Citizenship is fragile

Citizenship is fragile. That assessment is easy to dismiss if you want to think of citizenship in terms of legislated procedures for negotiating our common life in the face of our varied, and often clashing, opinions of what is good. Hard-won citizenship rights that ensure our entitlement to vote or to be tried before our peers are entrenched in law and tradition. Like the low rumble of traffic noise, citizenship is unremarkable, taken-for-granted and unnoticed.

Citizenship is fragile because it is under threat from democracy. Checks and balances have normally been in place to halt a tyrannical majority legislating to victimize a minority. The contemporary danger is that the majority are silent and politicians make the fatal mistake of looking to direct democracy as the solution to activate citizens who have withdrawn their participation. Rhetoric of ‘you having your say’ and politicians’ complicity with the narrative that the professional political class are ‘all on the make’ becomes a toxic cocktail that poisons citizenship. Into the silence speak those who have interest only in their own hobby-horse and those who have too much time on their hands. Inane, ill-conceived and prejudiced views like those that broadcast news channels read out as ‘your thoughts’ are elevated to the status of political judgments that supposedly shape policy. Representative democracy is allowed to wither in the face of populist promises of direct ‘have your say’ democracy. Citizenship comes close to being fatally undermined by those who purport to be strengthening it.

We’ve seen this before in the expansion of quangos that enabled politicians to pass the buck in order that a quango might take the blame for difficult decisions that were too politically toxic for ministers to be associated with. In a culture of risk-aversion the public (stirred up by the media) have come to demand 100% guarantees of safety, effectiveness and efficiency. We begin to lose the idea that good people might make a judgement call in the best of faith that then backfires or proves inadequate in the face of an unpredictable world or the downright wicked actions of a few. The elected politician, understandably, looks to the quango as their protection from vilification.

The Coalition’s turn to ‘us’ to contribute to decision-making about public service cuts, legislation to repeal and being more involved in ‘fixing broken Britain’ has the danger of undermining the very laudable aims of strengthening citizenship. By diluting representative democracy the Coalition inadvertently endorses the narrative that elected representatives are fatally damaged goods. At best the Coalition will provide itself with cover as it points to the others who have been complicit in tough political choices. Further, public consultation in the long-term is threatened if it turns out that specific consultations are sham exercises. This might not be the original aim but if ‘we-who-express-an-opinion’ propose what is unpalatable to the elected representatives of the rest of us the political class will have to find ways of ignoring it. This might prove much harder to do than eliciting the public’s advice in the first place. ‘Consultation’ will have been too easily interpreted as ‘delegation’ and those who have expressed their opinion will not take kindly to it not being heeded. The teenager who yells, ‘you’re not listening to me’ when she really means ‘you’re not agreeing with me’ is a model for ‘asking the public’ that we do want to emulate.

The way forward ought to involve consultation but in processes where very clear, local and specific choices are laid before those who are affected. Too broad-brush, rhetorical gestures pose serious threats to citizenship because they devalue representative democracy.

The integrity of the widow who gave her offering from a position of poverty received Jesus’ endorsement. We have no reason as Christians to denigrate ‘the public’ but we ought not forget that it was the crowd who, when faced with a ‘public consultation’ chose Barabbas over Christ.

Eric Stoddart, Lecturer in Practical Theology, University of St Andrews.