Michael Wills and the latest on the reform agenda

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Guy Aitchison (London, OK): It went largely unnoticed last week, but Justice Minister Michael Wills gave a short speech at Lincoln's Inn on how the constitutional reform programme is shaping up and what the government hopes to achieve.

He sets out in a clear fashion the three main processes entailed by the Green Paper. Some points of interest. It's encouraging that Wills says he will "explore the case for economic, social and cultural rights and so-called third generation rights", although, he stresses, these would not be enforceable by judges since this would "put them in the uncomfortable position of having to make decisions about the allocation of scarce public resources" disempowering "elected politicians". The Green Paper seemed to all but rule out the prospect of a BBOR containing anything over and above the standard civil-political rights, despite the fact 88% of Britons, when asked, list free access to healthcare as one of the most important rights. (To my knowledge, South Africa is the only country to have a constitution giving judges powers to order government to redistribute resources when an individual's basic welfare is not being met.)

He places this in the context of extended periods of office and the need to balance liberty with security in a period marked by terrorism:

behind the headline issues, behind all the complex and difficult decisions about how to strike the balance between liberty and security lies a profound and perennial and far-reaching question about where power should be located in our society and how it should be distributed.

The importance of human rights legislation is located precisely in its entrenchment of protections for the powerless individual against a mighty state, claiming privilege on behalf of the collective.

The bitter and bloody experiences of the twentieth century have taught us the inescapable importance of countering the inevitable tendency of power to accumulate around the already powerful.

Wills discusses the Citizens Summit on British values he is in charge of under Jack Straw. He says,

National identity matters to people. If there isn't a national process to discuss it, in ways that are inclusive of everyone on these islands, then there is a risk that this territory will be colonised by sectarian and sometimes even poisonous views.

For us, here the process of discussion and deliberation is as important as the outcome. That's why we are doing this through an innovative constitutional process. Shortly, we will start a series of discussions up and down the country, accompanied by print material and online forums, on what it means to be British, what's best about it, what best expresses what's best about it.

Wills discusses the transformational role of the web, but with a mixture of enthusiasm and apprehension. He celebrates the ease with which constituents can now contact their MP, but is uneasy that new forms of technology and communication might challenge the representative principles upon which our democracy is based. "The electronic plebiscite", he warns, "is just a click or two away" and we should be "very careful about embarking on a slippery slope towards plebiscitary democracy." He imagines what might happen if an unscrupulous billionaire wanted a policy change and set about a nationwide campaign of mass emails and advertising to convince voters to support it online. Could MPs be trusted in such a situation to meet Burke's ideal of the representative, using their "unbiassed opinion, mature judgement and enlightened conscience'"?

Wills's misgivings, I'd suggest, reflect a much broader anxiety on the part of government towards the power of the web - something memorably brought home to them last year with the huge success of the anti-road charge e-petition. For government, the challenge is to use new technologies for deliberation and engagement between elections, whilst ensuring that, what has been called, the "mainframe" remains intact. Is this possible given that the mainframe belongs to a previous age?

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