Will constitutional reform restore our broken trust?

By Rick Muir

So, everyone is now in favour of constitutional reform. For those of us who have long been advocates, this feels like a great opportunity – and in Rahm Emmanuel’s words, one should ‘never waste a good crisis’. But are the politicians serious? And will constitutional reform restore the trust that has now so completely broken down?

Trust will take years to rebuild – and I suspect the catharsis of a general election will be needed before we can even start that process. But the sheer level of public anger is evidence that this is not just about expenses – a chasm has now opened up between the representatives and the represented that needs to be bridged. I have my own thoughts on the priorities for reform (semi-open primaries, re-call votes, giving the public the ability to trigger referenda, a reformed electoral system for the Commons).

But the most important thing is that we the public start to debate what kind of politics we want. Public participation is important for at least three reasons:

1) solutions hatched within the political class will lack legitimacy

2) real reform tends to get blocked by the parties because they have a vested interest

3) if this is all just decided at Westminster we are bound to dislike the outcome almost whatever it is – simply because there are no easy or popular solutions to many of these questions.

Everyone loves independents – but no one wants a parliament where no one can agree and nothing gets done. People hate parties relying on rich donors – but no one likes state funding either. Politics is about making these tough choices and compromises – if it is just about ‘us’ the public making a set of incompatible demands on ‘them’ the politicians, we get into an impossible dialectic that will only further corrode trust. We need to decide what we want from our politics.