From banking to hacking public horror has failed to tame Britain's feral elites. We need a People's Jury
A new routine is emerging. First, a crisis occurs in a vital part of our lives: banks crash, MPs fiddle expenses, a media empire hacks phones. Public anger and outrage rises. Everyone says that something must be done. But frustration and apathy set in as it becomes obvious that nothing is done. A moment for change slips through our fingers. Meanwhile the next ? possibly bigger ? crisis lurks round the corner, perhaps banking again, or the energy companies. Why is this happening and what can we do about it?
We are witnessing a crisis of elites. Society has always had people in positions of power and huge influence. But now they have broken free of moral and regulatory constraints and operate, unashamedly, in their own interests. Remember Bob Diamond, the Barclays boss, lecturing MPs that the "time for remorse" was over.
Waves of extraordinary public horror, such as over the hacking of Milly Dowler and now Sara Payne's phones, refashion only ever so slightly relations at the top. For common to all these crises is excessive behaviour; greed, risk-taking and hubris, all the products of small, sheltered cliques wielding too much power.
It is the rise of corporate and media elites as first among equals, and their disproportionate influence over a demoted political class, which makes this era very different. And Britain feels particularly vulnerable. The US still has strong anti-corruption and monopoly laws. In Germany there is effective corporate governance of every major firm.And France has strong provisions for the public interest in areas like planning.
This is exactly what Britain has lost: any real notion of public interest and pride in the public domain. Hence the assault on public spaces like libraries and the replacement of multipurpose town squares at the heart of communities by private, single-function, gated shopping malls. The very concept of the public has been systematically eroded over the past four decades and replaced by private and corporate interests.
What was good for them was deemed good for all. But from banking to the media, transport and our utilities, that has been shown to be false. As the public tide went out, it left self-interested elites behind, operating with no predators, nothing to fear and no one to be accountable to.
Indeed they were given political sanction. Margaret Thatcher said "There is no such thing as society", while New Labour insisted that economic efficiency and social justice went hand in hand. All parties conflated the market with the state and squeezed the public out. With no pressure for higher ethical standards, the new all-powerful elites were like kids left free in the sweetshop, going feral as they lost all self-control and all touch with society.
The only means by which these crises can be avoided, or mitigated, is though the moral and institutional reassertion of a "public interest" in British political and corporate life. So today we, and a host of others, are calling for the government to set up a People's Jury to put the British public interest first. The jury would be made up of 1,000 citizens drawn at random from the electorate and funded out of the public purse. A paid secretariat will commission research and call witnesses to make our nation's elites answerable to the public. Reporting within a year of its launch the jury will report on how the public interest relates to media ownership; the role of the financial sector in the crash; MP selections and accountability; policing; and more generally on British political and corporate life.
The outcome would be a new public interest test with ethical procedures for the corporate world ? useful for example in the takeover by the junk food giant Kraft of Cadbury's ? and the proper treatment of national assets, services and utilities; and the outlawing of excessive concentrations of elite power in places like banking or the media.
There is an irony in that this call is coming from another group of the self-appointed and self-righteous. But in today's celebrity world this is the only way left to draw attention to an issue; and the issue is, letting the public decide.
Elites have always been with us and always will. What matters is whether they are in any way accountable to us. To constrain them requires constant vigilance and struggle. The truth is that for too long there has been no such struggle, and so we pay the price in banks that wreck our economy, politicians that line their pockets and media empires that intrude on our rights, our democracy and our grief, just to sell it back to us.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/31/peoples-jury-thousand-angry-citizens
Tom DeLay Elizabeth Dole John Edwards Dianne Feinstein Bill Frist
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