1. I’m fed up to the back teeth with democracy – at least based on what I have seen at the Palace of Westminster. For three solid years the British parliament has fixated on the infernal knife-edge 2016 Brexit referendum, and the so-called democratic will-of-the-people; the whole country has debated its various permutations with regard to parliamentary sovereignty, democracy, the rule of law, the apparent mendacity of the establishment; and, oh yes, that blasted European Union.
A time of shams
2. A grey film of fatigue and resignation has accordingly descended upon the United Kingdom of Great Britain; and a dark spirit of disbelief in the nation’s institutions is now walking abroad in England, to what destination no one seems to know. Gone are the days when to be British was something to be proud of; British young men no longer see visions, neither are the old British men dreaming dreams. Few are excited about the once revered establishment, especially the ruling political class; the nation as a whole appears to have given up on all forms of political activity; ‘why bother,’ I have heard some say, ‘they are all lying, cheating bastards!’ – putting their personal selfish interests before the country. This is a time of shams in British politics. What started as a mild ‘European’ headache for the British establishment way back in the 1970s has been so badly bungled by the ruling political class, that they might just as well have cut off the nation’s collective head, in a desperate bid for a cure. There were never so many liars in Britain since records began, as there are now; as a nation, we seem to have run out of ideas, no one knows what to believe in anymore. However, as bad as the situation clearly is today, can we entertain a hope, that it may be possible to somehow resuscitate our seemingly dead democracy back to life? If the answer is a yes, could a citizens’ assembly be one of the means by which we may reinvigorate our shrivelled-up democracy?
3. The Vietnamese have a saying: ‘If the head slides through easily, the tail will follow.’ And in attempting to answer the above two questions, it may be worth our while to first paint a portrait telling the shocking state of affairs in modern day Britain, which appear to have brought the country to her knees (the head); before setting out a possible solution, namely, a ‘citizens’ assembly’ (the tail). For want of space, our portrait will limit itself to citing only three snapshots, which depict England as a land vexed by a climate of fear, with a possibility of tipping her into a full-blown civil war. For we know from bitter experience that a patient’s case is sad indeed when his medicines are poisons and his physician(s) his worst disease. Now let us first examine the facts as set out in a bleak portrait of England today.
No country for tottering grey-heads
4. Several years ago, I was privileged to be acquainted with a grey-headed old lady in the English county of Buckinghamshire. Professional courtesy forbids me from naming her, but for the purposes of this blog post, we may call her Margot. Margot was born into an old English upper-class family at the time when British imperial glory was entering into its terminal decline; she was, for example, one of the last 400 girls to be presented as a debutante at Buckingham Palace, as a formal courtesy to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the II in 1958. It was the English upper-class equivalent of a puberty rite of passage. This seemingly innocent event marked the final curtain call as it were, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain as a potent global imperial power upon the world stage; and the loss of imperial glory had a profound effect upon the morale of a select type of people, who had hitherto considered themselves as the ruling elite in England. The 1956 Play by John Osborne, ‘Look Back in Anger’ is, I would humbly suggest, probably the best depiction of a Britain as a moribund and ineffective nation she subsequently became; it is a strident criticism of a once great and mighty country, whose loss of prestige is still reverberating down the decades – even to this day.
5. Troubles seldom come alone, they usually fly in flocks, like martins; and it will often happen that one will come upon the back of another. Alas, this became a reality to many a grey-head during the Major Financial Crisis of 2008; it was the perfect setting in which my friendship with Margot experienced something of a baptism of fire. Margot is married to a Scottish patrician, whom we may, for the purposes of this blog post, call Peter. A childless couple, whose circumstances were a far cry from the former gilded lives of their youth; the chaos of the national financial crisis was, for them, a source of unimaginable mental stress; as Margot was not only the carer of Peter, who suffered for years from recurring bouts of acute depression, but she was also the main bread winner, supplementing their pension by selling art. Margot is an accomplished artist of some repute. Thus it was that on one fateful night, Margot telephoned me to inform me that her husband of more than 40 years had succumbed to a most terrifying psychotic episode she had ever seen. She wanted me to go over to their house immediately – which I did. The long and short of the story concerning that fateful night is, we were compelled to have Peter sectioned to a mental health hospital with the help of the local Police Constabulary, under the 1983 Mental Health Act; on the ground that Margot would be under serious risk, if Peter were not given treatment urgently. It was an extremely traumatic experience for all concerned, but more so for Margot than it was for me, for example.
6. From the very start we knew that our mental health journey was going to be difficult, indeed the rickety state of mental health on the NHS in England is too well documented to merit repeating here; but nothing quite prepared us for the financial burden, when it became clear that Peter would have to be admitted into a nursing home on a long-term basis. Margot could not continue to care for him, because she too was getting considerably frail due to old age; and her health has always been delicate. The rising cost in fees for a place in one of England’s care homes is a major source of worry in the country; for the threshold, that is, the lower capital limit in order for one to qualify for public assistance in those days was, if my memory serves me correctly, set in the region of 13,000 pounds. It meant that all income from their pension, savings, benefits or other sources of income, excluding ‘personal expenses and allowances,’ had to go towards paying fees for the nursing home care. As you can imagine, Margot’s blood pressure went through-the-roof; for Peter had until then, been the one who managed their family finances. Because their relatives lived in far-flung places, both in the UK and abroad, her eyes naturally fell upon a close friend to help her to sort things out, and that friend, as it happened, was me. I was the one who was readily available.
7. It was the first time I had been put in this situation, that is, to play the role of a near relation to someone outside their immediate family. Had circumstances been different, I would have politely declined for fear of a possible imputation of appearing to take advantage of a vulnerable little old lady at a time of her distress. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the obvious risks to me personally, I chose to stay; I got involved. Providentially for both Margot and me, I knew exactly what to do, having done something almost similar before, when I helped the widow of the former colonial district officer several years earlier; her personal circumstances were however considerably different. I immediately set about searching for a good local solicitor to help put Margot’s financial affairs in order, and to help her plan for her future without Peter, including drawing up a ‘Will’ just in case of the unexpected happening. We were fortunate to find a local solicitor who had extensive experience in helping people in Margot’s situation. In the event; we discovered that she had nothing to worry about after all, as Peter had made some very wise investments during his time working as a private banker in the City of London many years earlier. The best news of all was, even at a rate of nearly 1000 pounds per week in fees for the care home, Margot has sufficient resources to support Peter, even in the unlikely event of him living well beyond 100 years. Such was my involvement in Margot’s affairs that on one occasion, some mental health medical practitioners and social workers mistook me for her son; it was a great sigh of relief all round when her situation turned out to be a lot better than she had first feared. For the newspapers are replete with horror stories of the great suffering of many grey-heads in England, at the hands of some unscrupulous practices in the care home industry. Only the other day I read of a case involving a grey-head suffering from dementia; his elderly wife and children were forced to sale the family home in order to pay for his care, leaving the family broken and his poor wife facing possible destitution in old age. This involvement gave me a first-hand experience of one of the great British sore spots; a burning injustice, which has done much to undermine faith in democracy in recent years.
The growing scourge of homelessness in England
8. The wind at times blows so gently as scarcely to stir the wing of a butterfly, but at another time it rushes in like a tornado, sweeping all before it. The Major Financial Crisis mentioned above, was a tornado like nothing seen in Britain since the 1930s, and the subsequent austerity measures put in place by a Tory-led government made a bad situation concerning vulnerable people in England worse. Surely no one can deny that our country is passing through a time of great and severe trial. The whole United Kingdom is in the grip of Brexit. There is such an abundance of news, and talks, and debates, and social media: and consequently ‘Flying’ reports about Brexit, false news and dastardly tells, are far more numerous than ever before; leaving many burning social justice issues largely unattended. One such burning social justice issue, our second snapshot, is homelessness. The growing scandal of homelessness in England feels like a stab at the very heart of national harmony, eating away at our much-vaunted democracy.
9. Having myself walked through the valley of humiliation albeit for a very short season; that is, when I roughed it on the streets of Milton Keynes, I was not shocked to see an article published in The Guardian on 17 September 2019, entitled: “The homeless death [of] Aimee Teese: ‘I didn’t think I would come to this at 30.’” The article charted the journey of a young woman from her childhood in the North of England, until her death at the tender age of 30. Reading the story sent shivers down my spine, as her experience chimed with stories of many homeless people, I had had the privilege to meet. I say privileged because it is one thing to read about homelessness at a distance, in the comfort of one’s home; but it is a wholly different matter to know homelessness experientially, as it is in your face, and very personal. I have written about my experience elsewhere, and I will therefore not repeat it here. But one paragraph stood out, it caused me to choke with emotions; it tugged at my heartstrings as I read it: “At 17, Aimee was given a council house. In retrospect, Cathy says this was almost as dangerous as providing her with nothing. ‘It was a proper bloody house, with a dining room and everything. She couldn’t cope with that. The whole street was terrace housing, and it was all bums outside. I remember walking down the street and every house was occupied by young people.’ Liverpool’s most vulnerable young people had been provided for, but not supported, given homes to play adults in, doss, get wasted and deal drugs.”
10. The article highlighted an extraordinary paradox now existing in England; for whereas the UK is one of the richest economies in the world, she nevertheless has one of the highest ratios of inequalities anywhere in the advanced world. It also highlighted the abject failure of the establishment to do right by the poor in England, poor both materially and in terms of prospects in education, and employment. The poor are, we may suppose, the often described as the left behind. They are in other words, the ‘outsider’ in their own land; with their noses figuratively pressed onto the glass of an expensive Michelin Star restaurant as it were, watching others feasting on the fat of the land while they have to make do and mend. Believe me, there is nothing pleasant or satisfying for hungry people to stand in the street and hear those inside a Michelin Star restaurant praising a good meal, of which they cannot get even to taste. Even where the left behind are given a helping hand as alluded to in the article, that help often falls to the ground because of the cack-handed way in which social policy is prosecuted in England; both major political parties, it must be admitted, have failed to produce practical policies which tackle this problem, it probably explains the apparent inability to make progress since the Brexit referendum in any meaningful way. It is particularly galling to the left behind, including their families, because the ‘social justice’ they are crying out for is nothing new; it was first proposed a long time ago in the Beveridge Report, which was part of the New Jerusalem promised to British people in answer to their great suffering and sacrifice during the Second Great War.
Britain’s Homeless In Winter | Girls Living On The Streets Of Brighton. For more information please visit: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree
Social mobility, democracy and Brexit
11. And it gets worse, much worse. The shocking choice to ‘Leave’ during the referendum of 2016 was in part driven by the frustrations of many working- and middle-class people who no longer felt that their living standards were commensurate to their expectations. Our third and final snapshot is therefore touching upon the sensitive matter of social mobility, democracy and Brexit. Many, especially those who count themselves among the middle class, it should be remembered, were once numbered among the lower middle class, and in some cases, the poor working class. The memories of stinging poverty and the austerity years during and subsequent to the Second Great War are still alive with them, even to this day. They remember how difficult life used to be for their families; their parents worked very hard, accumulated a little nest egg, thus achieving a precarious respectability in the process. They lived on a knife-edge, fearing that if some misfortune were to cross their path, all their hard work of thriftiness and diligence would evaporate in an instance before their very eyes; and that they would be plunged back into debt and real poverty. The unhappy reality of this hazardous existence, alas, often makes otherwise open-minded people hard-of-heart and unforgiving in their views about certain issues of the day. I know this to be a fact; for some of the ordinary English men and women, who came to my aid during my hour of distress as a refugee, were and are still numbered among these people.
12. Apropos my years as a penniless refugee in England, one of my highlights, for which I always set time aside, was listening to John Humphrys on BBC Radio4 – the world at One and PM at 5. John Humphrys stepped down from his slot on 19 September 2019, after 32 years of faithful service. Reading an extract from his recently published memoir, “A Day Like Today: Memoirs,” I could not help but feel a certain resonance with what he was saying. He spoke of his poor upbringing in Wales, and how he escaped poverty by, in his own words, “Both Mam and Dad had the unswerving certainty that if we went to a grammar school, we’d have a very different future from the grinding poverty of their own lives.” He continued, “My younger brother, Rob, and I went to Cardiff High, regarded as the best school in Cardiff, if not in Wales. I hated it from the day I joined until the day I left. The head was a snob, and I was clearly not the sort of boy he wanted at Cardiff High — far too working-class for his refined tastes.”
13. John Humphrys’ story reminded me of a lady I am acquainted with. She was the first in her family to breakout of such precarious existence in poverty, by first winning a place at a grammar school, which was followed with winning a scholarship to Oxford University. She did very well at Oxford. So well indeed, that she met and married an Oxford man, also the first in his family to gain a university education; they started a family soon afterwards, establishing their home in one of the Home Counties in England. The marriage was fruitful; producing two children, a boy and a girl. Anxious for their children not to experience the uncertainties of their youth, both husband and wife scraped and skimped in order to give their offspring a better chance in life; their only son was for example sent to one of the great English public schools in England. I understand that this sort of things is quite common in England for some aspiring parents to go the extra mile, in order to give their children a leg up in the highly competitive environment Britain has become. Their daughter was similarly provided for. Although she was not educated at a private school, she was nevertheless sent to one of the remaining grammar schools in England; this is significant because the Direct Grant Grammar Schools (Cessation of Grants) Regulation 1975, oversaw the general decline of grammar schools in England and Wales. The couple was naturally big with expectations; they had done everything practically possible to set their children up for life, they expected great things from their offspring.
14. But, alas, as we know all too well from the ancients, who accurately observed that you may put every stitch of canvass on when the wind blows, but you cannot make the wind blow. The fortunes of their children, although not through the fault of their own, were nevertheless a crushing disappointment; so much so that the couple is still the main provider for their progenies, including supporting their grandchildren. They feel desperately let down; let down by decades of one policy failure after another, there has been a genuine failure of leadership by both the Right and the Left of the British political establishment. They are very angry. And part of their anger is centred on the apparent liberties and obligations of Britain’s membership in the European Union, which no one in the establishment has ever taken the trouble to explain to them clearly. Make no mistake that if all things were equal, they would whole heartedly support the European Union project; indeed, the couple, in their capacities as academics, are among those who have done well out of Britain’s membership to the EU. But they are caught in a dilemma which no British government has been successful in addressing, which is, immigration and integration; and the seeming pressure placed upon declining public services. And living as they do in a town which is considered by many as one the melting pots in one of the Home Counties, government policies vis-à-vis integration of immigrants in the local communities appear to have fallen flat to the ground. Moreover, Brexit is such a major distraction from real issues ordinary people (including this couple) have to grapple with daily, that there is a sense in which British people appear to have been shafted to the back of the queue, as it were. This sense, I fear, is widespread. It is for example reflected in a twit I came across in my twitter feed the other day: “Politics is not just an after-dinner discussions for grown-ups. These children are living it. Foodbanks, homelessness, fuel poverty, clothes parcels, shops closing, after school clubs/youth services gone. It’s not ideology. It’s her environment. She lives it, sees it and is angry.”
Could a citizens’ assembly save our fractured democracy?
15. The Supreme Court’s unanimous finding that the prime minister’s attempt to silence parliament was unlawful and void will, I much fear, make the pressure cooker like conditions in the UK get a lot worse. For the simple reality is, Mr Boris Johnson has never and will never subscribe to the school of humility; he is therefore unlikely to change his chosen direction now. His chief concern, or so it would appear, is to go down in the history books as the prime minister who took Britain out of the European Union. All indications are that he is driven by a deliberate strategy to pit people against parliament, as a sure way for him to deliver Brexit after three years of chaos; and to destroy ‘that’ upstart who dares to challenge the primacy of the Tory party in British politics, the Brexit party, at the next general election, when it eventually takes place. And in so doing, Johnson has cast himself as the champion of the leave majority against the resentful minority of the so-called liberal establishment. Despite his avowed desire to address some of the burning injustices, which are continuing to ravish the delicate fabric of the British society and her ancient conventions, no one really believes much will be accomplished, even if a general election were successfully held. I do not pretend to be a master at psephology, neither am I an expert at reading the runes, but based on the continuing febrile climate in England, it looks certain that the Conservative party will not win a majority at the next general election. What is likely to happen instead is that a general election will produce yet another hung parliament. It means that the current political crisis is most likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Which begs the question, how does the United Kingdom emerge from this maddening impasse?
16. The answer is, and I think it is one which is a matter of first importance; that right thinking people in the whole of the British Isles regardless of their political persuasion, must accept that the damage to the country’s reputation on the international stage is probably irreparable. We are now in the unhappy territory of damned if we leave, and damned if we remain in the European Union; because it is difficult to see how any sensible country can ever take the United Kingdom seriously ever again, especially after seeing the strange spectacle of the UK parliament fritter away her energies by being everything by turns, and nothing long; trying all things, and achieving nothing substantial – for the last three years. Parliamentary democracy in Britain is severely damaged, and the better question, I think, should be what can we do to restore British people’s faith in democracy?
Japanese art of repairing broken pottery, Kintsugi – plus a citizens’ assembly
17. This is a difficult question to answer, but one which is hugely significant. It is probably beyond the scope of this blog post; for as alluded to in the above three snapshots in our portrait of England, cutting this particular ‘Gordian knot’ is a huge undertaking, which must be superintended by the best brains at the disposal of the entire British Isles. Those charged with the awesome task must do so without the fear of hurting people’s feelings, or the desire for cheap applause, lest they be prevented from searching out the wound concerning the failure of British democracy to the bottom; it is important to lay it bare, even to the bone. And for want of a better imagery, I think British democracy may in the circumstances, be compared to a very expensive and rare Chinese Ming vase that has fallen to the ground and shattered into many small pieces. The challenge facing all right-thinking people in Britain, is how to put the shattered vase back together. It is in the spirit of this challenge that I should like to propose for your consideration, an ancient Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted in or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, called Kintsugi. Kintsugi is based on a philosophy, which treats fracture(s) and repairs as part of the history of the whole piece, rather than something designed to disguise the damage. We as a British people cannot disguise the reality that our society, institutions, and above all, our representative democracy are broken. It is in acknowledging these hard facts, including embracing the damage thereof, that we may be the better placed to start the difficult process of putting our broken society back together, piece by piece. And in doing so, and if we follow the philosophy of Kintsugi, it is possible that we may even succeed in making our broken society much better than it has ever been. But how do we do this?
18. In answer, let me suggest to you an old idea – a citizens’ assembly. It is an idea which has recently started to gain traction the world over. A citizens’ assembly is basically a body of ordinary members of society coming together to deliberate (deliberative democracy) on an issue or issues of great importance. Membership to this body may be governed by random selection rather like a summons to sit on a jury in a criminal trial. And, like a jury that has been selected for a specific trial, the purpose of a citizens’ assembly is to study a variety of options in relation to a vexing problem(s), in order to give a view by way of an answer; and any given answer may, if the nation state so desires, put it to the public in a referendum for a vote. In a polarized political environment such as the one now present in the United Kingdom, a citizens’ assembly may be resorted to as a means of engendering public trust in the political process. It is, I think, one of the ways faith in our broken democracy may be restored. But can it work in England?
19. I believe it can. I speak here not as an expert; this blog post is merely a little nudge to the experts, in the hopes that they may take my humble observations a step further. Please let me conclude this blog post by telling you of an experience of a country that was just as divided as the UK, the Republic of Ireland. The divisive issue was abortion. For many decades Ireland had one of the most restrictive laws on abortion in the whole of Europe. The controversy started in 1983, when Ireland amended her constitution to provide equal rights to the life of a woman and an unborn child. The amendment, the 8th amendment of the Irish constitution banned abortion, including prohibiting politicians from legislating for any possible change in the law. The consequence of this law was that in the subsequent years, there were many high-profile cases in Ireland, which exposed the grotesque harm the amendment caused to girls and women. These cases ranged from denying women lifesaving cancer treatment because they were pregnant, to prevent women who for example, had had a diagnosis of fatal foetal anomaly, from aborting unviable pregnancies.
20. In one particular instance, as it happened, a young Galway dentist, one Savita Halappanavar, tragically died because the lifesaving procedure of an abortion was denied her in accordance to the law of Ireland as it stood at the time; a decision which outraged the entire country. The ensuing controversy gave impetus to the idea of a citizens’ assembly as a means of breaking the stalemate over abortion; it should be remembered that this very sensitive issue had dogged Irish politics for many decades. It was in these circumstances that, in 2016, the Irish Parliament established a citizens’ assembly to deliberate, among other things, the 8th amendment which outlawed abortion. The Guardian, keeping to the run of the Brexit debate, recently published an excellent article on the Irish experience of a citizens’ assembly. Quoting directly from the Guardian, “The 99 citizen members of the assembly were selected to be electorally representative and included people who were in favour of the change, some who were against and some who were undecided. The findings were published in a report at the end of 2017 and debated in parliament in 2018. Though the findings weren’t initially popular with the public, the result of last year’s referendum [2018] – 66.6% wanted to repeal the 8th amendment – was very close to the assembly’s 64% in favour of having no restrictions on termination in early pregnancy.” The Guardian found that transparency and fairness was and is probably the best argument for a citizens’ assembly. I warmly commend the idea of a citizens’ assembly for your kind consideration.