Programme recommendation

Unable to do much blogging at the moment owing to the need to prioritise writing up a dissertation (on a different subject) but have just heard ‘Rethinking Representation – Democracy in Action’ with David Runciman on Radio Four and I highly recommend it.  The essential message, for me, although next week’s episode promises to look more at possible ways forward, is that if we want a political system fit for purpose in today’s world and able to encompass the complexity and multifaceted nature of the issues facing us, we have to get more involved, but also know how to behave ourselves within that involvement.  What might that then look like in practice with more citizens involved at local and regional as well as national levels and how would representation then function?  How would we choose our representatives: still through a simple voting procedure or something which identifies the person deemed most suitable at the end of a process in which all are involved and which sees the contenders then slowly emerging? This may sound radical and be beyond what we want to get involved with. But you get what you pay for and here we need to pay with our involvement. But that involvement has to be within the right frame and process.  I wrote a paper on this 2 years ago and will attempt introduce aspects of it in future posts.