of its own economic development.

And, no, Brexit is not an excuse. People did not vote to repatriate power from Brussels only for it to get stuck in London.

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By Giles Fraser

A key moment came last year, when the introduction of a substantially revised railway timetable was botched so badly that services were disrupted for weeks. The North of England was one of the worst affected areas. Transport for the North – an agency formed to give Northerners as much control over transport as Transport for London gives to Londoners – should have led the response. Yet the fiasco demonstrated that the strategic decisions were still being made in London – ultimately by Chris Grayling’s Department for Transport.

And that’s the trouble with managing decentralisation from Whitehall. No matter how well designed the deal-making process, it ultimately depends on the continued approval and, even worse, the continued attention of a tiny circle of decision-makers in Downing Street.

*

It’s time to rethink localism. The real question isn’t ‘can local communities be trusted with more power?’ but ‘can central government be trusted to decentralise it?’ As the answer to that is obviously ‘no’ – here’s my modest proposal:

Instead of seeing what further powers might be prized from the grip of Whitehall and Westminster, let’s start from the position that our cities and shires should run absolutely everything. Yes, everything. So, no national taxes, only local taxes. No NHS, but Local Health Services. There’d be local security services too and local armies, local navies (in coastal counties anyway) and local nuclear deterrents (councils with ‘nuclear-free zones’ would have the option of unilaterally disarming themselves).

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Have I gone completely mad? Quite possibly, but the point I’m making is than in allocating powers between different levels of government the burden of proof should be reversed: it should be for central government to convince local communities that it is best placed to take the lead on a particular issue – not the other way round. For instance, I dare say that most areas of the country would be willing to surrender their nukes to the Ministry of Defence (though Yorkshire and Essex may have other ideas). They probably wouldn’t want the bother of running their own currencies either – apart from Brighton-and-Hove, of course, where they could experiment with making pebbles legal tender.

Nevertheless, with all of the money and power, the cities and shires would be free to pool their resources in other ways. They could form local partnerships with one another and empower regional agencies. Or they could they could get really creative and do things like revive the Council of the North or set-up an English Parliament.

*

With new power structures emerging from the bottom-up, central government would do only what couldn’t be done more locally. It would therefore be much smaller than it is now. Grover Norquist, an advocate of low taxes in the US, said: “I don’t want to abolish government, I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Well, one doesn’t have to go that far. This is all about sharing-out, not shrinking, the state.

Still, taking an axe to Whitehall would be fun. Entire departments would be abolished and amalgamated. For instance, with different parts of the country sorting out their own local infrastructure investments, you’d only need Whitehall to do the national stuff – which, once we’d slaughtered white elephants like HS2, Heathrow expansion and nuclear new build, wouldn’t be much. We could could join-up transport, energy, communications, water and housing into a single department instead of the five we’ve got doing the job now.

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With fewer government departments doing fewer things we’d need fewer ministers and fewer MPs. In 2010, David Cameron promised to reduce the number of MPs from 650 to 600. It was a modest cut, but so far the Commons has wriggled out of it. Well, they’ve had their chance. After the shambles they’ve made of Brexit, radical surgery is required. America, a federal nation of 325 million people, has a lower house of 435 members. So, on a pro rata basis, a federalised UK would need 87 MPs. And seeing how the world’s most powerful nation gets by with just 100 Senators, we could cut down the House of Lords from 781 to, er, 20.

*

How much mischief could 107 Parliamentarians get up to? Quite a lot, actually, so we’d also need local government to write us a new constitution. The status quo, in which Parliament assumes that it has a monopoly on power – to be localised only at its discretion – cannot be allowed to stand. We need to look at the example of countries like Germany, Switzerland and the USA, whose written constitutions spell out that power resides at different levels of government, not just at the centre.

Unfortunately, we have to start from where we are. For radical localisation to happen, Parliament has to agree to it. So, on the principle that turkeys don’t vote for Christmas, what hope can there be of change?

None at all – unless, of course, we stop voting for turkeys.

Click here to read our series of answers to the question: how can we fix our democracy?

In the wake of Brexit, something amazing happens. There is a rebirth, a renewal. It’s just one that no one predicts.

Today, Britain is battered and divided – practically the only thing everyone agrees on is that the political process is broken. The facts about what Brexit is and what it means have been jumbled and misunderstood. Amid screams of ‘U-turn’! and ‘traitor!’, politicians have become locked into positions they can’t diverge from, and meaningful debate across the divide has barely happened.

Months and years have been wasted mired in rancorous political grandstanding, while ‘compromise’ and ‘consensus’ have become dirty words instead of moral imperatives. And worse than division is the fact that our democracy has failed to produce clear decisions, over and over again. The majority of the electorate – including Remain and Leave voters – have been left feeling that their voices are not valued; that democracy isn’t working.

It’s time to rip up our no-longer-fit-for-purpose analogue system. It’s time for democracy to go digital, taking political debate and decision-making beyond the halls of Westminster, directly into the homes of citizens.

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Fast-forward to a post-Brexit Britain. A new generation of MPs has been elected who have captured the public’s rage with a call for radical change. They want to transform not only what Government does, but what Government actually is.

The new politicians are spread across parties, and some sit as independents. Each of them sees that democratic renewal will be necessarily woven around the technologies that have already changed so many parts of people’s lives. Collectively, these politicians become known as the Digital Democrats.

Once in Parliament, they start to change how politics works. The first target for reform is facts. The truth had become too cherry-picked, too politicised by different sides. So our Digital Democrats turn to Wikipedia. For each of the big new questions populating the post-Brexit landscape, they create Wikipedia timelines.

On each issue, relevant articles and facts are posted. Naturally a debate rages about what people think is true or not. But now that debate occurs within a common space with common rules around sourcing and validation: some facts are flagged as being agreed on by all sides, others as contested  – but all are visible to any citizen.

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Next, the Digital Democrats turn to how political debate actually happens. Politics, they argue, has always been about finding compromise and consensus as well as recognising political difference and competing interests. Some reformers had argued that citizens’ assemblies were the answer, but the Digital Democrats saw those as part of the old analogue system. Rather than picking citizen representatives in specific locations, they want to engage the citizenry as a whole. To do so they build a new online space, one that looks nothing like Facebook or Twitter, and they call it The Forum.

The Forum is universal – activists, lawyers, lobbyists, civic society, public affairs consultants, charities and interested members of the public, anyone at all with a stake in the big political questions, can participate. On a huge screen in Parliament, the politicians and the public watch as thousands of people appear on a massive map, logging in and contributing their thoughts on the questions posed.

Some people think the idea crazy, but the Digital Democrats persevere. Could they harness the internet for productive engagement, rather than facilitating abuse towards politicians, offensive memes or retweet-chasing calls to the already converted? Could they use it to find, even create, consensus?

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Within The Forum, each political question has a different strand. One is on the principles underpinning a new British foreign policy. Another on how new tech should be regulated. Still another on trade.

Participation works like this: you join The Forum, click through to each strand, and answer draft statements with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’. And as more people engage, artificial intelligence works to understand the contours of the debate. Who has similar positions? What are the dividing lines? The Forum maps the debate, drawing people who generally agree into the same group. It shows how many islands of opinion there are, how big each one is, and how far apart the groups are from each other.

The beauty of The Forum is that it’s built around a value or vision completely different from those online platforms that had erupted with divisive activity for or against Brexit. The Forum gamifies consensus. The algorithms underpinning it have no time for retweets and reposts and engagement. Their function is to make most visible only those statements with which substantial numbers of people in different groups agree, not simply those supported by one echo chamber or another. On this platform, grandstanding and polarisation are invisible.

Over time, the Digital Democrats find that The Forum forces people to listen to the considered views of others in different groups and, beyond that, encourages people to think about views they hold that people in different groups might also agree with. Within debates, ‘consensus’ statements begin to bubble up that everyone, to their surprise, feels they can get behind.

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By far the most radical – and controversial – part of the Digital Democrats’ agenda, however, is how they link all this to political decisions. This digital mobilisation is meaningless, they realise, if it doesn’t make a difference; they need to link it to political outcomes.

So they form cross-party groups, and begin to weave the consensus statements produced by The Forum into law or policy. The politicians begin to see The Forum as having agenda-setting power in its own right; something with the capacity not only to vote on issues put to it, but to help decide what the issues themselves are. A bottom-up model which puts the citizenry in the driving seat.

Digital democracy isn’t a magic bullet. After Brexit, society is still unequal, with wealth concentrated increasingly into the big cities. Vastly different attitudes to technology also open up – younger, richer, urban early-adopters are more likely to see upsides, others the downsides. The poorest, most vulnerable, most voiceless groups are also those least likely to join The Forum or be active on it. And the Digital Democrats recognise that their initiative is struggling to reach the people who feel furthest away from politics in the first place.

But maybe despite these challenges, the Digital Democrats are making people more optimistic about politics. People may hold different views, but The Forum begins to show what they also have in common, rather than magnifying what divides them.

The Forum doesn’t mark the end of Britain’s political troubles. But it does, where it exists, find consensus faster, enabling laws to be rolled out more quickly. And it evolves continuously as the tech becomes ever more sophisticated. It shows that democracy is a living idea, not a set of static institutions, but a political system to be renewed and refreshed. And, perhaps most importantly, it puts decision-making in the hands of the people.

Click here to read our series of answers to the question: how can we fix our democracy?

It is time to put our diseased and decaying political parties out of their misery before they do any more damage to our fragile politics. But this isn’t one of those articles arguing for a new set of parties (one which happens to agree with me on everything, and another full of all my favourite bad guys). We should abolish political parties altogether. They do far more harm than good.

You’ve probably heard the Aaron Sorkin line from the West Wing, urging people to vote: “Decisions are made by those who show up.” Well, in a party political system, especially one like ours, decisions are actually made by those who take sides. And – as I’ve written here before – the act of taking sides is proven to destroy your ability to think rationally about other people and their ideas.

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We have made our political parties increasingly democratic for those who choose to join them. The party I used to work for, the Liberal Democrats, has always been obsessively democratic, offering members the vote on everything from party policy to the members of party administration committees.

The Conservatives now offer the members a vote on the leader, which they never used to. And Labour has continued a shift towards party democracy started by Ed Miliband, who changed the voting system to give members the final say in choosing the leader. The party now tries, at least, to take seriously the party’s official policies, which their last successful leader Tony Blair never did.

Of course all this makes the parties feel terribly smug and happy with themselves. It validates the status and identity of those who have chosen to join these exclusive clubs: it tells them they are special. Internal democracy helps parties hold together. The problem is that it tears a country to pieces.

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Corbyn is the consequence of Labour’s journey into true democracy: creating a culture of intolerance towards all those with different opinions. When Theresa May is finally dragged out of 10 Downing Street, the country won’t get to choose the next Prime Minister: it will be up to about 100,000 people who chose to be members of the Conservative party. The next PM will be someone who can pander to a single partisan group, instead of someone who can bring a divided country back together.

At every step in Brexit, the PM has asked herself: how do I keep the Conservative party together? It’s common currency to say that getting a deal through ‘with Labour votes’ would be the death of her. And ‘Labour votes’ is said with the tone of voice you would use to say ‘the blood of slave children’. It’s considered beyond the pale to cooperate with elected representatives of the people, simply because they wear a different colour rosette once a year. What total insanity.

So I’m done with partisan thinking. Time to scrap these toxic parties that make us all go crazy with conspiracy thinking and assumptions that the other guys are always wrong.

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Of course, we will need something in their place. I’m calling them political movements. They would be simpler, single issue-based organisations that endorsed and funded candidates who agreed with them. Anyone could stand for Parliament, on their own if they chose. But each candidate would be free to seek the endorsement of as many political movements as they wanted – greens, feminists, defenders of the local hospital, pro-nuclear activists, anti-pornography campaigners – giving a far more accurate representation of who they were and what they stood for than a party logo can.

And citizens would be able to join as many political movements as they wanted, instead of being forced to pick a side.

At the moment there is only one political party that permits you to be a member of another political party. It’s the Women’s Equality Party – deliberately styled as cross-party. They offer a political home for women and men who believe gender equality is the most important issue in politics. But they also recognise that equality for women is not the sum total of politics: that it is possible to be a feminist on the Right as well as on the Left. They’re open to feminists of every stripe and you don’t get thrown out for voting differently if you choose to.

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Contrast the Cooperative Party, which lets you join the Labour Party, but no others. Daft and self defeating. There are believers in the cooperative movement in all our political traditions. The Cooperative Party would have real impact in our politics if it endorsed cooperative-lovers in all the parties, instead of pretending cooperativism is exclusive to the Left.

Imagine if the Green Party had instead been the Green Movement, backing and endorsing candidates from across the political spectrum who understood the urgent importance of climate change. Instead of one MP, with little power or influence, they would have a strong relationship with hundreds of MPs.

Instead of diluting the green message with hundreds of other policies that have nothing to do with the environment, they’d be a crusading force to protect the planet. Environmentalists could have chosen a winning candidate who came with a Green guarantee, instead of wasting their vote on a minority party that couldn’t win. Progress would have been faster.

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By Polly Mackenzie

A parliament elected in this way would need to choose its own Prime Minister: someone who could command the confidence of the House. Instead of just taking a party “whip” on every topic, MPs would be able to gather and decide the approach on different topics with those elected with the backing of the relevant political movement. To win their confidence a Prime Minister would need a programme for government and a Cabinet that brought together a wide range of groups, offering them progress on each movement’s policy priorities. Much better to have this kind of negotiation and debate out in the open, than in the secret rooms where party manifestos are written.

Perhaps this sounds confusing. But informal groupings exist in Parliament already, it’s just that they are only understood by the Westminster watchers. Citizens get little information about what their candidate stands for, just a basic brand of red or blue: under my system it would be crystal clear what kind of candidate you were voting for. And honesty is what we need more of in politics.

Yes, democracy is wonderful. But democracy inside parties privileges the partisans, and is torturing the parties themselves to death. It’s too late. We need a new system that celebrates complexity, cooperation and communication. The party’s over.

Click here to read our series of answers to the question: how can we fix our democracy?

The problem is easy to state, but tricky to solve. Turnout in elections and referendums is often so low that the legitimacy of the result becomes open to question. When the United Kingdom voted three years ago to leave the European Union, Brexit was backed by 52% of those who voted – but just 37% of the total electorate. Should a major constitutional change be waved through without the explicit approval of almost two thirds of us?

Now consider the last general election to have produced a majority government. In 2015, David Cameron’s Conservatives secured an overall majority of 12 with the support of 37% of all voters – and just 25% of all electors. A combination of low turnout and our first-past-the-post system for electing MPs meant that three quarters of us were ruled by a party for which we had not voted.

The arguments about our voting system are discussed elsewhere in this series. So my concern here is the issue of turnout. How can we persuade more people to vote, and therefore to imbue the result of any electoral contest with greater legitimacy?

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The most obvious answer is to make voting compulsory. Just as jury service is an obligation that we have as citizens if we are summoned to do it, so voting in elections and referendums could be considered a similar compulsion. This is the case in about 20 countries – the precise number depends upon how one classifies countries where compulsion in theory is seldom enforced in practice.

The case for compulsion is clear. It is not just that turnout would rise sharply, though it would. Going by the experiences of countries that have already introduced compulsory voting, it would rise from less than 70% in each of the last five UK general elections, up to something like 85-90%. (It is never 100 per cent: the electoral register is not perfect; electors die, fall ill, face family crises, are stranded away from home, or have some other legitimate reason for not voting; and some people are happy to risk the modest fine that might, or might not, be levied on non-voters.)

There is, though, more to the case for voting compulsion in Britain. Parties these days are more anxious to be generous to older folk such as myself – because we vote – than to young adults, because they are more likely to abstain. Poorer families living in bad housing with lousy local schools would get more attention and public money if they voted in similar numbers to comfortable middle-class home-owners.

More generally, a higher turnout would incentivise parties to campaign with more integrity. Elections today are largely cynical, mechanical exercises in mobilising each party’s base – aimed at firing voters up to make sure they vote rather than discussions on the country’s future in any meaningful sense of the word. If millions more people were certain to vote but were not sure how to go forward, the pressure on parties would be to devote their energies more to political conversion, which would require at least some element of proper, authentic, debate.

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Against all this there exists one powerful argument that cannot be ignored. We live in a free country, and many would argue that the freedom not to vote should command as much respect as any other freedom does. True, people in compulsory-voting countries can spoil their ballot paper: the law dictates that they turn up to vote, not that they mark their ballot paper in an approved way (or, indeed, at all). But if someone wants to stay at home rather than trek to a polling station, should they not have the freedom to do so without breaking the law and incurring a fine?

All of which leads me to my proposal to square this particular circle – to secure the benefits of compulsory voting but without the compulsion. I propose inverting the financial incentive inherent in compulsory-voting countries. Instead of fining people for not voting, provide them with a cash incentive to play an active part in their democracy. The financial “cost” of not voting would be the same, but it would be a foregone payment for exercising the right not to vote, not a penalty imposed by the state for breaking the law.

Let’s put some numbers to this. A £10 voucher would be roughly the equivalent to the penalty for not voting in Australia (it is AUD$20 for first-time non-voters). Assuming a turnout of 90% in a UK general election, that would represent a cost of slightly more than £400 million to the British government. It would be a relatively modest outlay to improve our democracy – an increase of well below 0.1% in government spending in general election years.

However, there is a good chance that even this outlay could be reduced, even eliminated. Here’s how. Invite big companies to fund the vouchers – say Tesco, Lidl, Boots, Marks & Spencer, Amazon, and BP (for use at their filling stations). Given the beneficial publicity that companies could attract for participating in the scheme, it might even make the government a profit. For example, it could be granted to one company in each sector through an auction. Tesco might compete with Sainsbury’s, Boots with Superdrug, BP with Shell and so on. Given that many people going into a retailer to spend their voucher will spend a lot more, the true cost to each company will be far less than the initial outlay of £10 per person.

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The process of issuing the vouchers would be relatively simple. Each ballot paper would have a tear-off voucher attached. After casting their vote, each voter would write their name on the voucher. The retailer could, if they wished, verify the identity of the voucher-holder. In any event, by restricting the use of the voucher to one per transaction, it should be fairly easy to minimise misuse.

One further possibility would be to allow vouchers to be donated to a charity. This part of the cost would be borne by the government, unless a major bank, or consortium of financial businesses, stumped up, again in return for the public-spirited publicity they would receive.

These details are not designed to be prescriptive, but to illustrate some of the possibilities that would open up if we used our imaginations and recognised that the practical benefits of such a solution would far outweigh the drawbacks that could offend purists. Once we agreed that this was worth exploring, a host of detailed options could be investigated.

Let us address one likely criticism head-on. We shall be told that this would be a bribe, and that bribery has no place in a democracy. To which my response is this: what on earth are election campaigns all about anyway, if not a proffering of competing bribes in the form of promised policies?

There is a more principled answer. Many people, especially among the less well-off sections of the electorate, abstain from voting because they perceive little benefit to them. Whether you call my idea a payment, incentive, compensation or bribe, the result of this reform would be to encourage millions more of our fellow citizens to engage in our political process, taking more interest in the choices placed before them.

These citizens would, to a large extent, be those who most needed our politicians to enact laws, levy taxes and direct public spending in ways that reduced inequality and increased social harmony. At stake is not merely the legitimacy of our election and our referendum outcomes, but also the quality of the decisions that flow from those outcomes. It could deliver a more meaningful future for those with the least prospect of one.

Click here to read our series of answers to the question: how can we fix our democracy?

Jeremy Clarkson
Nominated by James Kirkup, Director of The Social Market Foundation

The Liberal Democrats are looking for a replacement for Vince Cable. The Independent Group has made Chuka Umunna its ‘chief spokesman’ but isn’t yet a full political party. Centrism needs a leader.

That leader should be Jeremy Clarkson. Yes, Jeremy Clarkson. Bear with me.

I am a centrist. We like political compromise and policy based on evidence, not ideology: just do ‘what works’ and leave philosophy to philosophers. We haven’t had the best time of late.

One reason is that centrists tend to be like me: metropolitan wonks who focus too much on the detail of policy and not enough on how voters will see that policy.  I spent years writing clever columns about the merits of a liberal immigration policy; in 2017, I thought (and still think) the ‘dementia tax’ was a good policy, because it’s better to tax the houses of asset-rich pensioners than the incomes of asset-poor workers. Smart, eh?

Then there’s Brexit, which brings me to Clarkson.

Guess how he voted in the referendum? What he thinks about leaving? He’s a Remainer: a treacherous, bleating, Britain-hating public schoolboy millionaire liberal Remainer, who thinks Brexit is a “clusterfuck”. He’s basically David Cameron, but less fat and with slightly better jeans.

And guess what? It doesn’t matter. He’s still Jeremy Clarkson, the bloke’s bloke, the bloke with the cars and the crap jokes and the stupid comments about foreigners and the bad jeans.

And he’s got exactly what centrism needs: an understanding of – and a love for – the stuff that millions of ‘ordinary’ voters are interested in.

Last month, when Theresa May was pictured awkwardly trying to play pool with her Italian counterpart, Clarkson had a Twitter-rant that sums up why centrism needs him:

I’m shit at pool. But I know how to hold the cue at least. What I cannot understand is how you can be the prime minister when you don’t. Seriously, how can you get to the age of 62 without EVER playing a single game of pool? It’s impossible. 

How can you know what normal people think if you’ve never played pool?

The last thing centrists need is more smart policy and more clever people: we’ve got that covered.  We need leaders you could go down the pub and have a laugh with – and who would be down the pub having a laugh even if they didn’t want your vote, because that’s what they like doing. Because that’s what people do. #JC4PM

Howard Jacobson
Nominated by Tanya Gold

When regarding the agonies of Brexit, I dream, idly, of a clever Prime Minister. George Osborne may fantasise that I am talking about him. I am not. I am talking about Benjamin Disraeli, who wrote novels, split the Tory Party, re-established it with one nation Conservatism – still a fantasy that endures – passed reforming legislation and still made good jokes. For instance this on William Gladstone: “He has not one single redeeming defect”. Or this: “I must follow the people. Am I not their leader?”

Was the kindness, the imagination, and the wit of the novelist the key to Disraeli’s brilliance? I don’t know, but sometimes I fantasise that Howard Jacobson is prime minister. He wouldn’t do it, of course, not being a f*cking inadequate, but I cannot get the idea from my brain, especially when watching the dishonest idiots on BBC Parliament.

I dream that he would actually think, deeply, about things, and act with one eye on history, and the other on Count Tolstoy. He hates social media, which is right; I imagine he is sound on climate change, also right; he would re-open libraries, and make wonderful speeches. I wonder if the subjects of Elizabeth I felt the same way as I would under a Jacobson premiership: soothed, because their leader was that rare thing in politics – not a fool.

Tracey Emin
Nominated by Bidisha, writer, broadcaster and film-maker

Having followed her varied, beautiful and highly skilled work for decades now, I have a lot of respect for the artist Tracey Emin and would love to see what she’d do with the top job.

I interviewed her for Radio 4 about a decade ago and she was thoughtful and gentle, very cultured and with a naturally international mindset. She combines many qualities and has overcome many challenges, which I think would garner people’s respect, and also speaks to an inner strength and steady, laudable ambition.

As a former Young British Artist she has come through the New Labour era of the financial boom and Cool Britannia’s soaring cultural capital. Indeed, that period made her rich and famous. However, her early years were humble and marked by family issues (her philandering father had an entire other family secreted away), lack of opportunity and multiple instances of rape and sexual violence.

She has fought her way up from modest beginnings, gender violence, lack of opportunity and the low expectations of others to emerge as a great artist with a wide-ranging body of art, self-knowledge, maturity and self-belief. She has withstood howls of derision from many people, who believe that what she creates is not art, to emerge as a tough, experienced woman who is sure of her gifts and determined to carve her place in the world.

I respect those qualities in a leader.

Jurgen Klopp
Nominated by James Bloodworth – author and journalist

Westminster needs more people with “helping syndrome”, the epithet coined by the Liverpool FC manager Jurgen Klopp to describe himself.

As a Liverpool supporter, I’m obviously biased. But the 51-year-old German exudes a warmth and intelligence that is sorely lacking in our politics at the present time.

I haven’t chosen Klopp solely on the basis of his sporting affiliations or personal magnetism, however. His political views chime with my own: Klopps is on the Left without being a fanatic. He talks in terms of first principles rather than ideological dogma.

“I’m on the Left, of course,” Jürgen Klopp tells the journalist Raphael Honigstein in Klopp: Bring the Noise, his book on the Liverpool manager. “More Left than middle. I believe in the welfare state. I’m not privately insured. I would never vote for a party because they promised to lower the top tax rate,” Klopp adds.

Moreover, Klopp is a pro-European who emits none of the intellectual snobbery that seems to animate some of his fellow Remainers. Klopp told the Guardian in 2018 that he didn’t believe the English had become an inward-looking people post-Brexit. “I don’t see it,” Klopp told the paper.

Charisma, intelligence, as well as respect and civility towards one’s political opponents. Westminster could do with its own Jurgen Klopp.

Martina Navratilova
Nominated by Julie Bindel, journalist and feminist campaigner

Martina Navratilova, one of the finest sportspeople in the world, is brave, principled, and the antithesis of hypocrisy. In other words, nothing like a politician.

I first saw Martina on TV at Wimbledon in 1976. I was 14 years old, and crippled with self-hatred and shame for being a lesbian. Martina did not feminise her appearance, unlike other female tennis players, and was proud of her muscles. I had her clocked as a feminist, and suspected she was a lesbian long before she came out in 1981.

In 2010, I had the honour of interviewing Martina, shortly after she revealed she had breast cancer. As ever, Martina had her eye on the bigger picture, and used her diagnosis to encourage women to look out for warning signs.

More recently, Martina has spoken out about the unfairness of male-bodied trans-women competing against natal women in sport. Martina does not have a bigoted bone in her body, but even so, she was immediately accused of ‘transphobia’. But Martina did not back down, and continued to take a principled stand on this issue.

When she came out as a lesbian, Martina lost every single one of her sponsors; today, she is facing bullying and unjust criticism. But Martina takes it on the chin, because you can’t keep a good woman down. If Martina were our Prime Minister, the country would not be in the mess it is today.

Alexei Sayle
Nominated by Matthew Norman, political satirist and columnist 

The moment Alexei Sayle established himself as one of the great lost leaders came on Question Time a few years ago. An audience member raised a matter of typically inexpressable tedium, and for the only time in the borefest’s history, a panellist gave the perfect response. “I don’t care about that,” he said. “Ask someone else.”

Those who recall such national humiliations as Tony Blair’s musings on the murder trial of Deidre from Coronation Street would appreciate a PM under no compulsion to have an opinion about everything, and brazenly unconcerned about pandering.

Sayle’s claims extend beyond that. He wouldn’t remotely want the job, which should of course be a formal prerequisite for having it. If he did, he’d  acknowledge Britain’s diminished status by cancelling Trident, and use an alarmingly capacious knowledge of military hardware to remodel the armed forces in keeping with the needs of this geopolitical age rather than the one that ended in 1990.

His rage, intelligence and hilarious deployment of distinctly unparliamentary language would reignite public interest in politics to levels unseen since he was remoulding the country’s comic sensibilities in the early 1980s.

He would also be the first PM since Churchill with genuine literary talent. Alongside his fiction, he has published two glorious volumes of memoirs (Stalin Ate My Homework, and Thatcher Stole My Trousers). Who wouldn’t give one kidney at least for a  third, Bercow Kissed My Ringpiece, covering the Downing Street years?

Ronald Blythe
Nominated by Harry Mount, editor of The Oldie

At 96, Ronald Blythe remains our greatest living expert on the British countryside.

Fifty years ago, he wrote his masterpiece, Akenfield – Portrait of an English Village.

He invented the name Akenfield for his fictional Suffolk village. But his recorded interviews with locals – from teenagers to retired farmhands in their 80s – gave a crystal-clear, undeniably true picture of the brutal horrors of country life in the late 19^th and 20^th centuries.

I interviewed him this year and, half a century on, he remains a supreme listener – a quality distinctly lacking in Parliament.

Talk to an MP and they usually talk at you and avoid asking questions. I was amazed, at the Oldie Literary Lunch at the Ilkley Literary Festival last year, to see Alan Johnson, another candidate for the best Prime Minister we will never have, ask questions – and keep on asking them – of his neighbour at lunch before giving his speech.

How do you ever learn anything if you don’t ask questions and don’t listen; and don’t read books – another thing MPs aren’t much cop at?

Blythe doesn’t just read constantly; he writes, too – over 30 books so far, and he’s planning on writing more.

When I interviewed him, he modestly said, “I was a listener and a looker.”

He still is.

Claire Tomalin
Nominated by Deborah Orr, journalist

Many former journalists go into politics. That’s not surprising. The two disciplines often attract people with similar interests and passions. The journalists who used to be editors – who have experience of managing a team, juggling a mix of information and priorities, maintaining a vision of how everything fits together – are better placed than the mere writers to make the transition.

I’d never actually wish that, after she resigned as literary editor of the Sunday Times, Claire Tomalin had become a politician – her career as a biographer has been too valuable, too dazzling for that. But Tomalin would have made a superlative prime minister. Anyone familiar with her writing is aware of its remarkable intelligence – an intelligence leavened with the empathy that enables her to understand how human talents and human flaws tend to coalesce to make a unique, sometimes dark, sort of creativity or genius. No one could doubt that she has the skill with words to communicate the original thoughts and ideas that her prose writhes with.

But Tomalin’s resilience is stunning too. She has achieved so much. Becoming the preeminent biographer of your generation, having been born a woman in 1933, takes stamina. To do this while your personal life is marked by tragedy after tragedy – pain and loss that most of us don’t even experience once – well, Tomalin is a human among humans. Claire – you’re only 85. It’s not too late.

Malorie Blackman
Nominated by YA novelist, Lisa Williamson

The next generation deserves a leader who listens to and values their opinions. For the past three decades, Malorie Blackman OBE has done just that. Since publishing her first novel in 1990, she has given a voice to under-represented children and young adults in her fiction, television writing and tireless campaigning.

In a Young Adult sector dominated by white authors and publishers, Blackman’s impact has been revolutionary. Some of her books, like the wildly successful dystopian Noughts and Crosses series, tackle racism head on, while others feature black children simply getting on with their everyday lives or having the sorts of adventures previously reserved for white readers. It’s a deceptively simple yet powerful approach that has changed the landscape of children’s literature.

The 2013-15 Children’s Laureate uses her platform to promote reading for pleasure, to highlight opportunities in the creative industries for young people of all backgrounds, and encourage and empower them to write their own stories. Meanwhile her words continue to reflect issues facing young people in the UK today – just look at the emotional response her award-winning Rosa Parks episode of Dr Who spurred last year: it indicates the power of her work.

I doubt Malorie would want to touch the PM role with a bargepole, but, my gosh, wouldn’t it be fabulous if someone who put the well-being of our children first was in charge for once? They’d certainly get my vote.

Louise Casey
Nominated by LBC presenter Iain Dale

Great prime ministers have visions. They know what they want to achieve and they understand the measures necessary to achieve it. They lead from the front. They can articulate their vision to enable voters to buy into and support it. They don’t shy away from controversy or confrontation. They lead public opinion, they don’t follow it.

Step forward Dame Louise Casey. Known as the most untypical of civil servants she first came to the public’s notice as the Blair government’s Homelessness Czar. She became the driving force to combat Anti-Social Behaviour and headed the Respect Task Force before being appointed Victims Commissioner. She then took on the Troubled Families initiative and wrote a report into the Rotherham Grooming scandal. In each of those jobs she shook up the system, adopting the maxim that in order to create an omelette you have to crack a few eggs.

Louise Casey eschews party politics, but she is a natural born leader. She doesn’t stand for any nonsense, and is an original thinker. I’d say that’s just what the country needs as we look for a replacement for Theresa May. What a shame she isn’t in parliament.

Katharine Birbalsingh
Nominated by Peter Franklin

Michaela Community School is a state secondary school in the London borough of Brent. About a fifth of its pupils qualify for free school meals and almost half speak English as a second language. It has also been rated by Ofsted inspectors as outstanding in all categories. Oh, and the school opened its doors just five years ago.

Michaela’s founding Headmistress is Katharine Birbalsingh – the inspirational leader of a remarkable institution and an effective advocate for ‘traditional’ teaching methods in a modern setting. Michaela is described in the press as the ‘strictest school in Britain’, but Birbalsingh’s actual philosophy is one of no excuses for bad behaviour.

She understands what so many have forgotten, which is that the atmosphere in our schools, whether of calm or chaos, is ultimately a choice. That also goes for the scourge of screen addiction. Michaela empowers parents to take back control from the smartphone – offering discounted ‘brick’ phones so that they can call their kids without plugging their brains into the internet.

For sticking her neck out, she attracts a lot of flak – to which only one reply is necessary: you do better. We could certainly do with more doers and fewer talkers in Government (though Birbalsingh is a brilliant speaker too). No doubt she’s too busy giving children the best possible start in life to bother with the greasy pole of politics. Still, I can’t think of anyone better to deal with the delinquents of Westminster.

“The crisis”, according to Antonio Gramsci, “consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Sure, those lines were penned (in prison as it happens) sometime between 1926 and 1935. But Gramsci’s oft-quoted phrase provides an eerily accurate description of UK party politics in 2019.

For decades after Labour replaced the Liberals as the main opposition to the Tories – early in the twentieth century – this country’s politics largely (although never exclusively) revolved around arguments over the size of the state and how much governments should tax, spend, and redistribute.

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A party for the politically homeless

By Giles Fraser

Voters were relatively class conscious and often maddeningly tribal – content to choose between one of the two main players whose dominance was, at least in part, underwritten by the first-past-the-post electoral system that the UK, unlike most other advanced liberal democracies, decided to stick with.

That two-party system first began to fray at the edges in the early 1970s, its threads pulled by a combination of rising Scottish (and then Welsh) nationalism, and disillusionment with both Labour and the Tories, which led to the Liberals winning nearly a fifth of the vote in 1974. A much bigger tear then occurred in the mid-eighties, when Labour’s lurch to the Left and the Conservatives’ lurch to the Right gave rise to the SDP and eventually the Lib Dems.

Since then, the two-party system has only crept closer and closer to its eventual demise: the Lib Dems held the balance of power in 2010, forcing David Cameron into a coalition; the SNP became Scotland’s biggest party five years later, after an election in which UKIP won nearly four million votes, albeit only one measly seat.

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Tories will reap the Brexit whirlwind

By Matthew Goodwin

True, the two main parties appeared to bounce back in 2017, their combined vote share exceeding 80% for the first time in a long time. But anyone who thinks their problems are over is fooling themselves, not least because cultural divides brought to a head, but not caused by, Brexit (over national identity, migration and multiculturalism, law and order, etc.) are now every bit as important as the economic divides that previously reinforced Conservative-Labour predominance. Voters are not only more volatile and less tribal; they also care more nowadays about stuff that undermines both the unity and the traditional appeals and agendas of the big two.

As a result, the Tories, despite Theresa May’s best efforts to tack to the Right, remain vulnerable to a radical populist alternative on one flank (be it UKIP/Tommy Robinson or the Brexit Party) and, precisely because of those self-same efforts, to whatever the TIG morphs into on the other.

But TIG, particularly if it manages to absorb the Lib Dems, also represents a serious potential threat to the Labour Party – all the more so if Deputy Leader Tom Watson’s newly-established party-within-a-party, Future Britain, presages mass defections. And nor, given young people’s concerns about climate change, should we completely forget about the Greens.

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The trouble with TIGgers

By Graeme Archer

The UK, then, is already a multi-party system – not just an embryonic one, but a near-term one: a living, kicking entity that reflects the sheer diversity of a truly 21^st century electorate. But it’s a system that currently can’t be born, leading to the “interregnum” we’re currently trapped in and the “morbid symptoms” Gramsci referred to – most obviously a whole bunch of voters, and their parliamentary representatives, who are disoriented, anxious and often angry about the direction that what they used to think of as ‘their’ parties seem to be taking.

What is stopping this fully-fledged multi-party system from coming into being is obvious. Indeed, it’s been staring everyone in the face for years. It’s the first-past-the-post, plurality electoral system that (unless, like the SNP, their support is geographically concentrated) massively disadvantages small parties, not least by persuading people that, however much they might like them, a vote for them is a wasted vote.

What we need to do – no, what we absolutely have to do – is to junk an electoral system that is manifestly unfit for purpose and replace it with a proportional alternative that would allow voters to vote for parties that actually reflect their shifting preferences rather than forcing them to choose which one of the big two seems likely to do the least worst damage.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Changing the electoral system; hardly a radical idea, right?  Haven’t people – often very, very boring people – been banging on about it for ages? Didn’t we have a referendum on it a few years back? And wasn’t it rejected by an overwhelming majority?

Well, yes and no. There was a referendum in 2011 (one which, incidentally, allowed the road-testing of many of the techniques later used by the Leave campaign to secure victory in 2016).  But the electorate was offered an utterly uninspiring, and some would say false, choice between FPTP and the Alternative Vote (AV) – a system whose main advocate, the by then terminally toxic Nick Clegg, had previously (and tellingly) referred to as ‘a miserable little compromise’. No wonder only four out of ten voters could even be arsed to turn out.

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Could Brexit fix our broken politics?

By Giles Fraser

Frankly, we should aim much, much higher. Like New Zealand did in the early 1990s, when frustration with the two main parties boiled over into demands to end their in-built, in-bred duopoly, we should follow a two stage process. Stage one: a chance for advocates to educate people about the myriad different systems out there and then to find out, in a referendum, which of those systems they would plump for, assuming there were to be a change. Stage two: a referendum to determine whether they’d prefer to stick with the devil they know or dump it in favour of the winner of that initial public vote.

In New Zealand, the process resulted in the country plumping for MMP – the mixed member proportional system that’s used in Germany and (although, for technical reasons, it’s less proportional there) for elections to the devolved legislatures in Scotland and Wales.

Essentially, voters get two votes – one that allows them to decide who their local MP will be and a second that sees them pick parties rather than individual candidates and that, once all the votes are counted, ensures (subject to a threshold designed to exclude really, really small outfits) that parties’ share of seats in parliament reflects their share of the vote in the country.

Were the UK to follow its former dominion’s example it would, as it did there, massively shake up and shake out politics without nixing the ‘constituency link’ we still seem to value. Even if today’s two main parties survived, their parliamentary and governmental hegemony would be challenged by a number of smaller parties, at least some of them based not, as now, simply on narrow nationalism but on big ideas – ideas that, however much some people may hate or even fear them, resonate with millions of people all over the country, but which are currently underrepresented (if they are represented at all) in its legislature.

Brexit didn’t blow up British politics. It was in big trouble already. Since there’s no point trying to put the genie back in the bottle, then I’m going to ask him to grant me at least one wish: PR for the UK. Not entirely novel, I admit. But radical? You bet.

Click here to read our series of answers to the question: how can we fix our democracy?

When my short book, People Power, was published in 2018, I was invited onto BBC2’s Daily Politics to discuss my proposal for radical House of Lords reform.

“It’s a lovely idea,” began Jo Carney, referring to my suggestion that members of Parliament’s upper chamber should be selected at random like jurors. “But it’s never going to happen, is it?”

Since all the preceding items in the programme had drastically overrun, that was pretty much the entirety of the interview. It has been rankling ever since: partly because my unmade rejoinders keep improving with time, but mainly because subsequent events have doubled and redoubled the force of my arguments.

My core points were simple: that without urgent, radical action to boost Parliament’s perceived legitimacy, the survival of representative democracy in the UK cannot be guaranteed; and that the simplest way to fix this would be a radical remaking of Parliament’s most flagrantly unrepresentative chamber.

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Can anyone seriously doubt the first point today? And, if not, does anyone have a better, more achievable suggestion than the second?

The crisis in politics is perhaps more obvious now than it was in early 2018, although it was pretty obvious then. Respect for our representatives in Westminster has collapsed. The main parties barely bother to disguise their habit of putting their own interests ahead of the nation’s. Social media and the slapdash use of referendums have created an unprecedented appetite for what could loosely be described as direct democracy.

Previously voiceless millions have been empowered to make their views known, unmediated. Increasingly, they expect to be heeded. Well-funded demagogues fan resentments for their own purposes, and MPs cannot or will not resist. “People are tired of experts,” said Michael Gove. But it’s worse than that: millions are tired of Westminster politicians too.

Can anything be done? There is a strong case for reforming the Commons and/or the voting system, but the chances of Parliament authorising such reform in the foreseeable future seem negligible. The need for Lords reform, on the other hand, is almost universally acknowledged. Its members are unelected, unaccountable to the electorate, and no more representative than the Garrick Club. Why would you not tear it up and start again? Hence my focus on the Lords in People Power.

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Could Brexit fix our broken politics?

By Giles Fraser

My proposed solution was deliberately broad in its brushstrokes. The current peers would be replaced by 400 People’s Peers, randomly conscripted and weighted to be a small, representative sample of the electorate as a whole. Service would be “compulsory, well-paid and prestigious”, perhaps even involving ermine and titles.

Those selected would sit for four-year terms, including a six-month training period. The outgoing great-and-good would have the option of paid employment as trainers or specialist advisers for their randomly selected replacements. Ideally, the chamber would continue to benefit from the ex-peers’ expertise and experience. But, having no democratic mandate to represent us, those ex-peers would not deliberate or vote on our behalf.

That was about it. The details are arbitrary: it’s a sketch, not a blue-print. Its purpose was to win support for a general principle. I accept that my proposed system isn’t perfect. What matters is that the existing system is dreadful.

Those who work in Westminster struggle to grasp this. They think the current set-up works quite well. “What about all that expertise?” they say. “The courteous, well-informed debates? The well-established conventions of back-and-forth between Lords and Commons?”

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But none of that matters if the governed don’t accept the chamber’s legitimacy. If its influence can be dismissed – as it can – as the meddling of “unelected peers”, its collective wisdom counts for nothing. If you really believe that Parliament as currently configured is functioning well, you need to get out more.

If we did decide to replace the House of Lords with a chamber based on ‘sortition’ (that is, the selection of representatives by lot), there would be no shortage of experts capable of fine-tuning the system to make it viable. Groups currently working to give sortition a bigger role in UK politics include – to choose just a few – the Sortition Foundation, Unlock Democracy, Constitutional Reform, A Citizens’ House in Parliament, Compass, All Hands on Doc.

Globally, the sortition movement is vast. Wise and knowledgeable authors whose writings on the subject I recommend include: JKB Sutherland, Nicholas Gruen, Brett Hennig and Anthony Barnett (who made a proposal much like mine for Demos more than 20 years ago).

The workings, strengths and weaknesses of deliberative assemblies and citizens’ juries have been exhaustively studied over several decades by countless academics and institutions, from the pioneering professors James S. Fishkin and Robert C. Luskin (of Stanford University and the University of Texas at Austin respectively), to the Electoral Reform Society, the Centre for the Study of Democracy, and UCL’s widely admired Constitution Unit.

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Wanting to incorporate a randomly-chosen assembly into national politics may not be a mainstream position. But it is intellectually respectable.

My purpose in writing People Power was to nudge that respectable idea a little nearer to the centre of national debate. I quote with pride Alex Burghardt MP’s verdict on my book: “It’s not as crazy as it sounds.” (By my standards, that’s a five-star review.)

But the proposal at People Power’s heart deserves to be taken more seriously than that. Traditional politics is in crisis. The collision between direct democracy and representative democracy has left Parliament floundering and ineffectual. Yet a proposal to take radical corrective action is considered crazy, while wanting to carry on as before is considered sane. That’s the sad irony of foreseeable disasters. Evasive action seems worthwhile only if you leave your mental comfort zone – or when it’s too late.

In fact, since my book was published, there has been a surge in mainstream support for giving randomly-selected citizens a role in national politics. (The Daily Politics, by contrast, has disappeared.) The proposed role has been a specific one: breaking the deadlock over Brexit. But the thinking is much the same.

Nearly 80,000 people have signed an online petition calling for a Citizens Assembly on Brexit. Their case has been made by heavyweight thinkers and politicians – and even, once, in the Commons. Right now, their cause seems like a lost one – although it would be foolish to rule anything out where Brexit is concerned. Yet sustained exposure is gradually drawing the idea of sortition-based politics into the mainstream.

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By Oliver Bullough

It is telling that a Citizens’ Assembly on climate change is a key demand of the striking schoolchildren of the Extinction Rebellion.

What all these enthusiasts appreciate is that consulting the public in a sortition-based deliberative assembly is quite different from casually asking voters for their views in polls and referendums. Like jurors in court, participants in such assemblies are focused and informed. They interrogate evidence and examine conflicting views. No one whips them to put party before country. Trained conveners ensure that all are heard. The emphasis is on discussion, not winning; shifts in opinion are common. And the conclusions, like juries’ verdicts, are generally accepted as fair.

Everything we know about such bodies shows that they tend to heal division rather than exacerbate it. The discussions are conversations, not confrontations. In an age of political polarisation, this is precious. Parliament is pre-occupied with party-political arm-wrestling; public political discourse consists mostly of mud-slinging. The combined effect is endless political mud-wrestling: dirty, violent, unedifying and – if continued too long – dangerous.

Political traditionalists usually object that a randomly chosen cross-section of society would produce a ‘lower calibre’ of person than the processes that provide the current members of the Commons and the Lords.

I don’t think this bears scrutiny: not just because the calibre of many current members of Parliament is so obviously and embarrassingly low – or because, despite what people in Westminster think, the average citizen isn’t a moron – but because the main point of a democracy isn’t that it results in a nation being governed by its wisest members. Most democratic nations aren’t. But their systems of government work – when uncorrupted – because their decisions command popular consent.

In People Power, I quote approvingly the words of Dexter Perkins:

“The best wisdom is to be found in the collectivity, not because any member of the collectivity is himself as wise or as well informed or as disinterested as some notable individuals may be, but because the reconciliation of the wills, the aspirations, and the interests of all, even the prejudices of all, provides a more solid and enduring basis of action than the will, the aspiration, and the interest of any individual or any class.”

That, in one sentence, is the case for democracy. It is a merging of interests. Sadly, such a merging has barely featured in the UK’s recent contortions over Brexit. Democracy of a kind has been involved, but only the kind that divides. If you expect what follows to have an enduring basis, your appetite for far-fetched political ideas is stronger than mine.

The point of a Citizens’ Assembly isn’t to secure a particular outcome. It’s to detoxify politics, through a visibly fair mechanism that cannot be dismissed as an establishment stitch-up. With Brexit, it could have rebooted the entire seized-up process; in Westminster, it could restore the the credibility and perceived legitimacy of Parliament.

The economic fall-out from our Brexiting (hard, soft, fudged or reversed) will pass. Perhaps it will be less than some fear. But the political and social damage feels more permanent, and could prove disastrous if we cannot find the courage to address it. Is it really so crankish to consider seriously a mechanism that could set us on the path to healing?

Perhaps it is too late to bring that mechanism to bear on Brexit. Yet the need for detoxification remains. The political establishment is more hostile than ever to the idea of empowering randomly selected citizens: a trial programme of local citizens’ assemblies has just been radically scaled down. But I have yet to hear of a more sensible idea for achieving the healing we need.

People Power: Remaking Parliament for the Populist Age, by Richard Askwith (Biteback).

Click here to read our series of answers to the question: how can we fix our democracy?