Witness sessions
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Friday 24 June, Bristol
1.30-4pm
Armada House, Telephone Avenue, Bristol, BS1 4BQ
The Witness Session in Bristol focussed on two themes central to the debate over political participation: local government and the growth of ‘informal’ political participation such as protest politics and single-issue campaigning.
On the theme of extra-parliamentary political participation the Commission heard why people are increasingly seeking new channels to influence political decisions, beyond traditional and formal structures. Witnesses included Peter Tatchell, gay and human rights campaigner and Hilary Wainwright, Editor of Red Pepper, the magazine of socialist, feminist and green politics and fellow of the Translational Institute in Amsterdam.
On local government, the Commission heard how decentralisation of power and localisation of services might help reinvigorate political participation. Witnesses included Leader of Bristol Council, Barbara Janke, and Professor Gerry Stoker, Chair of the New Local Government Network and adviser to the ODPM.
Discussions and statements
Listen to the discussion & read transcripts and summaries
Local democracy
Barbara Janke, Jesse Norman, Gerry Stoker
Listen to the discussion | Download summary| Download full transcript
Protest and campaign politics
Lord Mancroft, Peter Tatchell, Hilary Wainwright
Listen to the discussion
| Download summary| Download full transcript
Timetable
| 1.15-1.30pm | Registration |
| 1.30-2.15pm | Local democracy Cllr Barbara Janke Leader of Bristol City Council; Liberal Democrat Councillor Jesse Norman Honorary Research Fellow in Philosophy at University College, London & spokesperson for Direct Democracy Professor Gerry Stoker Professor of Political Science, Department of Government, University of Manchester; New Local Government Network Board Member; advisor to the ODPM. |
| 2.15-2.40pm | Audience questions |
| 2.40-3pm | Break |
| 2.50-3.30pm | Protest and campaign politics Lord Mancroft Conservative Peer & Countryside Alliance Board Member Peter Tatchell Civil Rights Campaigner; co-founder of teh AIDS activist organisation ACT UP and the direct-action group OutRage! Hilary Wainwright Editor of Red Pepper magazine; Senior Research Associate at the International Centre for Labour Studies, University of Manchester. |
| 3.40-4pm | Audience questions |
Panel I: Local democracy
Barbara Janke is the Liberal Democrat Leader of Bristol City Council and Councillor for the ward of Clifton West. She became leader of the Council in May 2005. She was first elected to the Council in 1995 and became the leader of the Liberal Democrat Group in 1997. From 2001 to 2003 she was chair of the Education Scrutiny Committee. Until 2001 she was a teacher of politics and economics and foreign languages.
Jesse Norman is presently Policy Adviser to George Osborne MP, the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. He also teaches philosophy at University College London, where he holds an Honorary Research Fellowship. Prior to this he was a Director of Corporate Finance at Barclays de Zoete Wedd. His books include The Achievement of Michael Oakeshott and After Euclid. Most recently he was one of the 23 authors of Direct Democracy: An Agenda for a New Model Party, which was serialised in the Daily Telegraph (www.direct-democracy.co.uk).
Gerry Stoker is Professor of Political Science in the Department of Government at the University of Manchester. His main research interests are in local government, multi-level governance, partnership, urban politics, public policy, public participation, social capital, non-profit organisations and cross-national policy transfer. He was formerly Director of the ESRC Local Governance Research Programme and has authored or edited 20 books.
In April 2002 Gerry Stoker was appointed Director of the government-funded five-year evaluation on the New Constitutions and Ethical Arrangements that the 2000 Act established in English local government. He is Associate Director of Institute of Political and Economic Governance in Manchester, was a member of the ‘sounding board’ advising the Minister for Local Government, Nick Raynsford, and Chair of the New Local Government Network (NLGN). With the NLGN he has been a leading advocate of the ‘new localism’ agenda as a means to reforming the relationship between the political centre and local government. He is also a member of the ODPM/LGA Balance of Funding Review.
Panel II: Protest and Campaign Politics
Lord Mancroft is a Conservative Peer and a board director of the Countryside Alliance. He first entered the House of Lords in 1987 and became an elected hereditary peer in 1999. He played a central role in representing the position of the Countryside Alliance during the legislative process of the various Hunting Bills that have been presented to Parliament since 1997.
The Countryside Alliance mobilised hundreds of thousands of supporters to take the streets to protest against government neglect of rural needs during Labour’s first term. In 2004 it was during a protest against the hunting ban in Westminster that Otis Ferry famously invaded the House of Commons with four other Countryside Alliance members. Through campaigning, lobbying, publicity and education the Alliance seeks to influence legislation and public policy to ensure the sustainability of rural life. It is a membership organisation with over 100,000 full members.
Peter Tatchell is a gay and human rights campaigner who has been at the forefront of direct action campaigning since the 1980s. His political activity began with opposition to Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Impending conscription led him to move to London in 1971, where he became a leading member of the Gay Liberation Front. In the 1980s he stood as a parliamentary candidate for Labour in Bermondsey and was famously denounced by then Labour Party leader Michael Foot for supporting direct action political campaigning. In the mid and late 1980s he wrote a series of books including The Battle for Bermondsey and Democratic Defence. He was one of thirty founding members of OutRage!, a radical gay rights group, which fuses theatrical performance styles with political protest. Some activities of OutRage! have been highly controversial. It unveiled placards naming 10 Church of England Bishops as gay in 1994; shortly after this, it wrote to twenty-five Members of Parliament urging them to publicly reveal their homosexuality.
Peter has also taken up human rights more generally. He has twice attempted to place Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe under citizen’s arrest on charges of torture, a campaign praised by many of the newspapers that had previously denounced him. In 2000 he resigned his membership of the Labour Party citing its treatment of Ken Livingstone, and fought unsuccessfully for a seat on the London Assembly as an Independent in support of him. In April 2004 he announced that he had joined the Green Party.
Hilary Wainwright is editor of Red Pepper, a British new left magazine, and fellow of the International Labour Studies Centre at University of Manchester, the Centre for Global Governance at the London School of Economics and Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. Her current work is focused on what happens to “People Power” or popular resistance in the face of corporate-driven globalisation. Her most recent books include Reclaim the State: Experiments in Popular Democracy (2003) and Arguments for a New Left: Answering the Free Market Right (1993). A founding member of Charter88, the movement to democratise the UK’s state structures and the constitution, and convenor of the economic democracy workshop of the Helsinki Citizens Assembly, Wainwright is also on the editorial board of the UK political think tank, The Catalyst Trust. She also founded the Popular Planning Unit of the Greater London Council during the Thatcher years.
