This week we’re looking at the agenda of constitutional reform. What exactly should that agenda cover, and should it look beyond government, parliament and courts?
Constitutional reform is a recurring theme in UK politics. Debates regularly surface about changing the electoral system, reforming the House of Lords, or redefining the role of the courts. These conversations often focus on the traditional institutions of the state: government, parliament and the judiciary.
But is that focus too narrow? When considering how power operates in a modern democracy, should constitutional thinking extend beyond these formal branches of government? Might institutions such as the media, financial sector or other centres of influence also deserve attention when we discuss constitutional design?
This week, Daniel Hind joins host Alan Renwick to explore a fresh argument that the constitutional reform agenda needs to be broadened. The discussion is based on a new article in The Political Quarterly that calls for a more expansive understanding of how democratic power should be structured and overseen.
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[00:00:05] Alan Renwick: Hello, this is UCL Uncovering Politics, and this week we're looking at the agenda of constitutional reform. What exactly should that agenda cover?
Hello, my name is Alan Renwick, and welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics, the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London.
Constitutional reform is a perennial topic among political junkies in the UK. As in many other countries proposals abound to change the electoral system, reform the House of Lords, empower or perhaps reign in the courts, and a host of other issues. But how far should the constitutional reform agenda reach?
Is it just about the three traditional branches of the state: executive, legislature and judiciary, or in other words, government, parliament and courts, or when we are thinking about structures of power and government, should we be venturing more widely to include, say, the media or the banks? Well, a new article in our partner journal, the Political Quarterly argues that a more expansive approach is essential.
The author of that article is Daniel Hind, who is a fellow in the Democracy Collaborative's Next System Project in Washington DC and also honorary visiting fellow at the University of York. He's the author of several acclaimed books on constitutional matters, and I'm delighted that he joins me now.
Dan, welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics, it's great to have you on. And let's begin with the core claim that you argue for in your Political Quarterly article. You say that we need a wider view of the constitution and the agenda of constitutional reform than is often presumed. So before we get into the argument for that view could you maybe kind of say what actually is the view that you're defending here, what else ought we to include in discussion of constitutional reform?
[00:02:16] Daniel Hind: Yeah, thank you very much for having me on to talk about this, Alan. So what I wanted to do in the article really was to step back from our existing institutional array, from the kind of the repertoire of institutions that, that we have and that we, we call the Constitution and think about like, like what is the role of the Constitution?
And it strikes me that the role of the Constitution is to organise and direct sovereignty. Now that raises a number of questions like, what exactly do we mean by sovereignty? Let's just say, do we mean supreme authority in the state? And that raises the question, well, who should exercise sovereignty?
And again, let's take it for now that we believe in the idea of popular sovereignty, the idea that the people should rule. And the other question it raises, well, what does it require for a a person a plural or individual subject to be sovereign? Right. What are the powers required to be sovereign?
And if you start from that, what I call a sovereigntist perspective, what I think you find when you look at our current institutional arrangement, as you say of parliament, government, and courts, is that a great deal of what traditionally would've been understood to belong to the sovereign has kind of vanished from our, as it were, from our political consciousness, right?
We have a waking day of politics where we talk in terms of legislation and the courts and the activities of government. But we also have this kind of dream world, right, where things like the organisation of public discourse and therefore the creation of public opinion, the creation of our common sense happens in a kind of constitutional darkness.
Things like the allocation of credit money are left in the private sector when on a, a pre-modern conception of the political and of the sovereign. Obviously, the creation and the allocation of credit is a sovereign prerogative, right? It's just something that you don't leave in individuals to or commercial organisations to do in the marketplace, it belongs to the sovereign.
Now, one of the ways I try and illuminate this is by kind of bringing in Hobbes's Leviathan and his account of the rights and what he calls the rights of the offices of the sovereign. And I think it's quite useful to use that slightly antique language and to, because it helps us, as it were, to estrange us from our current arrangements.
What would Hobbes make of a situation where the nominal sovereign has no immediate, or, you know, no kind of unmediated means, as it were, to discover the facts of any given matter. It's reliant on, essentially, unaccountable intermediaries for its information about the wider world and essentially is not in a position to appoint its own counsellors.
And I think that really kind of calls into question the extent to which we, we enjoy pop, you know, substantive, popular sovereignty.
[00:05:23] Alan Renwick: Before we get a little bit further into that particular point you use there several times the phrase, what belongs to the sovereign? What does that mean?
[00:05:30] Daniel Hind: Mm-hmm.
[00:05:31] Alan Renwick: And how do we define it?
[00:05:34] Daniel Hind: Well, so I mean, the Hobbesian answer would be to say, what must the sovereign have in order to maintain sovereignty, right? So the overwhelming concern in Hobbes is like, what does it, what, like how do you ensure the security and stability of the polity, of the realm? And his answer is, well, you need an you know, an o overpowering sovereign to prevent the eruption of civil war, right?
So when I say what belongs to the sovereign, what I'm saying is like what do we as a popular sovereign, if you like, what do we require? What do we need to have in our institutional apparatus to ensure that when we say, oh, well we, you know, we are a a society. That in which we enjoy popular sovereignty, that we're not just kind of mouthing empty words, right?
There is substance to sovereignty in virtue of a particular set of rights and duties that we take on as constituent individuals within this sovereign body that mean that our claims to sovereignty are not empty. Because you can imagine a monarch where actually the advisors are in charge, right? They've been they've been captured by their advisors. This is a sort of a perennial in early modern political rhetoric. The idea that the king's advisors have led him astray and so on, right?
Now, again, let's revive that, that notion and say, well, you know, to what extent are we fit to, you know, are we fit sovereigns or have we been misled by our advisors? Are we, as it were senile, are we, you know, defective, cognitively defective and unable to rule?
[00:07:07] Alan Renwick: So, so yeah. So you are arguing that one of the key things that we need to attend to when we're thinking about this focus on the, the needs of the sovereign is the kind of, mm-hmm. The information system through which we find out about the world around us, through which we find out about the kind of, I mean, I guess I'm expressing this in sort of more modern words, just to to bridge the gap between the right. You just
[00:07:33] Daniel Hind: don't have to, you don't have to cosplay it.
[00:07:35] Alan Renwick: Bridging the gap between the 17th century and today here, so we need to understand the information system, the system through which we come to form our opinions, and we need to care very much about the quality of that system in order to be able to say that we do genuinely hold power in our hands as citizens, rather than transferring that power to the media moguls or to whoever it might be, who otherwise is shaping the content of that system.
[00:08:02] Daniel Hind: That's right. And again, I think, you know, I do think Hobbes is very, very helpful here because when he sets out to describe the rights and dues of the sovereign, like he's, like, I'm a partial reader, but my reading of him is that his overriding concern is with the quality of the information environment, right?
And there are two reasons for that, right? The security of the realm depends on, like, in his view, the suppression of seditious doctrines. Like he's an anti-Republican because he thinks, you know, lunatics in Oxford and Cambridge kind of caused the Civil War by talking about Republicanism and talking about Rome too much.
But he's also deeply concerned about the quality of the information system in the sense of the counsel that the king or the monarch or the sovereign is going to rely on. The sovereign has to be able to appoint his own counsellors. That's a really crucial point it seems to me, because we do not appoint our own counsellors.
We have appointed counsels appointed to us by either the markets or by by the sort of dynamics of public media provision, right? Where we don't have, we don't actually have any real insight into the the decisions that go into who is then elected to be or has chosen to be are counsellors
[00:09:12] Alan Renwick: And counsellors, clear in, in, in case listeners are unsure, we need mean counsellors with an E here, so that these are our advisors are.
[00:09:21] Daniel Hind: That's right, counsellors, yeah. So, you know, the people who give counsel to the king, not local government figures. I was rereading the section where Hobbes is talking about how crucially important, the cardinal importance of deciding who is to speak to multitudes of people, right?
Now, implicitly Hobbes is a monarchist and he's concerned about the multitudes of people, as it were, as a subject body to be ruled, right? But our concerns are supposedly, and I think they should be democratic. So when we're talking about multitudes of people, we're talking about the nominal sovereign of the state.
Who gets to speak to large audiences, whether through decisions made at the BBC or decisions made in newspapers or crucially decisions made in the algorithmic management of social media that's simply outside the purview of the multi, the supposedly ruling multitudes. And I think that's a really crucial point for us to grasp that it's not enough to be able to vote if we do not have effective oversight and control of the information on which we'll make voting decisions.
And the problem is not simply an individualistic one. The problem is analogous to the problem of pollution in the sense that it's not enough for me to be well informed, right? But let's, like we're all vain and we're all narcissistic, we all think we're well informed, right? The problem is not that as an individual I'm, I know, I can see through the lies, I can say. I'm affected by the extent to which misinformation, disinformation, laziness, negligence, anti-democratic movements in the communicative sphere are influential on others.
That's the key thing for me. And which is why I think it's important that we move beyond individualistic approaches to the problem of misinformation, disinformation, and we move to a, you know, an all population response. And this touches on one of the other prerogatives of sovereignty, which I don't talk about in the piece, but which is like the means of peace and defense, right?
The ability to defend ourselves against foreign invasion. Foreign subversion. Turn on this question of like, what do we know? There's a huge amount of modern warfare, which is essentially information warfare, okay? And at the moment we are, I think in our, in this country, very vulnerable. to forms of cognitive infiltration, cognitive subversion, both from enemies, foreign and enemies domestic that needs, that we do need to take very seriously.
[00:11:43] Alan Renwick: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:11:44] Daniel Hind: And
[00:11:44] Alan Renwick: Yeah, so, but before we get further into the implications of that discussion, I think it would be useful just to, to bring in a second dimension of what you talk about in the article. So you talk about kind of two areas in which you argue we should expand our sense of the Constitution.
And one of them is to this area of information and the space of opinion formation and so on. And the other, perhaps quite curiously, given what we've been discussing so far, is the creation of money which feels like a very different kind of thing. How does that fit into the overall picture?
[00:12:19] Daniel Hind: Well, I mean, this is, you know, this is to some extent, an opportunity that one can take from my chosen text for the sermon that I was giving in the article, which is, you know, the Hobbes's account of sovereignty. If you go back and you take a kind of, if you took a historical view of money and money creation in particular, what you find is something that Christine Desan talks about as a constitutional theory of money, right?
And the idea there is that money is a, is as it were, the act product of sovereign authority, right? It's the sovereign who says what constitutes a coin, what constitutes legal tender in the realm, right?
And what we've managed to do through like a very complicated process of historical renegotiation and theoretical, what should we call it, sophistication, right? We've managed to create a world in which people say with a straight face that money is veil on exchange, that is somehow related to and subordinate to the operations of what's understood to be a private economy, right?
And you find this in, in, in sort of classical political economy. You find this in modern macroeconomics, you find it in Marxism as well. This idea that money doesn't really matter. Money isn't, money is sort of, it's, there's something sort of, I dunno, vaporous about money.
Now the reality of the situation is that money still matters and money is created by private institutions in our society and it's created for overwhelmingly commercial reasons. Now, what this leads to in practice is a situation in which the private sector banks have been able to create vast amounts of money to lend against residential and commercial property, and essentially to impose a kind of land tax, a kind of renovated form of land tax on the rest of the population in the form of interest and repayment schedules.
And one, one of the features of like the broad field of of economics is this inability to dis distinguish between rent and profit through, through market exchange, right? Now, if you take a sovereigntist view, you say, well, actually an awful lot of what is, what constitutes rent is a consequence of banks being able to, to essentially to create money ex nihilo, right?
Now, money is always created ex nihilo, the question is, you know, by whom and under whose authority and in what kinds of epistemic conditions. It would come as very surprising to a lot of people to think that money is essentially created by banks. It's not lent by banks as intermediaries between their savers and their borrowers
The version of banking that we have in our heads is a legitimating fairy tale. So these two issues are deeply intertwined to my view, because I don't think the current mon monetary regime could survive in a, as it were, a democratic information regime. If people understood what money was, where it comes from, how it operates, frankly, they wouldn't have to spend so much on their housing costs.
[00:15:26] Alan Renwick: Would I be right in thinking that your argument here is not that these two areas that we've been talking about, the sort of information creation of opinion area on the one hand and the creation of money area, on the other hand, you're not arguing that these are the kind of two most important bits of the overall constitutional structure? What I think you're arguing is that these are two bits, of two very important bits of the constitutional structure that are unusually not subject to democratic control of your, like, or not subject to the control of the popular sovereign. Is that a fair characterisation?
[00:16:05] Daniel Hind: So that's interesting. I think that, I am very comfortable with the idea, as it were of the supremacy of legislation, right? I think that the lawmaking capacity is and should be key. Where I think, where I would step back from saying they're not the most important areas, I think in the question of communications, media and communications, a reformed system of communications would transform the way in which the legislature functions, right?
So I don't think that they are, as it were, separable, they're not modules that one might be able to, you know, in a kind of distinct way deal with, without affecting the other elements of the system. And similarly, I think if you have a, if you have a reform system of communications and you have a, therefore if you, like, you have a reform system of monetary management or monetary fiscal management, that's going to change the the substance of the, of our political economy, and it does at least open the way towards a substantively post capitalist economic order.
[00:17:13] Alan Renwick: Right.
[00:17:14] Daniel Hind: The details of which are, you know, the great kind of get out clause are to be de determined by popular deliberation, right? I don't propose to sort of describe a post-capitalist political economy here and now, but I think that if you take money and media into consideration in your constitutional design, in your constitutional architecture, you open the way to forms or new forms of experimentation that are like, I just are profoundly important.
[00:17:43] Alan Renwick: Yeah.
[00:17:44] Daniel Hind: Yeah. So I, again I'm a, I'm an Englishman and I believe in parliamentary supremacy and I'm not about to start calling that into question but parliamentary supremacy exists within a particular regime of knowledge. And that regime of knowledge, once that changes, parliament inevitably will change.
[00:18:01] Alan Renwick: Yeah. But I mean, I guess I'm thinking as you've already said, you don't talk in the article about control over legitimate violence, control over the military.
[00:18:12] Daniel Hind: Mm-hmm.
[00:18:12] Alan Renwick: I mean, is that because we already have de democratic mechanisms of control that the sovereign is already clearly in charge there through the legislature and the executive, and therefore we don't need to pay so much attention there, whereas we don't have that kind of control in the case of communications and in the case of money creation?
[00:18:34] Daniel Hind: That's interesting. I think, the honest answer is I don't talk about defense because of the word that there, there is only so much that one can say in an article. It is true that it more generally you know, I have, I've tended to shy away from, the hard questions of defense and security to some extent.
I don't think, again, I don't think that the distinction is in, is entirely sort of clear. A reformed system of communications would, it seems to me, make us more resilient in certain ways that are extremely pertinent to issues of national security. And it's something that I think should be explored further.
There's a, there is a thriving defense, industrial defense security nexus that are talking about questions about how we deal with things like hybrid warfare. And I think it would be very useful to democratise that discourse because I do think that a a better informed, you know, more engaged, more interested democratic public is a national security resource in a sense.
I, again I'm not, I wasn't there in a, in an article seeking to, to describe in detail a complete different constitutional order. I think it would be for us to decide exactly what implications a different regime of knowledge would have for our defense security policy.
I think it's obvious that there are lots of things about it which are extremely strange at first glance, like the status of our nuclear deterrent. The relationship with a, an increasingly erratic global hyper power in the form of the United States. Like, these things are all things that need urgent attention and I think that there is a sort of queasy unanimity at the moment in parliament about not talking about them seriously. And I do think that will have to change.
[00:20:25] Alan Renwick: Okay. One more question before we go deeper into some of the kind of contemporary policy implications of your analysis, which is, what's the value of drawing in Thomas Hobbes to this discussion? I guess one might think
[00:20:40] Daniel Hind: Mm-hmm.
[00:20:40] Alan Renwick: You know, he's, firstly, he's an 17th century author, so he's quite hard to read for contemporary readers. And also he's just living in a vastly different context. You know, he's not a Democrat, clearly.
He's he's his context is
[00:20:54] Daniel Hind: mm-hmm.
[00:20:54] Alan Renwick: Is wholly different from the one that we're living in. What's the value of going to him rather than just thinking, okay, well we are in a democracy. The fundamental principle of democracy is one of popular sovereignty and,
[00:21:08] Daniel Hind: mm-hmm.
[00:21:08] Alan Renwick: And taking it from there.
[00:21:12] Daniel Hind: Well, I think one of the, one of the advantages of looking at our present arrangements through the lens of Hobbes, and in many ways I'm not a Hobbesian, I'm not sympathetic to a lot of his positions, but one of the great advantages it seems to me of looking through Hobbesian eyes our, at our current system is that I think he's very useful in demystifying the idea of sovereignty. I think we've fall fallen for a kind of structural mystique where we think that sovereignty in his, in institutions, this is idea that sovereignty is a quality of abstract states.
And there's a very interesting sort of gen genealogy about the idea that Hobbes is not actually, I don't think, a prophet of the abstract state. What Hobbes stresses and what he's like, what he's very clear about is that the sovereign is a person, right? Sovereign is a, is an individual or a collective person who is capable of action.
Structures are not capable of action, structures are animated by people both collectively and individually. And then once you step back from the particular institutional array that we have and we like, there you, there is this sort of, there is this sort of fantasy world where we talk about the emergence of the abstract state and the modern state is a sovereign state and so on and so forth.
And this is, these are sort of, they're a bit of a salad it seems to me, people decide to do things. Sovereignty is a descriptive category as well as a normative category. It's about like who has control of the situation. We've seen in, you know, in, in recent months, partly because change of, changes in the information technology we have, we've seen that actually the people who are in charge of events turn out to be very different from the people that we thought they were at the time, right?
Now that's in incre, it's incredibly useful. It seems to me, to step back and say, who are the people who decide and how do they decide? What are the mechanisms, formal and informal through which decisions of public significance are made and, if value, if we don't like that picture, how do we go about, how do we go about changing it?
So I think we don't have to use, we don't have to use Hobbes. You're absolutely right. We could just say, let's start from the principle of popular sovereignty. But let, but crucially, let's not succumb to the modern superstition that popular sovereignty is a quality that states have, right? States are not sovereign. That's a, an artifice of international relations. If you,
[00:23:35] Alan Renwick: And I guess you're also saying that just going to the worldview of someone who has a very different worldview from our own is just very useful for jolting us out of our presumptions that we have forgotten to notice. So it's just quite, it's just very helpful to
[00:23:49] Daniel Hind: Yeah. Yeah. And it's very bracing to see very contemporary concerns about the organisation of the government of doctrines. Alongside questions about how how the heirs of deceased parents are to be treated. You know, there's a load of things in Hobbes that are, that seem genuinely pre-modern or even medieval or classical. But there are things there I think that are of, you know, con continuing resonance.
[00:24:15] Alan Renwick: Good. Definitely. Yeah. Let's move on then to kind of contemporary policy debates. And so in the realm of communications, I, you've already talked about the BBC and the press and AI and social media and all sorts of different areas there.
But in the article, you focus particularly on the BBC and the question of how the BBC should be governed. So, what does your approach imply about how we should go about thinking about BBC governance?
[00:24:50] Daniel Hind: Yes. Well, that's a big question. I mean, the first thing to say about the BBC is that, and as I say in the article, it's very striking that all the political parties knew in 2024 that the BBC was to have a new charter in this parliament. And there was almost no discussion or reference to the BBC in their political communications, let alone in their manifestos.
So the idea that the future public media might be a matter worth discussing during the general election simply like did not feature, right? And that, that seems to me to hint at something really. Problematic about a public institution that has such an obtrusive presence in our life on one in one sense, but is almost invisible in another.
We know almost nothing about its internal workings. We, every now and again, the relationship with the government breaks up. It breaks out as a sort of scandal, a sort of fever of headlines about government interference or about, you know, antics of senior political appointees in the BBC and so on.
But, in general, we have almost no insight into, its, into its workings. It's a sort of a black box for editorial decision making. Now, I'm not saying this as a criticism of the people who work at the BBC in particular. I'm just saying that it's deeply problematic that we rely on and we pay for an institution that we know almost nothing about.
So the first thing that I think implies for our relationship with the BBC is that we do need to, how should one say, pour an awful lot of daylight in on the magic. We need to open up the BBC as a space in which citizens routinely, regularly, and in structured ways, talk to media professionals about what they're doing and why they're doing it, right?
Now, as you know, the BBC is a is a compound institution. It has a cultural, educational as well as a sort of informational mission. So we are not going to, we can't talk about all aspects of this. But I think cultural dynamism and democracy, like they're not the strange bedfellows that people make them out to be.
The idea that, oh, well if the people are involved, the art will be trash. Like it's difficult to sustain right on, on the historical record. So, but to put that aside and talk about news and current affairs, like if we are interested in, and we are keen to promote popular sovereignty, it seems to me that we should be involved in the creation of our shared understanding of the world, right?
Now, one way of doing this would be to say, every individual who supports the BBC in some capacity, or is it as it were, like reliant on the BBC in some capacity, should enjoy equal rights to engage in its operations and governance, right?
And that might take the form of an individual, on the one hand, a very shallow, broad power to shape editorial budgets as BBC, that would be the idea that I'm particularly interested in something. I don't think it's getting enough coverage. So I support a, an independent project that, that pursues that issue, whatever it happens to be.
And we can talk about like, why do I think that's so important? In a bit, if you like. But I do think it's really crucial that we understand the need for all of us to have some sense of an, of a quality of voice in the national conversation. And that's in a mediated society with 70 million people, that's, it seems to be one way of approaching some sort of of a quality of voice in the sense of the Athenian sense of being able to speak up, right, about matters that concern us and having a, an equal right to do so, equal power to do so.
And the other element of this would be equal eligibility to sit on panels, elected randomly, elected, you know, through random selection, that would sit inside the BBC and would be involved in these structured conversations with BBC staff. And that would perhaps be involved in structured conversations with outside experts, with elected representatives, with the general public in ways that create new communicative spaces that are organised around non elites, organised like by drops from the ocean of the people, okay?
So little drops of people are inside the institution and they are then in a communicative, iterative relationship with the membership or the citizenry as a whole, okay? And that the fact that the citizens citizenry and the membership are kind of co-equal is an important part about what I would argue for, which is that we're used to thinking of cooperatives and mutuals in the context of the a private economy. But obviously as the corporation begins as it were in the state sector. It's like charter corporations are the origins of the modern limited liability co kind of corporation.
There's no reason why we couldn't, as it would have chartered corporatives. That are given public funds to pursue a public good. But to do so on the basis of a, an empowered membership constituted by notions of equality, liberty and the exercise of these pro-democratic, explicitly pro-democratic powers.
[00:30:11] Alan Renwick: And is the direct involvement of members of the public in decision making processes that you've described there for the case of the BBC, is that particularly important in the case of the BBC or is this a model that you would think also applies and perhaps equally applies to o other areas of kind of state activity?
And we, should we be thinking about this in the governance of, I don't know, the NHS or governance of the school system? I mean, is the BBC particularly important for this kind of approach.
[00:30:47] Daniel Hind: So I'm, you know, I'm very wary of put, sort of putting up a one size fits all approach to, as it were, broad public sector reform. The educational system and the and the NHS are obviously very different kinds of beasts from the BBC.
They do different things and there's a different relationship between the public and the professional staff and the government in, in, in those three cases. So I'm not se suggesting for a moment that we should just sort of graph this onto every element of public administration.
I don't think that, in the context of certainly medical science, I don't think the idea of how should I wanna say insulated technocratic control is a particularly safe one. I think that there is space in which there should be more of a structured conversation between scientific experts and the publics who fund them.
There's a very interesting book from the early sixties called The Government of Science where a, you know, a very important figure in the American Science Administration says, look, if you can control the 3% of GDP that's spent on scientific research and development, you pretty much control the society's future, right?
Now, at the moment, decisions about scientific investment are overwhelmingly made far away from popular oversight and control, okay? And then things like AI are sprung on us as the future. And it's like, well, how did that happen? It's, oh yeah, because we were investing hundreds of millions of pounds behind your back, or dollars, in this case, we were investing all this money behind, behind your back.
We're creating this technology, which is kind of ready to completely transform everybody's subjective experience of life, maybe, there's a lot of boosterism as well going on. But the point, the general point is that huge numbers of huge sort of areas of our shared future are basically being decided now without an anyone in a position to say, hang on a minute, is that a really, is that a good idea?
So, now, having said I don't think it is one size fits all everywhere, I think in the context of banking reform, then I think absolutely, yeah. I think it would be really useful to have that mixture of deep engagement by by ordinary people in the administrative workings of financial institutions combined with a more general, more casually exercised power to shape and inflect.
Investment decisions say, so you could imagine a regional investment bank that has a mandate to improve conditions of life in a particular place, right? And that could be organised in such a way that the re the residents all had some say over how money was spent and that a group of them chosen at random would be embedded in the institution to ensure that nothing untoward was happening.
One of the great strengths of randomly selected bodies in the past has been their ability to break up elite collusion. Which happens when people are able to do things outside of popular oversight and control. And I don't know if you've experienced local government in England ever, but the idea that you should have randomly people in the room when decisions are made seems like an eminently sensible.
[00:33:53] Alan Renwick: And that gets to exactly the question that is, is coming up in my mind, which is that we have two mechanisms by which we have sought to ensure a democratic control over decision making. One is the mechanism of representative democracy where we elect representatives to do this job for us. And the other is the mechanism of sortition, of randomly selecting members of the public so that people who are not members of an elite can perform this role.
And I guess what I'm wondering is, what is your thinking on the respective roles of these two mechanisms? I don't think you're arguing that we should get rid of the representative democracy mechanism. But when is it more important for us to have more of the sortition element, and when is it maybe more important for us to have more of the representative element?
[00:34:43] Daniel Hind: I mean, a good rule of thumb it seems to me is that where at the moment we rely on appointment, then we should look very seriously at random selection as a parallel mode for populating spaces of real authority and power. At the moment, government mandates the existence of the BBC as a, you know, a public body with public purposes, and then leave the BBC board essentially to fill out executive roles within the BBC as it wishes on the basis of professional expertise, on the basis of experience, whatever it happens to be. They have their lights by which they judge people.
The concern is, by the way that they are appointed people on the basis of their ideological affinity towards a a kind of broadly Thatch political and social settlement, which most people in the country have rejected, but which still seems to, you know, run rampant through the major parties and many of our major institutions. It doesn't seem to me at all strange to say, well, as well as appointing people, we also appoint boards selected at random.
Because you might say, well, yes, but you know, these individuals are incredibly special and clever and brilliant and essentially could provide a sort of aristocratic argument for appointment. But the fact is that 30 people are cleverer than one person. They just know more, and given adequate resources they are likely to come up with better arguments, ideas, areas of interest, than any given individual, however brilliant.
Much better for our aristocrats to be in a conversation with democratic bodies than to leave them to their own devices, which really means leave them to the tender mercies of the the governing party of the day, actually, maybe with a bit of a look in from the opposition.
So that seems, yeah. Just to finish the point, it seems to be. It doesn't seem to be a huge leap to say that where at the moment we delegate to quangos, we delegate to unelected bodies on the basis of their, you know, their expertise or whatever that we say, well actually, let's run a parallel system for the time being. And by the way, I would, you know, I'd quibble with the idea that these are two democratic mechanisms, voting and
[00:36:56] Alan Renwick: mm-hmm.
[00:36:56] Daniel Hind: Random selection, like random selection is a democratic
[00:36:59] Alan Renwick: mm-hmm.
[00:37:00] Daniel Hind: Mechanism as is like assembly and person, those are the two democratic mechanisms that we have. Election used to be understood and I think it's usefully understood now as a kind of aristocratic relic. It was a way of choosing people on the basis of their outstanding personal capacities.
[00:37:21] Alan Renwick: But the unique feature of election is that it is accompanied by accountability. So, the people whom you elect, you can choose not to elect the next time round if they don't do what you want. Whereas people chosen in a process of sortation there's no mechanism. And I guess even more I mean, I often think even much more seriously than that. The people who are organising a process of sortition and are organising kind of citizens assemblies and these kinds of things, they are not accountable.
[00:37:48] Daniel Hind: Mm-hmm.
[00:37:48] Alan Renwick: And there's a danger if too much power is put in the hands of these kinds of processes, that they are actually controlled by the people who organise those processes, not by the participants. And that the lack of a mechanism of accountability there, is potentially a problem down the line.
[00:38:06] Daniel Hind: Yeah. Well, so there's a couple things to say there. I mean, firstly on the question of. I take seriously the idea of legitimacy that derives from accountability. I do think that's, as it were, a, an ace card that the defenders of the election of legislatures can play. However, in practical terms, I think we should be alive to the fact that not being elected next time might not be the worst thing in the world.
If you are delivering for an oligarchy and you expect to make tens of millions of pounds, in the oligarchic circuits, which we know now are extensive, secret and criminal, right, then actually, well, I, you know, so I betray the electors and I, it was embarrassing when I got voted out. But yeah, it doesn't really matter.
Do, I mean, like, I'm not convinced that election is the great safeguard of public, of the, you know, the public good that we sometimes set it up to be. So we have to be wary of that. And only question of accountability, again, I think there's a distinction to be drawn with legislation and discursive spaces.
Where we're writing laws, we are trying, we're coming up with our best description of what the social order in terms of rewards and penalties should look like, right? It's a very, it's a very final and almost solemn process that's in involved there.
Where you are in the business of, as it would be in the case of the BBC, making decisions about what's interesting, what should be given more attention by, you know, by the personnel involved in investigation and analysis at the BBC, say. If we put them in a, an editorial role of some kind, or we ask the general public to do in a more diffuse and general way, as I suggested earlier when we're doing that, these aren't irrevocable decisions, they could be mistaken.
You could get the priorities wrong, you could be misguided, you could be wrongheaded, and that would be a correctable process, and I think that is and again, the point about captured by a administrative bureaucracy is a real problem. But one of the beauties of our, of a system that used random selection extensively would that you would multiply the number of people who had direct experience of serving on these panels.
And to the extent that the bureaucratic administration was defective or untrustworthy in some way I, it would be very hard to keep that secret. It's turned out it's quite easy to keep the degree of control that private interests have over the media and over our political process. It's been quite easy to keep that very well subdued because there are only 600 legislatures, legislators. There's not that many people, and with those only a fraction involved in the sharp end of drafting legislation and ex, you know, using executive authority.
So, thousands upon thousands of people who've had direct experience of what it is to wield some form of communicative power makes, it seems to me, it makes secret or surreptitious capture of a democratic process that much more difficult.
[00:41:11] Alan Renwick: We,
[00:41:11] Daniel Hind: I mean, the final thing to say. The one place where random selection was used in a highly consequential space that we know of as well documented was in the Athenian Grand Counsel, and there's absolutely no suggestion there that they were pushed about by their secretariat, it just didn't happen, they just, now you could say, well, 70 million people is different from whatever it was, a hundred thousand or 50,000 citizens. There are differences of scale I grant you, but nevertheless, I don't think we should underestimate the extent to which. We as in like quote, ordinary people can smell a rat, I think people are perfectly capable of doing that.
[00:41:46] Alan Renwick: One final question, if I may, we must wrap up, but this is so intriguing and so as you mentioned, the BBC charter is up for renewal. The government issued a green paper on its ideas here a few months ago, and that contained some thoughts about bringing the public into BBC governance, thoughts about Citizens Assemblies, but in a very, kind of limited and tame way. The idea was that the government might use citizens assemblies and processes such as these, sorry, the BBC might use the, these processes in order to help its kind of engagement with its audience not in a kind of fundamental part of its governance structures.
So, the guest question is, how do you persuade Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, to be bold and be brave here and go for something more radical? You know, those in power are always very cautious of giving away power. Always very worried of also just about new structures. How do you persuade her that this more radical path is the one that she should take?
[00:42:51] Daniel Hind: I mean the, you know, the, actually want to say the facetious answer would be to say, to put her in the room with the Lisa Nandy, who was saying in 2020 that she wanted to create a cooperative BBC. It's been a, it's a long standing feature of a certain tradition in the Labor Party that she belongs to, to say, we think cooperatives are good.
We think mutualism is a good idea. But then to shrink back from actually doing it ever when they have a chance to do it. So I, you know, I have limited faith in my ability to persuade Lisa Nandy of the need for a, an engaged and empowered public in the BBC, given that she hasn't persuaded herself.
But that aside, the, the references to Citizens Assemblies in the green paper are a bit like, you know, they're a bit like, there's jokes about, you know, how to make the perfect martini. Like you can't put any vermouth in it. Essentially, you've gotta wave the vermouth bottle at the glass through sun, strong sunlight, and that's the perfect martini,
The kind of, the acknowledgement of the need for the public to be in any way involved in the operations of public media is like the vermouth in a per perfect martini, there's hardly anything there. It's almost the pure gin of Aris aristocratic control.
And, so, like what do we do about that practically? I mean, the Media Reform Coalition ha are gonna launch a, an alternative green paper. They may well have done so by the time this comes out. And I would just urge listeners to go and look at those proposals and think why is it that civil society, which, like is not encouraged to think deeply and hard about the structure of public media is nevertheless able with on its own resources to produce more in the way of creative solutions for the BBC as it faces a kind of digital future than the combined resources of the BBC and the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport.
It's not just the, it's not just the culture secretary, the BBC itself has said almost nothing about how it can change it to an environment where people are no longer using broadcast primarily, but are reliant on digital platforms of one kind or another. There there's like zero interest in the BBC in talking about its future because it seems to me a sustainable future of the BBC will have to be one in which we are much more actively involved and much more actively engaged.
So rather than use the empty language of, you know, wouldn't mutualism be nice in, in opposition, we'd like say, well, yeah let's think about what a public sector mutual looks like. What does that mean in reality? Because my contention to you is if you look at large private sector mutuals, election doesn't cut it.
Elect election does not deliver active and direct engagement in the business by the members of the nationwide or the cooperative group, right? It doesn't. There needs to be much more granular much more molecular to use a what used to be a buzzword, right? Much more molecular involvement by ordinary people in these structures if they are to reflect and promote the public good.
[00:45:48] Alan Renwick: We could continue this conversation for much, much longer, but we have already got well past our time limit. So thank you Dan, so much and let's hope we have an opportunity to continue this conversation at some point in the future. We have been discussing the article, Popular Sovereignty and the Constitutional Reform Agenda, published in the Political Quarterly and currently available on Early View on the Political Quarterly website.
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