Democracy as we currently practice it is a funny system. A form of governance intended to maximise public involvement and give everyone an equal say in society has turned into a ritual where, for most of us, sticking an X on a ballot paper every few years is as much involvement as we’ll ever have.
There are of course other ways to make your voice heard. You can write letters to the paper or create petitions to protest or demand the righting of wrongs. The Avaaz network and organisations like 38 Degrees have been particularly successful at mobilising public opinion around causes such as preventing the sale of publicly-owned forests.
But examples of real involvement in the decision-making process are relatively few. That’s way it’s important that today the charity Church Action on Poverty is calling for one per cent of all local authority budgets to be handed over to communities through participatory budgeting processes.
Participatory budgeting does what it says on the tin: local people get together to decide between themselves how money is spent.
That process is important because it encourages people to take responsibility: if you’ve made the spending decision, you can’t blame someone else for the consequences. It encourages creativity: it’s an opportunity to put new ideas and approaches on the table rather than leave them to professional (and generally risk-averse) ‘experts’. And it encourages connectivity: if you’re making decisions with others about how money is spent, you learn to balance your own interests against those of others.
So participatory budgeting can be an important step in the quest for that elusive holy grail of fairness. In hard times, it helps people distinguish between spending that is wasteful and necessary investment.
It isn’t a panacea – people will make mistakes. But the important thing is that they will be their own mistakes, not someone else’s. And that’s the kind of democracy we should all be striving for.
So the question to ask about the People’s Budget campaign is not, ‘will it work?’ but ‘why not try?’. And if the answer is that ordinary people can’t be trusted, that speaks volumes about the shrivelled, debased version of democracy prevalent in many parts of the UK.