The Scottish Citizens Assembly has concluded - and one of its big proposals is a "House of Citizens", as a second chamber for Holyrood
Out of the wave of civic assemblies that we’ve experienced over these last few years - whether citizens, abortion or climate defined - it’s interesting to see what the Scottish Citizens Assembly (with a brief to deliberate on a better democracy itself) has come up with.
The Electoral Reform Society, one of the Scottish Citizens Assembly partners, flagged up very clearly this week that the biggest ask from the deliberators (here’s the page for the main report) was something called a “House of Citizens” - essentially, a “second chamber” for the Scottish Parliament (there’s currently only one parliamentary chamber, with a committee system around it) that would be an embedding of the citizens’ assembly process at the heart of Scottish government.
The partner organisations (including Common Weal, on whose board our co-initiator Pat Kane sits) have made a proposal (full report here). The executive summary is below:
The report cites the Citizens Council that has been set up as a Second Chamber in the Ostbelgian (East Belgian Parliament) - see below:
There’s also a petition to sign here, that will be presented to Scottish Parliamentarians in the run-up to these May elections for Holyrood. (BTW, there’s a parallel campaign for the UK Parliament).
Since 2017, we’ve been tracking the gradual impact on national and regional governments that the citizens’ assembly movement has been making (eg, see this on the OECD report on citizens initiatives, as well as recent German plans, but also this archive). While we’re always supportive of any relenting in the top-down grip on political processes, we always want to focus on the practical, micro-structural and concrete acts of power that really give citizens in communities momentum and force, a sense of instigating their own agency.
A “parallel polis”, made up from these kinds of initiatives, is always going to be more important than waiting on constitutional evolution (indeed, as exemplars of community power, they should be the most authentic drivers of macro-level change).