WHAT ARE THE LESSONS FOR WALES?

FIRST, Wales needs more bridges between government and people, especially if the prospect of increasing the number of Senedd members from the present paltry 60 has been put on hold. If the established government of an independent nation feels the need for this enhanced connection then surely a younger legislature in a country with much more limited media needs it even more.

Citizens’ assemblies would not be there to challenge the authority of the Senedd, but to improve the quality of our representative democracy, to deepen its roots and to buttress it against corrosive cynicism.

Second, after a torrid three years in which the Brexit debate has split the country, this could be a way of bringing the country together. Had citizens’ assemblies been built into the Brexit process across the UK at a much earlier stage, the debate might have been shorter, more reasoned and less divisive. The one attempt, carried out by the Electoral Reform Society, produced a more nuanced view of Brexit than one might have expected.

The Senedd has put a toe into the water, but the question for us in Wales is whether we want to see this as a passing novelty or a permanent part of our democracy – a permanent expression of the engaged community that the pandemic has exposed for all to see. I believe it should, which is why I would be sceptical of Prof McAllister’s wish to rely on crowdsourcing the funding. Governments, too, must be committed to the process.

In the current circumstances there will be those who will see this as an unaffordable luxury. But let us not forget that Ireland went down this road in the middle of the cruellest economic circumstances. As its Constitutional Convention met, unemployment was at 14.8%.

David Farrell refers to Churchill’s remark that “one should never allow a good crisis to go to waste”. That is true for us in Wales today.

Perhaps it is time to assemble a coalition of Welsh civil society to press the case – the IWA, the Bevan Foundation, the WCVA, the Wales Governance Centre and others. For instance, citizens’ assemblies would certainly be relevant to the Institute of Welsh Affairs’ current project on ‘Rethinking Wales’. But government, too, must be drawn in.

The first task of such a coalition would be to persuade all political parties, bar none, to make a bold commitment to citizens’ assemblies in their manifestos for next year’s Senedd Cymru elections. After all, what party is going to be willing to stand up in public, and say they are not interested in the opinions of the people who elect them?