By Keith Aitken in Edinburgh | 11 November 2013
Policy making by public bodies in Scotland should be opened up to a much more representative cross-section of the population, according to a report commissioned by the Left-leaning Jimmy Reid Foundation.
The report, from the foundation’s Commission on Fair Access to Political Influence, called for: decisions to be devolved to the most local level possible; participatory budgeting; more accessible consultation processes; more open methods of choosing governing bodies; and public policy to be shaped by ‘mini publics’ rather than expert groups.
Where such processes cannot be deployed, it said, public bodies should be required to set out publicly the reasons for not using them.
The report, Government by the people, daid that some 70% of the Scottish population earns less than £24,000 a year, but that only 3% of the people invited to influence public policy-making come from that income group. Current procedures, it said, also favour those Scots most able to travel to Edinburgh, where the Scottish Parliament and Government are headquartered.
Commission chair Larry Flanagan, who heads Scotland’s main teaching union, the Educational Institute of Scotland, said it was wrong to confuse political disengagement with lack of interest.
‘The fact that large swathes of the population have been conditioned to accept a spectator role in political matters does not mean that given the opportunity they would decline to be players.
‘Being able to influence decisions equates to a degree of power and those currently with power are notoriously poor at sharing it with others,’ Flanagan said.
‘By ignoring the contribution that we all can make to better decision making, by ignoring the voices outside the circled wagons of defensiveness, party politics, self-interest, and, occasionally, self-delusion, our current political practice falls short of being a living, vibrant, inclusive democracy.’
Robin McAlpine, the foundation’s director, said that both technologies and proven practices existed that were capable of tying the Scottish public more closely into every stage of policy-making, and that the report was about how to make best use of such methods.
‘There is a strong argument to make that if these proposals were implemented it would be the most radical change to democracy in Scotland since universal suffrage,’ McAlpine said.
‘We should not underestimate just how different government would be if it was involving ordinary citizens in decision-making and relegating commercial and vested interests to just one more group with their own opinions.’
McAlpine claimed that existing public policy reflected the agenda of the professional classes. ‘We wouldn't have a bedroom tax, the privatisation of Royal Mail, the renewal of Trident or the outsourcing of public services. These are all the agendas of a tiny elite in society.’
