Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Just in time for the collapse of New Labour in a cloud of double-dealing, the escutcheon of Charter 88 has been hammered to the wall of a new campaign for democratic reform, Unlock Democracy, as Peter Facey reports. By coincidence Robin Wilson who was a mover and shaker of Northern Ireland's Democratic Dialogue, in a very nice tribute to Stuart Weir and me, looks back across almost two decades ago to the establishment of Charter 88. He lists more achievements than I might claim,
"Devolution for Scotland and Wales and (some of the time) for Northern Ireland, incorporation of the European Convention of Human Rights, a Freedom of Information Act, proportional representation in elections (as long as they are not for Westminster) ... This is quite a roll-call of success".
In a brilliant paragraph he then suggests what has gone wrong,
"But in the catatonic language of "New" Labour - whose novelty seemed always to reside in the fear of radical change and the rush to court the established and the wealthy - its "modernisation" became a mere slogan without a connecting narrative. The result was that neither the authorship nor indeed the sense of thoroughgoing and interconnected constitutional change was realised in the outworking, and it became a "passive revolution" of typically English-patrician muddling through. And now the legacies have come to haunt: the failure to adopt proportional representation at Westminster opens the prospect of a Conservative reconquest of power; the failure to introduce the euro leaves the economy suffering interest- and exchange-rate premia as recession looms; and the failure to reform the Lords as a voice for the regions and nations and to establish formal intergovernmental structures is seeing tensions rise between a populist Scottish and a reactionary English nationalism."
Quite a legacy for Unlock Democracy! Its defining demand is to move on from Charter 88's call for a democratic written constitution to insisting on a citizens constitutional convention as the means of getting one. There is an element of progress here. What was an unexpected demand for a new written constitution in 1988, which the political establishment regarded with bemused indifference ("C'est magnifique mais ce n'est pas la politique" I was told by one of its more distinguished members), is now becoming that most dangerous of ideas, an accepted fact that the chaps themselves must look after on our behalf. This is why it is essential to support Unlock Democracy's demand for a popular process - it is in the true spirit of Charter 88.
