Parliamentary Affairs Advance Access originally published online on August 27, 2009
Parliamentary Affairs 2009 62(4):537-551; doi:10.1093/pa/gsp022
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This article appears in the following Parliamentary Affairs issue: CHARTER 88 AND THE CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM MOVEMENT: TWENTY YEARS ON [View the issue table of contents]
Charter 88 and the Constitutional Reform Movement: a Retrospective
Katzenbach Research Fellow
Centre for Socio-Legal Studies
University of Oxford
Manor Road
Oxford OX1 3UQ
UK
Correspondence: david.erdos{at}csls.ox.ac.uk
This paper argues that Charter 88 was fundamentally both the product and catalyser of an ‘aversive’ constitutionalist reaction on the Left and Centre of British politics to the perceived excesses of Thatcherite Conservative rule. Alongside this, other longer term, secular trends were also important including the growth of a postmaterialist politics and the intellectual collapse of Marxism. However, although a number of Charter 88's domestic reforms were implemented by New Labour post-1997, the complete closing of this ‘aversive’ constitutional moment shortly afterwards proved fatal to the continued dynamism of this movement. Despite this, both the Charter's vision of a genuinely pluralist democracy in Britain and its legacy of a renewed vitality in constitutional debate remain potent within the contemporary constitutional reform landscape.
THIS SPECIAL edition of Parliamentary Affairs is dedicated to examining the origins, history, legacy and impact of the constitutional reform group, Charter 88. The articles included here developed out of a conference on Charter 88 and the constitutional reform movement organised last July at Oxford University's Centre for Socio-Legal Studies and timed coincide with the 20th anniversary of the launching of the Charter back in 1988.1 Alongside this conference, which included a wide range of participants, not only from academia but also from the world of practical politics, think tanks and lobbying, the 20th anniversary year also saw a number of other initiatives including Unlock Democracy's2 own edited book that featured contributions from Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg among others.3 The full text of the Charter was included in ‘Taking Liberties’ exhibition (October 2008–March 2009) which the British Library organised to mark 900 years of ‘[t]he struggle for Britain's rights and liberties’.4 Nevertheless, given its status as the foremost comprehensive campaign for constitutional reform in modern British political history, it is remarkable how little analytical attention it has garnered. Indeed, within the scholarly literature, only one book5 and a handful of academics articles have focused on it. This volume is premised on the belief that such a lacuna is unwarranted. Much of relevance remains to be said about both the Charter and the broader constitutional reform movement of which it was a part.
The focus on the anniversary of Charter 88's founding raises a number of related questions including, in particular, whether and, if so, why and in what way was the Charter seminal? This introductory paper argues that such questions can only be approached through a distinctly historical lens. Fundamentally, Charter 88 was both the product and the catalyser of a particular constitutional moment in the UK. The development, work and eventual (albeit partial) eclipsing of the organisation were fundamentally (although not completely) structured by the opening and then closing of this moment. The paper first considers what prompted the founding of the Charter. This leads on to an analysis of the rise and fall of the Charter from 1988 through the present. Finally, it turns to a consideration of both the direct impact and broader legacy of this constitutional reform grouping.
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Section one: ‘aversive’ constitutionalism and the origins of Charter 88 |
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Having secured the support of over 200 leading members of the political, literary and academic intelligentsia, the left-of-centre journal the New Statesman and Society propelled Charter 88 into the public square on 30 November 1988. The original Charter included a statement of constitutional principles and understandings accompanied by ten demands for specific reforms such as proportional representation, a Bill of Rights and regional government. Both the principles and understandings and these concrete demands (Box 1) forwarded a vision of a more pluralist political system in the UK, subject to far more institutionalised checks and balances than envisaged by the traditional ‘Westminster’ model of democracy.
Box 1. Charter 88: the ten concrete demands
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The trigger behind this movement was umbilically tied to Thatcherism's near-decade long dominance of British politics. According to her critics amassed on the left and centre of the political spectrum, Thatcher had engaged in a systematic and dangerous centralisation of power in the UK and, in so doing, had undercut long-cherished civil liberties and understandings. In short, according to David Beetham, an original signatory to the Charter, Thatcher had successfully established a ‘leadership state’ centred on the Executive.6 Alongside her belligerent and confrontational style of governance, specific policies often singled out for criticism included the abolition of the Greater London Council and the other metropolitan authorities, the abrogation of trade union rights (notably at Government Communication Head Quarters (GCHQ)) and, finally, other restrictions on civil liberties notably in the area of freedom of speech (e.g. the broadcasting ban implemented in 1988 against Sinn Fein and other Irish republicans). Alongside this, the Conservatives ability to pursue these policies while winning three general elections on only a minority of the vote was equally seen as illegitimate. As Francesca Klug stated.
The turning-point was the 1987 general election. The failure of the political system to brook virtually any challenge to a Conservative government which, on the basis of three elections on a minority vote, could bring in almost any measures it wished, was hitting home. The reputation of Parliament as a bulwark against the executive was pretty much in tatters.7Central to arguments of critics such as Beetham and Klug, Thatcher had only been able to pursue her agenda because of the ‘unique and unreformed character of the British constitution’.8 In other words, it was Britain's entire Westminster model of governance which had allowed Thatcher to succeed. As another original Charter signatory, the late Paul Hirst commented:
In Mrs Thatcher Britain has found a politician to expose the nakedness of the constitutional checks and guarantees to public view. She has helped to puncture our insular and incorrigibly ignorant view of ourselves as the premier democracy, and helped to show the need for a break with our political history, with the institutions and traditions that we have celebrated to the point where we have ceased to think about them.9Thus, while the diagnosis developed by Charter 88 led it to support a radically new constitutional settlement for the UK, the movement at a political level largely developed, rather more immediately, from an ‘aversive’ reaction to the Thatcher administration. As Beetham put it.
[T]he constitution is the central issue of British politics today, because Mrs Thatcher has herself made it so.10It follows, as Michael Rustin perceptively comments in this volume, that, at least in its origin, Charter 88 may be
best understood as a bold attempt to rewrite a political script for a left whose established assumptions, organisations and methods had just been decisively defeated. Rather than trying to resolve differences of political ends by constitutional means, Charter 88 was by contrast a movement which sought to formulate political ends in constitutional terms. Rather than standing ‘above’ politics, this campaign for constitutional reform was essentially a form of politics.11Alongside this immediate and overtly political trigger behind the Charter, however, a large number of longer term and more indirect factors were also important both in propelling forward and structuring this movement. A number may briefly be mentioned. First, the affluence and mobility of the post-World War II era had prompted a ‘radical dislocation of social attitudes’ in Britain resulting in the death of ‘old social and political deference’ and new demands for ‘public participation and greater openness’.12 These new value constituencies, known within the broader literature as ‘postmaterialists’, formed the bedrock of Charter 88 at all levels of the movement.13 Second, these and related developments including, in particular, the declining salience of Marxism had a particular potent effect on Left of British politics. Stephen Howe in this volume provides a fascinating account of how these developments reshaped the intellectual environment on the Left leading to a reaching out beyond narrow (anti-capitalist) working class concerns. This led, in particular, to a new focus on the need to remove traditionalist monarchical and aristocratic aspects of Britain's governance structure and, more positively, to encourage the empowerment of civil society and democracy (whether conceptualised through a civic republican or radical democratic lens). To a significant extent, some of these themes are also mirrored in Michael Rustin's paper. Moreover, while both Howe and Rustin note the importance also of conceptualising the Charter 88 movement through other prisms such as pragmatism or power, the linkage between these intellectual factors and the growth of Charter is obviously apparent. This is particularly so given that so many key leaders and instigators of the Charter, notably Anthony Barnett, Stuart Weir, Paul Hirst and David Marquand, were themselves powerfully influenced by these developments. Third, increasing Scottish and, to an extent, Welsh interest in devolution inevitably opened up a window to a wider debate on the future constitution. Although not the only, or probably even the principal, feature of this development, Howe's paper provides a highly illuminating account of its intellectual aspects and their broader link to constitutional reform. Finally, as my own paper later in this volume argues the interest in a new constitutionalism in the UK was also given impetus by the growing integration—economic, political and, most especially, cultural—of Britain with the rest of Europe.
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Section two: the rise and fall of Charter 88 |
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From the beginning, the Charter pursued its goals through a dominant two-winged approach.14 In the first place, the Charter campaigned actively and publicly on constitutional issues, thereby seeking to build a ‘popular, non-party citizens' movement outside traditional politics’.15 This involved the organising of innovative publicity stunts (often featuring literary and intellectual celebrities) and also frequent and topical advertising in the national press. The latter was related to an ongoing campaign to gain both mass signatures to the actual Charter statement and monetary contributions from an albeit small proportion of the same. Alongside this, the Charter also developed an ‘insider’ strategy through direct interaction with political parties and elite politicians. Although the Charter publicly stressed the ‘all-party’ nature of this latter activity, Charter 88's own archives demonstrate that the organisation overwhelmingly targeted the Labour Party. This work involved a presence at party conference, the direct lobbying of elite politicians on issues such as electoral reform and a Bill of Rights and the mobilisation of support within the membership of political parties, sometimes through setting up specific organisations such as the Labour Rights Campaign.16 Additionally, although the Charter itself rarely published detailed policy proposals or analysis, it did seek to act as a catalyst for such activity. For example, it organised two large conferences to discuss constitutional reform—‘Make a Date with Democracy’ on 14 July 1990 and the Manchester Constitutional Convention in November 1991 (the latter attracting over a 1000 people)—as well as publishing of a series of papers coming out of this latter conference.17 Patrick Dunleavy, in this issue, argues that the building-up of such detailed evidence, argument and expertise proved a vital asset for constitutional reforms when seeking to implement their policy agenda in the post-1997 political environment.
Within five years of its launch, each of these three strategies appeared to be bearing fruit. The advertising campaign had not only largely paid for itself (through the attraction of new donations) but had also seen the signatory base of Charter 88 grow to almost 50,000.18 Moreover, the Charter had successfully ensured a high profile for its policy goals, notably through Democracy Day, organised the Thursday prior to the 1992 general election, which involved the participation of some 10,000 people.19 Turning to party politics, during the leadership of John Smith, the Labour Party seemingly embraced Charter's over-arching constitutional vision. In particular, in March 1993, John Smith delivered a Charter 88 lecture entitled ‘A Citizen's Democracy’ endorsing a holist approach to constitutional reform. Meanwhile, the party's support for proportional elections to the new devolved bodies, the reform of the House of Lords, a referendum on electoral reform for the House of Commons and an entrenched British Bill of Rights led to the conclusion within the organisation that ‘Labour is now committed to most of the Charter's aims’.20 Finally, by this time, the coalition around the Charter had produced a number of detailed constitutional reform proposals linked to the Charter's ten demands including, most notably, the Institute of Public Policy Research's draft written constitution21 and Liberty's consultative policy document on a Bill of Rights.22 Overall, Charter 88 had succeeded in pushing the issue of constitutional reform ‘from the fringes of political debate to a position not so far from the centre’ (The Independent, 2 March 1993).
Despite this, difficulties with the Charter's approach were present and mounting. Most importantly, there was an ongoing tension between those who emphasised the importance of an ‘insider’ lobbying-based strategy focused on a behind-the-scenes elite conversion of the Labour Party and those who placed primary emphasis on building a mass, campaigning popular movement outside of traditional politics. In 1992, for example, a number supporting the insider approach had argued that Charter 88's Democracy Day was unfairly ‘partisan’ in nature and would cause unwarranted damage to the Labour Party.23 On this occasion, this extreme insider perspective was clearly defeated, an event which led to the resignation of Bernard Crick from the organisation.24 Nevertheless, as the Labour Party seemingly endorsed more and more of the movement's goals, the approach of the Charter shifted. High-profile campaigning ceased and there was a greater emphasis on building links with the political elite. Despite this, the limited nature of the Labour Party's commitments and its disinterest in engaging productively with constitutional reform groups such as Charter 88 became increasingly obvious, especially after the party's landslide election victory in 1997. As Matthew Flinders comments in this volume:
Charter 88 did not succeed in persuading the Labour Party of the need to adopt a holistic or systematic approach to democratic renewal. With the benefit of hindsight it is possible to go further and suggest that although Charter 88 sat at the centre of a powerful epistemic community it did not achieve a deeper ideological shift within the Labour Party away from its traditional acquiescence with majoritarianism.25What symbolised most the difficulties with the Charter's relationship with Labour was the party's failure to honour its commitment to holding a referendum on electoral reform for the House of Commons. Increasingly, the adoption of a predominantly insider strategy resulted in an organisation which had ‘lost momentum and did not make any significant gains’.26 Finally, in the 2001 general election, the Charter decided by a majority to fundamentally break with this approach by launching a series of advertisements featuring the visual of Tony Blair with a Pinocchio nose alongside a number of broken constitutional commitments including, most notably, ‘We will have a referendum’. As in 1992, this confrontational approach proved unacceptable to a number of Charter 88's Labour supporting donors and supporters who ‘effectively resigned from the organization’.27 However, in contrast to the previous experience, the Charter's new initiative was not successful. Perhaps most surprisingly, the Liberal Democrats, who at a grassroots and individual level were as central as Labour supporters to the Charter's functioning, failed at an organisational or elite level to actively support it. In fact, we now know from the Ashdown diaries that the Liberal Democrat hierarchy were fearful of losing, and therefore unwilling to push for, a referendum on electoral reform for the Commons without ensuring the acquiescence, or even support, of the Labour elite:
[A] position in which the Prime Minister was either hostile or agnostic in a PR referendum would be unacceptable to us.28In contrast, the attitude of the Charter was generally far more sanguine about the capacity of reformers to make a public case for change even in the teeth of elite opposition:
The challenge Charter 88 posed to the Liberal Democrats was that it suggested their core values could be popular! That there was a world to win, that proportional representation could follow from a new settlement rather than be gained within the old one.29In any case, perhaps also reflecting the ‘New Labour honeymoon’ which continued right up until 2001, the Pinnochio nose campaign ‘failed to capture the public mood or to relaunch the organisation as a popular mass movement’.30
By this time, the Charter was in chronic financial and organisational trouble; in 2003, matters came to a head in a series of redundancies and resignations followed by the eviction of the Charter from its offices. The very future of the organisation was clearly in doubt. However, although internally controversial at the time, the formation of a strategic partnership with the New Politics Network (NPN) (formerly, Democratic Left and before that the Communist Party of Great Britain!) enabled the Charter to survive. Additionally, the Charter successfully forged an alliance with Active Citizens Transform (ACT), an organisation, established only in 2004, which aimed to link the environmental and democratic movements; Charter 88 and ACT merged in 2006.31 Both these linkages, incidentally, illustrate vividly the continued linkage of the Charter to both Left and postmaterialist constituencies.
Since the forging of these alliances, Charter 88/Unlock Democracy has regenerated itself. While it has proved unable to recreate the energy and dynamism of the original Charter or to introduce significant new blood into the organisation,32 it has successfully engaged on a number of themes broadly related to the Charter's initial demands, including electoral reform, local democracy and Europe. Along with other organisations and groupings, including Democratic Audit, the Electoral Reform Society and, between 2004 and 2006, the Power Inquiry, it continues to operate as a key player within the contemporary constitutional reform movement. Nevertheless, despite a number of potential focusing events including, most recently, the MPs expenses scandal, it remains to be seen whether these organisations, either individually or collectively, will prove able to recreate a constitutionalising trigger akin to the ‘aversive’ dynamic of the late 1980s.
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Section three: assessing the impact of the Charter |
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As the previous two sections of this introduction hopefully demonstrate, the Charter clearly caught the mood of a particular historical moment in the UK and achieved a salience for comprehensive constitutional reform which was unprecedented in modern times. Beyond this, however, how should the general impact of the Charter over the past 20 years be assessed?
Writing back in 1995, Mark Evans argued that ‘the degree of Charter 88's influence may be measured through its relationship with the supporters and opponents of constitutional reform within the Labour Party’.33 This critical issue—the relationship between the Charter and the constitutional policies since pursued by Labour—is addressed by the papers of Patrick Dunleavy, Matthew Flinders and, in a rather different, more sociological guise, also Michael Rustin. The analyses offered are significantly dissimilar. Concentrating on the central issue of electoral reform, Dunleavy's piece reconstructs the various pre- and post-1997 strategic interactions between constitutional reformers allied to Charter 88, supporters of the status quo and centrists within the Labour Party. His finding is that the constitutional reform coalition, centred around Charter 88, played an absolutely decisive role in ensuring the adoption of PR systems in Scotland, Wales, Greater London and Europe. Moreover, despite set-backs at the national level, Dunleavy argues that these changes have encouraged a large-scale transition of the entire UK electoral and party system. Therefore,
[T]he overall story is one of unprecedented success for electoral reformers, of a piece with the ineluctable transition to complex multi-party systems across all the nations and regions of the UK.34In contrast, utilising Arend Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy framework,35 Flinders' paper examines a wider range of policy areas and paints a much less sanguine picture. According to Flinders, instead of being converted to Charter 88's project of comprehensive reform, the Labour Party cherry-picked those reforms which reflected its own interests. Most notably, he stresses that the party backed PR for Scotland with a view to ensuring that the SNP would be unable to obtain an outright majority within the new post-devolution institutions. Thus, Flinders claims that the overall outcome for the constitution is one of ‘bi-constitutionalism’
the creation of a multi-level polity based upon a more consensual power-sharing model of democracy at the sub-national level within what is, admittedly, an increasingly frail conception of a power-hoarding Westminster Model at the national level.36and also ‘constitutional anomie’
the introduction of reforms in a manner bereft of any underlying logic or explicit principles combined with the inability to adopt a strategic approach which is sensitive to the inter-related nature of any constitutional configuration.37Mirroring this perspective, Rustin finds that, notwithstanding Charter 88 inspired reforms such as the Human Rights Act (1998), government authoritarianism has, in key respects, actually increased. These claims find a powerful echo in the activism behind the Convention on Modern Liberty, organised this year as a ‘call to all concerned with attacks on our fundamental rights and freedoms under pressure from counter-terrorism, financial breakdown and the database state.’38 Interestingly, Rustin links these trends not only to government reaction to various crises (such as 9/11) but also to ‘[a] climate of risk ... [that] has become quite pervasive in British society’.39 In sum, he argues, everyone has become subject to ‘more pervasive forms of power’.40
Counter-intuitively, it may be that these various analyses are actually more compatible than is initially apparent. Thus, even Flinders argues that ‘Charter 88 did play a leading role in locating constitutional reform at the centre of the Labour Party's modernisation agenda from the late 1980s onwards’41 and also that the organisation's work planted ‘certain seeds that may in the long-term indirectly lead to systemic change of the nature it campaigned for’.42 Similarly, Rustin even states that the Charter proved to be ‘the most successful single-issue campaign, so far as the delivery of legislation is concerned, in recent British political history’ (Rustin, 2009, p. 573). In the final analysis, therefore, the various differences between these pieces may be largely be related to their different starting points. If, as with Flinders and Rustin, we systematically analyse the post-1997 developments against the standard of Charter 88's democratic constitutionalist vision (or some Lijphartian variant thereof), then the actual trajectory will certainly appear limited, contradictory and seemingly unprincipled. In contrast, if, as with Dunleavy, we explore the constitutional policy of New Labour from the perspective of the historic track-record of governments possessing overwhelming political dominance, then at least some of the reforms which were achieved (e.g. the Human Rights and Freedom of Information Acts and the widespread adoption of PR systems outside Westminster) look distinctively more impressive. On the other hand, Rustin's piece, in particular, does serve to highlight the Charter's over-emphasis on formalistic institutional change as opposed to broader cultural developments including, most notably, the explosion of perceptions of risk. This, almost ineluctably, has encouraged the growth of government regulations and powers which pose a serious threat to the Charter's values of respect for individual freedom and autonomy. Contemporary constitutional reformers would, therefore, do well to note, analyse and correct this short-coming.
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Section four: assessing the legacy of the Charter |
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Beyond its direct impact on the policy of the post-1997 Labour Government, the broader legacy of Charter 88 must also be considered. This relates both to the Charter text's continuing capacity to operate as a rallying vision for a new constitutionalism and also to its legacy as a constitutional reform organisation. Again, opinions have differed. Turning to the vision of the Charter text itself, Martin Loughlin has argued that
Charter 88 is not a particularly well-written document. Of its ten point manifesto, no less than three range over the issue of executive power and the rule of law ... . The repetitions, ambiguities, and omissions render Charter 88 fundamentally flawed as a statement of principle.43Loughlin particularly criticises the Charter for failing to provide an answer to the question of ‘social and economic entitlements: employment, health, education, and social security’.44 Meanwhile, questioning both its vision and its organisational outlook, commentators such as Anthony King have argued that Charter 88 quite simply
failed to persuade large number of people, including large numbers of important people, of the substance of their arguments. They persuaded themselves but persuaded few others. They remained more of a sect than a movement. (King, 2007, p. 88)These various criticisms were not absent from the retrospective conference on Charter 88 back in July 2008. In particular, Nicholas Bamforth argued that the original Charter had failed to properly consider the appropriate role of an (albeit reformed) Parliament vis-à-vis the courts. Meanwhile, Stuart Weir, co-founder of Charter 88, regretted the lack of emphasis within the original Charter on the inter-relationship between economic and social rights and democracy.
Despite these specific criticisms, however, the dominant mood of the conference was rather different. Turning first to social and economic questions, the debate at the conference certainly demonstrated the broad sociological link between the majority of Charter participants and a left-wing approach to such matters; this link, as Loughlin notes, was also (albeit weakly) reflected in the original Charter's call for a constitution ‘anchored in the idea of universal citizenship’.45 Not only did the conference include a panel discussion on the question of constitutionalism and social change (featuring not only Michael Rustin but also Hilary Wainwright of Red Pepper and Martin McIvor of the trade union think tank Catalyst) but the key-note speaker, Will Hutton (previously a member of Charter 88's Council), outlined what he saw as the critical relationship between the stunted democratic republican tradition in the UK and the alleged lack of appropriate structures to properly regulate the capital markets and corporations. Additionally, a number of speakers denounced what they saw as the corporate control and marketisation of politics, and there were even calls for certain unorthodox and arguably over-bearing state interventions.46
Despite its roots on the Left, however, Charter 88's decision to exclude detailed commitments to particular social and economic arrangements were, as Michael Rustin writes in this volume, based on two well-thought out arguments: first, it was wrong in principle to ‘draw judges into decisions about matters which are properly decided by political argument’47 and, second, including such commitments would fracture the broader, supra-left socio-political constituency for constitutional reform (which included even a few Conservatives such as Ferdinand Mount) that that the Charter correctly saw as integral to the successful pursuit of change. As Rustin states
The Charter 88 coalition would have been placed under grave stress if its more socialist members had been able to insist, for example, on the restoration of trade union or welfare rights revoked under Thatcher, as constitutional entitlements.48Turning to broader philosophical issues identified by Loughlin and others, the existence of a tension between the Charter's democratising concern to strengthen the powers of renewed and proportionately elected institutions and its constitutionalist insistence that certain rights protections be entrenched even against the decisions of these otherwise democratically legitimate bodies is plain. This tension continues and may even have intensified into the present; thus, Alex Runswick has recently argued that a major role for Unlock Democracy, as the successor to Charter 88, is to ‘bridge the gap’ between these two concerns or orientations.49 Nevertheless, despite these tensions, and the concomitant legitimate differences in interpretation of the Charter that they entail, there was an important element of overriding constitutional consistency within the text. Above all, the Charter instantiated a commitment to replacing an ‘elective dictatorship’ which concentrated power in the hands of a parliamentary Executive (usually elected on a minority of the vote) with a pluralised decision-making structure where power was rooted in a far broader range of peoples and institutions. These included, in particular, a democratically reformed Parliament, individual citizens and the judiciary. Seen within that prism, therefore, demands for both electoral reform and a Bill of Rights/written constitution fitted naturally together.
As two of the papers within this volume illustrate, these Charter 88 principles can usefully be deployed (albeit sometimes controversially) to offer specific perspectives on contemporary constitutional challenges. Thus, my paper later in this volume argues that the Charter's fundamental values of popular sovereignty, subsidiarity, participatory decision-making and human rights point to the need to adopt a less sanguine attitude to the current extent and modalities of European political integration governance than is often forthcoming from the contemporary constitutional reform movement (including Unlock Democracy itself). More particularly, it argues that the Charter's democratic constitutionalist vision would best be furthered by a more modest European Union which focused on respecting popular sovereignty as expressed within the member states and matching its competences more closely to those appropriately managed by transnational governance mechanisms. Similarly, Kirkham, Thompson and Buck argue that despite its relevance to at least four of Charter's ten fundamental demands, both the text of the Charter and the organisation itself have unfairly neglected the specific value of including a right to ‘good administration’ within a reformed constitutionalism, enforced primarily through the institution of the Ombudsman as opposed the courts and judicial review. Overall, they conclude
Delivering good administration is a performance standard that all citizens are entitled to expect from those people and bodies that work in the public name. Such is the fundamental nature of this expectation that our conclusion is that if the original Charter 88 exercise of issuing a list of constitutional demands were to be repeated today, then serious thought would need to be given to including within it a right to good administration.50Finally, whatever the doubts of critics such as King, at a broader social as opposed to more philosophical level, Charter 88 was undoubtedly seminal. In particular, while not the first grouping to challenge core tenets of the majoritarian or ‘Westminster’ model, three factors made the Charter different.
- Ambition. The Charter was the first significant grouping in modern terms which clearly called for a radically new constitutional settlement in the UK through the drawing up of a written constitution. Most of the other groups existing prior to it advocated only for apparently disconnected piecemeal reforms.51
- A clear linkage with the left. As Martin Loughlin states, the Charter was ‘born of an alliance between the "libertarian left" and the "democratic centre"’.52 While the ‘democratic centre’, organised politically through the Liberal Party/Liberal Democrats, had long been interested in a pluralist vision of the constitution, the Left had historically been firm supporters of Britain's traditional set-up.53 As both Howe and Rustin outline, the emergence of the Charter represented the first explicit mobilisation of a significant portion of the Left behind an avowedly and systematically power-diffusing, as opposed to centralising, vision of political power.54
- A new energy to UK-wide constitutional debates. This was partly, although certainly not entirely, a matter of numbers.55 Of more significance than numbers alone, Charter 88 created an unprecedented visibility for the idea of a new constitutionalism through its high-profile publicity stunts and advertising. Although the Charter's style was certainly not universally liked, the dynamism which it created within UK-wide constitutional debates was not only impressive but has never entirely left us.
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Notes |
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1 For further information, see http://www.csls.ox.ac.uk/charter88. This conference secured welcome funding support from Oxford University Law Faculty's Research Support Fund and also from the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust (JRRT) Ltd.
2 Unlock Democracy is the successor organisation to Charter 88. It was formed from the merger of Charter 88 and the New Politics Network (NPN) in the autumn of 2007.
3 P. Facey, B. Rigby and A. Runswick (eds), Unlocking Democracy, 20 Years of Charter 88, Politicos, 2008.
4 http://www.bl.uk/takingliberties 24 April 2009.
5 M. Evans, Charter 88: a Successful Challenge to the British Political Tradition, Dartmouth, 1995.
6 D. Beetham, ‘Civil Liberties, Thatcherism and Charter ‘88’, Parliamentary Affairs, 42, 1989, 273–9, p. 279.
7 F. Klug, A People's Charter: Liberty's Bill of Rights: a Consultation Document, National Council for Civil Liberties, 1991, p. 158.
8 Beetham, op. cit., note 6, p. 275.
9 P. Hirst, After Thatcher, Collins, 1989, p. 45.
10 Beetham, op. cit., note 5, p. 279.
11 M. Rustin, ‘Revisiting Charter 88’, Parliamentary Affairs, 62, 2009, 570.
12 A. King, The British Constitution, Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 66–7.
13 Evans, op. cit., note 5, p. 123.
14 A. Barnett, Charter 88: We Can Make It Happen in the Next Ten Years, Charter 88, 1990.
16 The Labour Rights Campaign was established to entrench within the Labour Party a commitment to a Bill of Rights, Freedom of Information and constitutional reform generally. The Charter 88 Council agreed to support the establishment of this informal grouping on 17 November 1990 (‘17 November Council Meeting’, Box 3, Charter 88 Archives, University of Essex Library) and most of its key participants (Stuart Weir, Francesca Klug, Patrick Dunleavy and Andrew Puddephatt) were all associated with the Charter (‘Political Officer's Report on Party Conference 1993’, Box 69, Charter 88 Archives, University of Essex Library).
17 Often, of course, specific projects pursued by Charter 88 combined elements of all three of these strategies. For example, Charter 88's Sovereignty Lectures, inaugurated in 1992 by Gordon Brown MP, were concomitantly aimed at engaging with key elite politicians, raising the profile of the organisation and promoting a serious analytical debate on constitutional reform.
18 A. Barnett, ‘The Rise and Fate of Charter 88’ in P. Facey, B. Rigby and A. Runswick (eds), Unlocking Democracy: 20 Years of Charter 88, p. 25.
19 Evans, op. cit., note 5, p. 177.
20 ‘Political Officer's Report on Party Conference 1993 Part Two’, Box 69 (Co-ordinator's Files), Charter 88 Archives, University of Essex Library.
21 Institute of Public Policy Research, The Constitution of the United Kingdom, Institute of Public Policy Research, 1991.
23 See papers from ‘Charter 88 Executive Meeting 18 June 1991’, Box 7, Charter 88 Archives, University of Essex Library.
24 Evans, op. cit., note 5, p. 177.
25 M. Flinders, ‘Charter 88, New Labour and Constitutional Anomie’, Parliamentary Affairs, 62, 2009, 654–5.
26 S. Weir, ‘Tilting at Windmills: the First Years of Charter 88’ in P. Facey, B. Rigby and A. Runswick (eds), Unlocking Democracy: 20 Years of Charter 88, p. 16.
27 A. Runswick, ‘Dissolution and reformation: from Charter 88 to Unlock Democracy’, p. 51.
28 P. Ashdown, The Ashdown Diaries, vol. I, Allen Lane, 2000, p. 313. Such support had not, of course, been publicly mooted even in the Cook–Maclennan Report of 1997.
29 Barnett, op. cit., note 18, p. 35.
30 Runswick, op. cit., note 27.
32 V. Seddon, ‘Assessing the impact and legacy of the Charter’, presentation to Charter 88 and the Constitutional Reform Movement Conference, University of Oxford, 2008.
33 Evans, op. cit., note 5, p. 6.
34 P. Dunleavy, ‘Assessing How Far Charter 88 and the Constitutional Reform Coalition Influenced Voting System Reform in Britain’, Parliamentary Affairs, 62, 2009, 618. Even more pithily, at the conference itself Dunleavy summed up his perspective with the catch-phrase: ‘We're nearly there’.
35 A. Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries, Yale, 1999.
36 Flinders, op. cit., note 25, p. 654.
38 Interestingly, a significant number of both the groups and individuals linked to this event were formerly linked to the Charter 88 project. These included, most notably, Anthony Barnett and Stuart Weir (co-founders of the Charter) and also the Rowntree Trusts (who provided major financial assistance both for this event and also the Charter). The final event, held on 28 February 2009, was attended by over 1000 people in London, with parallel smaller Conventions also being held at seven other locations throughout the UK. See http://www.modernliberty.net/ 24 April 2009.
39 Rustin, op. cit., note 11, p. 576.
41 Flinders, op. cit., note 25, p. 660.
43 M. Loughlin, Public Law and Political Theory, Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 221–3.
45 Ibid., p. 222. According to Weir, this inclusion was ultimately effected by the intervention of Lord Scarman (Weir, op. cit., note 26, p. 5).
46 Notably that free-sheet newspapers posed a commercial threat to the quality press and, therefore, should be banned as being contrary to the public interest.
47 Rustin, op. cit., note 11, p. 574.
49 Runswick, op. cit., note 27, p. 57.
50 R. Kirkham, B. Thompson and T. Buck, ‘Putting the Ombudsman into Constitutional Context’, Parliamentary Affairs, 62, 2009, 601. Interestingly, such a suggestion appears to have political traction. In particular, a recent Government White Paper favoured including a right to good administration within a new British Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. See Ministry of Justice, Rights and Responsibilities: Developing Our Constitutional Framework, GSO, 2009, pp. 39–41.
51 Even the closest precursor to the Charter, the Constitutional Reform Centre, which had been founded by Richard Holme in 1984 to promote debate about constitutional change, had stopped short of systematically drawing together the various reforms it advocated through such a mechanism as a written constitution.
52 Loughlin, op. cit., note 43, p. 221.
53 S. Cripps, Can Socialism Come by Constitutional Methods?, Socialist League, 1933; J. Griffith, ‘The Political Constitution’, Modern Law Review, 42, 1979, 1–21.
54 Moreover, whilst interest in such constitutional change is, once again, reemerging on the right of British politics (see, e.g. D. Cameron and N. Herbert, ‘It's Time for a New Politics’ in Facey, Rigby, Runswick, Unlocking Democracy, 20 Years of Charter 88), this renewed support for constitutional pluralism has remained a potent ideological force on the Left into the present.
55 As previously noted, within five years approximately 50,000 people had signed the Charter. Eventually approximately 100,000 were to sign. However, the significance of these numbers, in themselves, should not be exaggerated. Certainly, they were insignificant compared with the numbers involved in non-constitutional political campaigns such as the Live Aid in the 1980s or Make Poverty History more recently. Moreover, it should be stressed that only approximately 6000 people involved themselves in Charter 88 in a sustained manner whether by paying standing orders (approximately 5000) or helping in other ways (approximately another 1000) (P. Farthing, ‘How Charter 88 Used Marketing to Drive Change’, presentation to Charter 88 and Constitutional Reform Movement Conference, University of Oxford, 2008). In any case, the Charter was always heavily dependent on the support of numerically tiny, but financially rich, foundations for its activities, most notably the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust (JRRF) (T. Smith, ‘The First Decade of Charter 88: Fruitful Interaction with the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust’ in P. Facey, B. Rigby and A. Runswick (eds), Unlocking Democracy: 20 Years of Charter 88, 2008).
56 King, op. cit., note 12, p. 86.
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