A spectre is haunting Westminster – the spectre of the citizens’ assembly. This unkillable bad idea is making the headlines again because of the suggestion that, when Labour comes to power, citizens’ assemblies could be used to develop new policy proposals to put before Parliament. Fittingly, given its essentially anti-political and anti-democratic nature, this idea has been mooted by Sue Gray, Keir Starmer’s ‘chief of staff’, a woman who has wielded enormous power but who holds no elected office and has never offered herself for any public vote, rather than by Starmer or any of his frontbenchers.

Creating such assemblies may not be official Labour policy. It appears that Gray was either freelancing, or had agreed to float a trial balloon on behalf of the Labour leadership, when she put forward the ‘transformational’ plan; by the end of Monday, citizens’ assemblies were already being briefed against by Labour’s National Executive Committee. Luke Akehurst, a member of the NEC, said that ‘citizens’ assemblies are a stupid idea’.

Labour’s Luke Akehurst said that ‘citizens’ assemblies are a stupid idea’

He’s right, of course, but this won’t be the last time we hear about citizens’ assemblies. It is a perennial favourite among the Sensible classes, involving as it does core Sensible values such as Consulting The Stakeholders, and bypassing the allegedly archaic and unacceptably adversarial House of Commons. It is worth reflecting, therefore, on why exactly we must say no.

An obvious question is: who will assemble which citizens, and to what end? Advocates, including Gray, have referred specifically to Ireland, where citizens’ assemblies have been established since 2016 to consider a number of hot topics, notably the repeal of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting abortion, which was eventually abolished via referendum in 2018. This is an enlightening comparison, because the Irish experience demonstrates a number of dangers.

Under Ireland’s system, the secretariat is provided by the civil service and the chairs are government appointees, meaning that the establishment is well able to guide deliberations. Reports are drafted by the secretariat, and no doubt the chair and other ‘facilitators’ can do their best to ensure that any non-compliant members who somehow slip through the selection net do not have too much influence on proceedings. Moreover, while the members are selected at random and intended to be broadly representative of the demographics of Ireland, people who agree to take part are by definition those who already have an interest in politics, as well as the willingness and the ability to spend long days discussing the subject.

‘Nonsense can and does go by default,’ said the social critic Anthony Daniels. ‘It wins the argument by sheer persistence, by inexhaustible re-iteration, by staying at the meeting when everyone else has gone home, by monomania, by boring people into submission and indifference’. Was he talking about citizens’ assemblies? Probably not, but he might well have been. There is, after all, a certain kind of person who is quite content to get obsessively involved in decision-making processes. More often than not that person has very strongly defined and rather unrepresentative views.

Perhaps the work of citizens’ assemblies would be better described as ‘consensus laundering’; these assemblies are used to create the appearance that there is a widely held view on some matter of public importance. Typically this will support the action that the establishment – the political parties, the civil service, the quangocracy, and ‘civil society’ – want to take anyway, but now their policy preference has an extra patina of legitimacy because the citizenry has given it two thumbs up.

The problem is that if the authority of Parliament is watered down in this way, it undermines the simple mechanisms of accountability which are meant to be at the heart of the British constitution. At the risk of over-simplification, Parliament – in practice the House of Commons – is supreme within our system, and the Commons, in its turn, must answer to the electorate. Of course, this approach has already come under serious threat in recent years. Prominent dangers to parliamentary sovereignty include constant judicial review of government decision-making, and the limits placed on legislation by vast and often arbitrary human rights requirements and equality impact assessments. There is also the growing powers of parliamentary standards bodies, which combine quasi-judicial powers of investigation and censure with very weak protections for due process. But citizens’ assemblies would further reduce the powers and prerogatives of MPs. They would blur lines of responsibility and enable cowardly and weak politicians to kick difficult issues into the long grass, by passing the buck to extra-parliamentary bodies with extremely limited mandates.

Citizens’ assemblies would reduce the powers of MP

The aim of modern left-wing politics is to make right-wing politics impossible. This means that governments are hemmed in by human rights and equality law, civil service guidelines and consultation requirements, such that any decisive action against the Blairite consensus becomes inconceivable. Citizens’ assemblies must be seen as part of this conscious and ongoing attempt to gum up the works, to ensure that the ratchet only ever turns one way – note that in Ireland it has consistently been the political class that determines what issues may be considered by the assemblies.

The great struggle for conservatives is to reverse the neutering of Parliament, and more broadly to restore the domain of politics itself; to re-establish the norm that the proper place for hammering out the great questions of the day is not the courts, or the offices of a standards watchdog, or a meeting of political obsessives and their NGO handlers in a provincial conference room, but the chamber of the House of Commons.