Is Corbyn unelectable? The BBC's favourite question

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I was pleasantly surprised to hear a great interview given by Ed Miliband on the daily Corbyn-bash known as the Radio 4 Today Programme. He refused to be drawn into Jim Naughtie's very unsubtle attempt to criticise his successor, and to join in the new mantra that everyone now robotically repeats 'Corbyn is unelectable.' 
Unlike all his other critics, Miliband did not claim to have a crystal ball and vast mind-reading powers to determine how 40 million people will vote in four a half years time - given that we don't actually know what's going to happen in Britain and worldwide over the coming period, other than the likelihood that it won't be plain sailing.
The interview was a rare moment of relief from the constant stream of snipes, attack interviews and constant attempts by the Beeb to remind us that we are not acually living in a democracy. They used to call Chile after Pinochet a 'managed democracy', meaning a country where the people voted but did not truly decide who ruled. That seems to be Britain - vote for who you want but don't have the temerity to break with the fixed set of ideas laid down by our elite. I'd like to see an analysis of the main 8.10 interviews on the Today programme to see how many feature pro or anti-Corbyn interviewees - and to look at the balance of questions. That old myth of BBC balance has been well and truly busted since Corbyn's election. I get the feeling that some in the BBC and Guardian think this is all just a momentary aberration and all will return to normal (ie Tweedledum Tweedledee politics) once Corbyn is overthrown or disappears in a puff of smoke.
Of course the cynics will say that an endorsement from Miliband is like a death wish, given what happened in May. But what all these Nostradamuses seem to ignore is what Harold MacMillan famously called 'events, my dear boy, events'. George Osborne has probably ruined his chances of replacing Cameron as prime minister by taking an axe to tax credits. Beyond that there are a series of dangers for the Tories in the economy.
For the first time in modern British history, the export of profits to foreign owners of British assets has now exceeded so-called invisible earnings (income to Britain from overseas assets). This is a result of the systematic selling off British companies to overseas firms and governments. They are creaming profits to such an extent that the old fail safe of UK multinationals earnings from overseas has been wiped out by the reverse flow of funds out of Britain. We are now the equivalent of a colony being bled dry by absentee overlords.
Britain's visible trade deficit has been growing steadily, and rose to 5.9% in 2014, its highest ever level. This is due to a decline in our energy and manufacturing exports, and the rise of the pound, making our exports less competitive. As Anthony Hilton in the Evening Standard has explained, it is also linked to the decline in our invisible earnings, as already stated: 

The amount of credit generated by our overseas investments fell 31% between 2011 and 2014 to £73 billion. At the same time, the amount sent to overseas owners of British-based assets went exactly the opposite way.It rose 31% to £71 billion. The overall effect of the plunge in money coming in and the surge in money going out was to cut out FDI surplus from £54 billion in 2011 to £2 billion in 2014.

This fact is the one that should have Osborne lying awake sweating. His strategy is to increase "earnings" by flogging off the last bits of family silver - Royal Mail, Eurostar, etc.

Meanwhile the deficit budget strategy is in tatters as the deficit continues to refuse to go down thanks to self-defeating austerity.

Then there is our unprecedented property bubble, which thanks to £100 billion plus invested by tax-dodging companies in London property has reinflated the bubble that wrecked the economy in 2008 to unprecedented levels, with prices 40 percent higher than the pre-crash peak. For potential future PM Boris Johnson, the social cleansing this is causing is apparently nothing to worry about - the more foreign millionaires who want to use our homes to stash their shady cash, the better. As the Standard reported:

since 2008 there have been 27,989 purchases of homes, buildings and land in the capital by shadowy corporate structures usually registered in tax havens to hide the buyers’ identities.

Not only is this making London unaffordable for its inhabitants, and creating a kind of fake city for the global rich, it is creating an unsustainable bubble and denying the exchequer billions.
Then of course there is overall rising indebtedness: "Total outstanding non-mortgage borrowing grew by nearly £20bn or 9 percent in 2014, to reach £239bn." Including mortgage debt, people in the UK owed £1.443 trillion at the end of July 2015. This is up from £1.412 trillion at the end of July 2014 – an extra £604 per UK adult.
How are the Tories going to keep this all afloat over the next four a half years, when historically speaking, they have overseen a crash in each one of their periods of office.

Thatcher's first government exacerbated the recession with austerity policies, putting 3 million on the dole in 1979-81. The 1990-92 Lawson recession saw Thatcher removed and Major returned to power, only to oversee the ERM debacle, which pretty much destroyed the Tories' credibility until 2010.

Labour has not yet recovered from the reputational damage caused by overseeing the 2008 financial crash. But by offering a radical critique of this government's policies, Corbyn's Labour can be shown to have pointed up the disastrous policies that could yet again tip Britain into a major crisis by 2020.

There's been a major economic crisis in Britain in every one of the last five decades: 1973-5, 1980-82, 1990-92, 2008-11. It is highly likely that the cycle will be repeated, and the above underlying economic problems are the time bombs ticking for the Tories before the next election.The problems in the housing market relate to affordability - people are being squeezed by very high rents and prices are beyond the reach of millions.

This market cannot continue to rise like this. Most housing prices bubbles don't gently deflate. They crash. Presumably Osborne believes that Britain's shortage of housing and the love affair of the global rich with London will make sure that the music never stops. We've heard this tune before and as Einstein said, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a a different outcome is the definition of madness.

According to a certain reading of the historical data, property crashes occur every 18 years, so the Tories are safe through 2024-5. But this bubble has been re-inflated by trillions in government quantitative easing, so the rules of the market have been massively distorted and may not behave normally going forward. Besides some other 'black swan' event may come from the side that we don't anticipate. Remember the tech crash of 2000-1?

If the Tories oversee another crash, who then will be unelectable? Perhaps only Boris Johnson, the curly haired future king, knows the answer.

Why the right can't handle democracy

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The horror, the horror. Democracy - that quaint idea of the people actually deciding who leads us, as against having to choose between pre-selected establishment candidates - has broken out in the Labour Party. The Blairites and others who see in Jeremy Corbyn everything they hate about their own party's traditions - honesty, socialism, commitment to principles - must be truly cursing Ed Miliband now for introducing a new democratic system for electing the leader. In the 1990s, the Parliamentary Labour party had half the votes on the leadership of the party. It was a way of making sure grassroots members didn't get above themselves and start thinking it was their party. God and Tony Blair forbid!
At some point, the leader election system was changed again, with a third of votes going to members, a third to affiliated unions, and a third to Labour MPs. That system put Ed Miliband in charge over his brother, whose Blairite record made him a dead duck for the unions.
And now, thanks to Ed, its just one member, one supporter, one union affiliate, one vote. Oh glorious democracy. Getting Corbyn on the ballot was a way of showing how fair minded Labour MPs were in the wake of the shocking defeat in May. But very few ever expected there to be an insurgency of the kind we are now seeing.
They bought into the Tory media line that Miliband lost for being too left wing. What is it about Labour politicians that they believe everything they read in the Sun, Telegraph and Mail? It's as if they lack the capacity for independent thought. They all trot out the same line - the Tories won and Labour lost because we don't 'get' popular right wing sentiments on immigration, welfare, tax etc. Yes, many people do worry about these things, but if you go and ask someone on the doorstep what they feel about these issues, some of them might repeat what they have read in the papers. Gypsies with big families are given five bedroom houses. People enjoying a life of ease on welfare. God forbid that you should challenge the distortions and lies that appear in the papers and point out some other salient facts - the billions in subsidies that go to landlords and businesses to subsidise high rents and low wages. No, no - that would be to suggest you could change these inequities and build a fairer country No, that would be a dangerous raising of expectations. Just keep it vague and aspirational and hope people vote for you out of desperation - maybe stick it on a stone plaque with apple pie promises of sunshine and warm feelings. This then becomes Labour policy.
Then along comes Jeremy Corbyn, squeezed onto the ballot for Labour leader and now leading the pack. I've known Jeremy for years as a peace and solidarity campaigner whose commitment is second to none - he has supported a lot of unfashionable causes, from Diego Garcia, to Palestine, CND, to Colombian trade unionists and the Kurds. Those who sneer should ask themselves what it is about political commitment they find so off-putting.
Corbyn is straight talking and is not burdened with the kind of inflated ego that has been the downfall of other left leaders in the recent past - abrasive personalities who, while charismatic, too often can't live up to the principles they espouse.
Kendal and Blair and all their right-wing media acolytes warn that we might be moving back to the 80s. They seem to be unaware that when the country voted Labour in 1997 and 2001, it was looking for an alternative to the right-wing Thatcherism that had governed the country and raised levels of inequality and poverty in the 80s and 90s. They did not actually vote for Blairism - they voted Labour. A landslide in 97 was almost inevitable. But even more important than this, 2020 is 23 years after 1997. The country has been ruled by a neoliberal regime - with a very short interregnum of Gordon Brown - since 1979. Perhaps only a radical candidate committed to real social change can challenge and bring to a halt this juggernaut that keeps coming back stronger like a zombie we thought we had killed.
Remember 1990 and the end of Thatcher. After that we got Major and the closure of the mines and the rail privatisations. With Blair we got Public Private Partnerships, Iraq, and ever greater security surveillance, plus the micromanagement and farming out of public services.
Neoliberalism comes in different guises, with different faces - but each time the electorate is fooled that it has voted for change, the continuity candidate wins. Even Brown, confronted with the biggest crisis in capitalism in 80 years, bailed out the banks with our money and asked for nothing in return - no radical reform of a financial sector that had become a blood sucking beast on the backs of ordinary people.
Blair reorganised Labour's democratic system so that members no longer had any real say over policy. Miliband began to change that.
So yes, people are desperate for something different. Janus-faced candidates like Burnham and Cooper - who declare love for big business or Israel whenever someone says jump and can't give a straight answer to a question - are not going to do it.
This is why Corbyn has caught the moment, and why Labour's political establishment - and the right-wing and liberal media including the Guardian - are in shock and don't know what's hit them.
Can Corbyn win in 2020? Who knows? And who knows what catastrophes Osborne will have inflicted upon the nation by then. Anything is possible - except the sudden discovery of conviction and principles coming from any of the other three candidates.
And as for the Labour right, the slick-faced elitists like Tristrum Hunt and Chukka Ummuna, they have shamefully exposed their contempt for democracy. After 20 years of managed control of the party in the name of staying rigidly to centrist politics that kill all enthusiasm, they have revealed the very reason millions in Scotland and England no longer want their kind of politics.
There is every chance that if Corbyn wins, they will split the party as happened in 1981 with the Social Democrats. That didn't work out well. However, as European politics has shown, new popular left movements can eclipse traditional social democracy - or at least give it a run for its money. See Spain, Greece, Italy, Holland. Britain needs a left-wing alternative to Ukip and the SNP in Scotland. This could be the beginning of something truly exciting.

As Labour veers right, the left needs to learn from the Leninist neocons

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The world has crept into my new dad bubble and now I must respond with political analysis...

Chris Leslie, Labour's Treasury spokesman turned shadow chancellor, comes across with all the political passion of a smooth-talking bank manager.

His interview in last Sunday's Observer was a manifesto for a post-Miliband Labour economic policy that eschews anything remotely radical in favour of pure managerialism. It's an unashamed bouquet of promises to do absolutely nothing that ruffles the feathers of big business.

Sadly, Labour doesn’t seem to get that it is perfectly possible to be left wing and also believe that free markets are actually necessary and good - within the framework of a mixed economy. Alas, an economy in which public and private co-exist in healthy competition was abolished by Margaret Thatcher and her successors.

Leslie used to run the New Local Government Network, a think tank that spent the 2000s arguing for deregulation and privatisation of local government services. In the interview, Leslie takes an axe to all of Ed Miliband's progressive policies - rail nationalisation is out, as too is rent control, capping banks' market share, even the mansion tax was "too crude". Deficit reduction, predictably, is a favourite. Market "transparency" is his watchword.

Instead of supporting competition in the private sector combined with strong public regulation of natural monopolies and essential services (health, education, housing, utilities, rail etc), nice Mr Leslie offers blind support for big business.

Leslie may or may not continue to be Labour's economic spokesman, but with this approach, he clearly puts himself to the right of Ed Balls and anyone with a hint of pinkish social democracy. This man is cut through like rock with neoliberalism and the promise of never being outflanked to the right by Osborne or anyone else.

It is a peculiar thing that Labour politicians always see electoral defeat in terms of failing to appeal to middle England Tory voters. Yes, the Tories won the most votes in the south, but if you combine Ukip, SNP and Green votes, that's nearly 6 million people who actually want left-of-centre economic policies that favour working people, such as a living wage, nationalisation of rail and utilities, rent control and so on.

Labour is not interested in these voters, and it wants nothing to do with the emerging progressive alliance of parties - SNP, Green, Plaid Cymru - as witnessed by Miliband's fatal refusal to make a deal with Nicola Sturgeon. (Once voters saw that Miliband was blind to the inescapable fact that Labour needed the SNP’s support to form a government, he was toast.) Amazingly, Labour’s tribalism and blinkered hostility to new political forces meant it cut itself off from potential allies, and left itself adrift and without credibility come election day.

So, if Labour refuses to reach out to the parties who do win progressive votes – or to adopt policies that win back working class votes from Ukip, eg rail nationalisation and strict enforcement of the minimum wage – then where does that leave the hopes of non-Tory Britain?

As the pitiful Labour leadership campaign has already shown, whoever wins the Labour leadership will focus on reaching out to big business and Tory voters in order to win back those marginals. It’s a narrow, opportunist politics that eschews fundamental principles and long-term thinking in favour of pure electoral machination.

This idea - to see politics purely as a short-term electoral game under current badly broken rules - is a fatal aspect of Labourism, and can be contrasted with the long-term hegemonic strategies of the Right to not just win the immediate battle but to win the class war.

Learning from the Neocons 

Since the 1970s at least, neoconservatives and their UK counterparts in the Tory party have approached politics with a Leninist, revolutionary focus that uses emergent crises as opportunities for “clean breaks” – and for reshaping politics in their own interests.

This was seen in the aftermath of the miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974, when chief ideologue of the Tory right Nicolas Ridley came up with a plan to break the miners by enticing them into a confrontation and then smashing them. This was part of a plan to break the back of the labour movement, and so move Britain away from socialism, which at the time was seen as a mortal threat to the British capitalist system. They used the global oil crisis of 1979-81 to begin a process of deindustrialisation, a brutal form of social engineering that gutted the communities that were the rock-bed of the post-war social democratic consensus.

Neoconservatives were never parochial or short-termist in their outlook. Like good Leninists, they were internationalists – 1989-91 was a key moment in the victorious march of western-led globalisation, when first the east European communist states, then the Soviet Union, collapsed after a long period of armed confrontation. Afghanistan and a bankrupting arms race finished off the Soviets. After 1991, neoliberal economic specialists moved in to radically overhaul the post-Soviet economy, causing devastation to millions. Since then, the 9/11 attacks, and more recently the 2008 crash, were both huge crises in the international system that neoconservative forces used to re-engineer society toward militarisation at home and abroad, and ever increasing concentration of wealth and corporate power.

The left naively believed 2008 would mark the end of neoliberalism. But where were the left-wing Leninists plotting to bring down the system thanks to its own fundamental weaknesses when it was on its knees? They certainly were not in the Labour cabinet – Gordon Brown, rather than seize the moment and bring the banking system to heal with a new model of state-regulated and socially responsible finance, rushed to the rescue of the banks, leaving them largely unreformed. He was not thanked for saving capitalism, instead the voters rejected him - and the Tories managed to make Labour’s economic record an election issue in 2015.

It is remarkable how the Tories were allowed to get off scot-free for their support for financial deregulation since the 1980s that ultimately led to the crash of 2008. If Labour had any political sense, it would have mercilessly slayed Osborne for his restoking of the housing bubble, rather than weakly echo the homeownership myth. Miliband, to his credit, saw that housing was a major issue, but the mansion tax was too ad hoc a policy to sound coherent (compared to land value tax), and rent control was only announced in the last month of the campaign.

There is no short cut to a revival of social democracy in Britain. But looking to Labour as a vehicle for radical change is almost as daft as expecting Fifa to reform itself. Labour needs to embrace the fact that the era of its big battalions is over and it will never again be given a mandate to rule without the support of other parties.

The next crisis

Governments lose elections, oppositions rarely win them.

The lesson taught by the neoconservative strategists is to look ahead to the next crisis and prepare for a political offensive when it comes, so that for once, the left can seize control of the political narrative. We can’t know what or when it will be exactly, but capitalism goes through a slump on average every ten years. Cameron and Osborne have recklessly reflated the housing and credit bubble and that bubble will burst. International crises can be expected – the Middle East is slipping towards apocalypse, while a new cold war is flaring in Europe.

The message of progressives must be one of hope, always, but hope not built on an unsustainable model of financial capitalism, ever-rising debt, climate crises and endless war. All these factors points toward disasters down the road but also the possibility of a saner, greener, more equitable politico-economic model that could replace this broken one.

Either the movement against neoliberalism will be ready to fight back when the next crisis comes, or, as in 2008, the financial oligarchy and their neocon allies will once again turn it into a new assault on what’s left of society to further enrich the 0.1 percent.

The QT election debate - Poor Ed's final trip

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Poor Ed Miliband, being harangued and bullied by some pretty unpleasant members of a 'representative' audience. He stood there, slightly rabbit in headlights, before launching into his creepy crawly 'what's your name' I'm-a-man-of-the-people routine.
Come on, Ed. This American style coaching - looking mad-eyed into the TV camera, walking up close to the audience like a preacher in the Deep South, rather than a British politician in dire need of some likability.
I felt sorry for him. I don't like bullying. Minutes before a confident, smooth-talking David Cameron was able to hammer home the Tory message of cutting the deficit and making sure all you hard-faced hard-working voters don't let those horrible scroungers get any more of your hard-earned cash. They lapped it up.

Miliband didn't do himself any favours. When it came to coalition talk, he just claimed that he would not negotiate on his manifesto and never do a deal with the SNP. The audience weren't buying it. One guy said, "have you thought how much more respect you would get from this audience if you were honest about what deals you will make after the election?' Miliband just carried on lying regardless.

It was as if he was saying to Scottish voters, I dare you to vote SNP. Go on. To English voters, he desperately wanted them to believe he was as much an English nationalist as any of them. The art of politics seems to come down to who can lie with a straight face. The more Miliband-Balls say they won't truck with the nationalists, the more it feels like the loser in Monopoly kicking over the table. If you're going to take all the money (votes), I won't give you the pleasure of winning. They seem to think that the SNP will simply be forced to back a Labour government - a minority, weak government, on current polling - from the sidelines. They could, as others have said, just abstain and watch Labour crumble.
But as one audience member in QT said, what about the voters? If voters don't want to give either party a majority, that means you should listen to them. They don't want a single party dictatorship. Listen to them. They've had tweedledum tweedledee for decades. They want something new. Just holding your hands over your ears and going 'la la la la la' is not going to change that.
At the end of Miliband's 28 minutes, we were none the wiser. He made a few noises about standing up for working people against non-doms and big corporations, but it rang a bit hollow. You can't just declare class war if there is no one standing behind you (although at least he does now have his new mate Russell Brand backing him), nothing in your armoury.
The small businesswoman didn't look that impressed. He should have just been a lot tougher on these critics - voters can be wrong, and they can just be deep down, rightwing Tories and there is little point in trying to win them over - just demolish them so your supporters can see that you know how to fight. But Miliband doesn't have the killer instinct. He doesn't even seem to have all the arguments.
He should remind people that zero hours contracts, low wages and sky-high rents are all subsidised by taxpayers to the tune of tens of billions of pounds. That's ordinary people's money being funnelled to business and landlords because they are exploiting people with low wages and high rents.
After getting a couple of laughs - more than Cameron - at the end Miliband tripped as he left the stage. What a symbolic exit. I felt sorry for him but more than anything I felt like the election was already over. I'm going to hold out for some small victories - the decapitation of Nick Clegg, a thumping majority for Caroline Lucas. But when I looked at that "representative audience" it felt like they wanted something right-wing, hard, Tory-like. And as they say, the people get the government they deserve. And the Scots will just have to wait for the next referendum to leave us to it.

Myleene and Angelina Jolie's 10 point plan to save Labour

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Mansion-class celebs are coming for Labour. First there was Myleene Klass’s ITV sofa assault on Ed Miliband’s property tax plans — “You can’t just point at things and tax them!” — to which a frozen Ed failed to answer “Yes you can if it’s a house!”
Then Hollywood royalty waded in on the row. Angelina Jolie (net worth with Brad £269m) told Channel 4’s Jon Snow that she may — shock, horror — decide not to move to a Marylebone mansion if Labour decides to tax it. “That might put me off.”
With Myles and Angie on his case, Miliband’s no-balls shadow chancellor is quaking. In an Evening Standard column Ed Balls admitted that plans to tax £2m-plus properties “are not popular with everyone but we but we are being clear about where the money is coming from for our health service.”
Let’s face it, if you put Myleene and “Tomb Raider” Angelina into a ring with the two Eds for gloves-off fisticuffs, there’s little doubt about who would end up face down on the mat. These high-net worth stars, known for their humanitarian leanings and constant use of the pages of Hello! to show off their fabulous lifestyle, have now jumped to the defence of the hard put-upon pluto-grannies from this tax thingummy.
And to save the Eds from a further pasting, Myles and Angie have got together to have a go at rewriting the Labour manifesto to make it more celeb-friendly. Truly, with Brangelina serious about getting a “foothold” in London — and she being “responsible about money” — who better to give advice on economy policy?

So here is their 10-point plan to remake Britain:

1. Poor people should stop complaining. It’s within their power to become who they want to be. All you need is hard work, expensive education and high-powered pushy parents. Go for it!

2. Celebrities pay a lot of tax already (well, the ones not smart enough to use tax-avoidance schemes). The least we could do is give them their own lane on the motorway to drive their hot wheels past adoring fans. If it’s good enough for Kim Jong Un...

3. Elections will be fought out in an X-Factor cum Bake Off — that’s right. Sing or bake, or both. The public decides. Digital democracy at work.

4. Politics is boring and turning people off. From now on, PMQs will be replaced with a Klaas and Jolie masterclass in economics, including priceless advice on how to disburse your millions across the world and stay ahead of the taxman.

5. The British royal family needs a makeover, so let’s have a TV vote for who should be the next Queen. (Hint: someone younger, beautiful with a string of hit songs and/or movies).

6. Most NHS costs can be reduced by healthier lifestyles — its strictly seaweed from now on. Jolie-Klass TV will offer tips to the nation on healthy eating and daily workouts. Get out the lycra and get with the programme.

7. All school uniforms will be from Littlewoods and M&S, with free Baby K Clothes for nursery age toddlers — royalties to Myleene. Kerrching!

8. Most life lessons can be gleaned from a careful viewing of Lara Croft, Mr and Mrs Smith, Maleficent and The Tourist. Compulsory movie classes in schools from age five and school assemblies will learn to sing the Hear’Say back catalogue.

9. Free acting and classical music lessons for offenders to encourage rehabilitation with inspiration from Myles and Angie. A lucky few will get places on the Ex-Con Factor, hosted by Andy Coulson.

10. No more politics of envy. You are beautiful and talented — not as beautiful or talented as us obviously, but everyone can aspire to be the best.

There you go, Ed. Alternatively you could just tell these millionaires that if they don’t want to pay their tax, they are welcome to leave. I hear Malibu is lovely this time of year — they can be happy knowing we’ll find a socially useful way to occupy those empty mansions.

Let's crowdsource our democracy - a mass Parliament of the people

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Left of centre thinktanks have told Ed Miliband he should adopt radical devolution as the theme of his election campaign for 2015. I say let's go further, much further.

Democracy has been spreading round the planet for more than a century, but in recent decades the ability of the representative democratic system to govern for the people has been found wanting. Officially, the majority of countries are 'democratic,' but unofficially most of us feel like we are governed and controlled by an unaccountable elite.
That is because representative democracy is merely an outgrowth of the model of aristocratic rule brought in by Britain and the new American republic in the 18th century, a system designed to keep power out of the hands of the people. The rulers and thinkers of the 18th century said this explicitly.

As James Madison, one of the founding fathers of the United States constitution, explained: “Pure democracy is the most vile form of government...such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention: have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property: and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

The system that is now universally described as democracy is misnamed. Representative democracy delegates power to elected officials and professional politicians who are not accountable to the people who elected them on a day to day basis. Other interest groups - including business, lobby groups, foreign governments, senior civil servants, military and political party elites have far more influence over our 'elected' leaders than we do. We only get to vote them in or out of office every four or five years. This is not democracy - and it was never supposed to be.

But if our politicians are too often unfit to govern, and come from a small class of privileged out of touch families, is it not time to put ordinary people right into the system of government and legislation? I propose a new People's Parliament be created to exist alongside the existing representative Parliament. It would be made of a large selection of ordinary members of the public. Members of the People's Parliament would not be elected. Instead, a random selection process, with some possible representative fixtures to reflect the broad population such as 50% women, would be instituted. Why random rather than elected? To prevent the same self selecting group of careerists and professional political types from running (and ruining) the country. It cuts out the need for expensive, time-consuming elections, which favours those of deep pocket, and instead uses the same principle as the jury system, which has served us moderately well for centuries.

I propose that across the country, 9000 people would be chosen, 300 from each constituency, to serve one year in this new assembly. Those selected would be given 10 days off work a year, and paid to attend local assembly meetings and hearings. Volunteers from the 300 would be able to take up co-ordinator roles, to call witnesses, civil servants and members of the public to meetings to discuss government policy and issues of the day. Members would serve for one year only, with a possible option to serve a second year for the sake of continuity in the work of the people's Parliament. This way its members, either remotely online or in person, could make their decisions based on being informed about the issues. However, even if they do not attend, they would vote on all legislation. The people could watch these assemblies online or on TV (well, some would chose to do so).

The People's Parliament would have equal powers to our elected politicians. There is the question - a critical one - of who brings forward legislation. Currently the government is responsible for most legislation, but if it was up to popular proposition and members of the People's Parliament to bring forward legislation, the old party system would lose its monopoly on power. As in Switzerland and in some US states, if enough people outside Parliament sign a petition for a proposition, it should be put before Parliament.

Big media outlets will, of course, influence the public and politicians and could likewise influence the new members of a People's Parliament, but at least they would be deliberating without being controlled by party leaders.

Both the existing (not very) Representative Parliament and the Direct Democracy Peoples Parliament would deliberate on laws and policy. When it came to the vote, they would both vote and the votes would be combined. If there was a split vote, the vote of the People's Parliament, as the more representative model, would hold the casting vote.

Members of the PP might have a say in electing the Prime Minister and cabinet from the current Parliament - although for practical reasons, this might be limited. It would be too easy for deadlock to take place if the PP voted against the formation of a government from the majority party in the elected Representative Parliament. Members of the PP would not be able to serve as a member of the Government executive while they were serving for the People's Parliament. Currently, by contrast, over 100 members of our elected Parliament are actually serving in the executive, or waiting for their chance to do so, so don't represent their constituencies at all.

The Lords would of course have to go. The PP would be the new Lords - of the people.

Because members of the People's Parliament serve only one year (or optionally two years), they would not be subject to corrupting influences - and there would be too many of them to corrupt anyhow. They could not be tempted by an offer to join the government.

There is of course, the possibility that the PP and the Commons could end up in loggerheads in the way that the Congress and Senate are often deadlocked in the US. In this case, perhaps a provision would be needed for the People's Parliament to call for a general election to break the gridlock. However, Switzerland manages to combine representative and direct democracy successfully, with the latter enhancing the former.

I would suggest that no one could serve in the PP more than twice in their lifetimes. There is, of course, nothing stopping them from turning 'professional' and standing in the representative Parliament. Ideally, resources allowing, this 9000 number would be increased over time, to perhaps 90,000 people (3000 in each constituency) so that the People's Parliament was even more representative of the population.

One could argue that rather than have this half way house of semi-direct democracy, we could move entirely to a digital direct democracy system where the people are able to vote on all legislation and by petition of a minimum number of signatures (50 or 100,000 as in Switzerland) bring forward laws, as happens in US states with the proposition system. Perhaps the PP could be combined with an element of direct democracy, such as in proposing legislation, or even referenda on big issues - again, something that happens in Switzerland.

The argument for the People's Assembly is that democracy is deliberative and the 9000 can look at the issues in depth. Also, by allowing it to sit alongside the existing system, it would be less revolutionary and threatening to the existing order (addressing the fears of modern-day Madisons). This is a practical proposal that the professional politicians would find hard to argue against. They should, truly, support it - unless they really favour the current system of disguised oligarchy.

However, if we could move toward direct democracy, I would favour it, but I don't think it's practical for everyone to vote on all legislation effectively, without a mediating group of ordinary people who can do this more deliberatively, hence the need for a popular parliament.

How do we get there? I don't actually know, since this needs to become a popular demand. Perhaps it is pie in the sky - paralysis, gridlock, the fear of ineffective government would mitigate this ever coming to pass. But my ideas are just a starting point and they draw on a wide range of direct democracy experiences around the world.

The foundational principle behind this idea is that the combined wisdom and good sense of many thousands of ordinary people is inherently superior to that of a few hundred professional politicians who each have a huge personal and political stake in the preservation of the existing order. With digital technology, we have the means to make this happen. In the long run, it is probably inevitable. We are no longer a society with a small politically literate middle class and a wider population dominated by deference, although each country is different in this respect. In some religion or tribe is still very important. I don't say every country is ready for this, but then again, the representative system is clearly not able to cope with the new demands of democracy either, as seen in Ukraine and Egypt.

People tend to focus on issues of policy, rather than on the system of government that rules us. But rather than keep on electing disappointing politicians who let us down, let's create a system of crowdsourced democracy (to use the digital jargon) that genuinely brings about 'rule of the people'. After feudalism, monarch, dictatorship and elected oligarchy - let's move to the system that actually gives power to the people. Are you ready for it?