“How to detoxify the immigration debate” is the title of an LSE blog post by Hana Kapetanovic.
The debate is being dominated by the loudest voices with the most strongly held views; the voices of the majority aren’t being heard. It would sound very different if they were. In British Future’s segmentation of public attitudes to immigration, the biggest group by far is the “Balancer Middle”, with around half (49 per cent) of the public falling into this group. This group is not fundamentally opposed to immigration, but wants it to be “controlled and fair”.
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As much as public perceptions are shaped by the media, political and information landscape, we mustn’t forget that public perceptions in turn shape media and political debates. The media publishes articles they think people will read. Politicians move to where they think the votes are, and yet are still faced with low trust. We need to break this democratic doom loop.
Breaking the democratic doom loop and detoxifying the debate sounds nice, but her proposal to do this is to take self-selected group of a few dozen voters, show them lots of briefings by government approved experts, have them converse for a few days guided by a government facilitator, and declare that whatever consensus the group comes to after this exercise has greater democratic validity than either the discourse of MPs who have actually been elected or the myriad private debates of the un-detoxified mass of the electorate.
This process is called a Citizens’ Assembly or a “Citizens’ Jury”. If all these grand titles boil down to is a bigger than average focus group, fine. Endearingly worthy, in fact. But the minute the citizens’ assembly starts to displace the functions of an actual assembly voted on by all the people, or the citizens’ jury starts to think that it can make important decisions as if it were a jury jury, then…
No.
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