Rupert Read, former Green Party candidate and environmental philosopher, recently launched a report in the House of Commons entitled 'Guardians of the Future: A Constitutional Case for representing and protecting Future People' with the aim of addressing this very important issue. Namely, how do we make today's politicians accountable to those that are unable to excercise their democratic right to vote. Read is principally concerned, as the report title suggests, with the generations that will come after us in the UK, but I think his idea could also be applied more widely to questions of global diplomacy.
To give a brief synopsis: Read suggests the creation of a third branch of governance to sit above the House of Lords that would be charged with the responsibility of protecting the interests of 'future' people. By future people, Read presumably means anyone and everyone in the future, so, if you are reading this, you too are a future person (or at least you will be). But, barring catastrophe, there are obviously more future people who are yet to be born, and it is the interests of these people in particular that we should be concerned.
As for the make-up and powers of this government body, it would be comprised of members of the public, selected in much the same way as a jury would be today, and would range in size anywhere between 7 and 144 people. The random selection process, Read maintains, would help alleviate the problem of partisanship which might arise if the group were selected by election or appointment. It would also, one would hope, represent a real cross-section of the population helping to undermine the possibility of demographic interests. The principle power of this body would be the ability to veto legislation found to be potentially harmful to future people, but it would also be granted the pro-active right to initiate legislation as well as review existing legislative practice. On a national level at least, there would be no higher authority.
Although the words sustainable or sustainability do not appear frequently within the report, it is abundantly clear that Read's intention is to enshrine them in our constitutional framework. For this alone, we should greet this report as a starting point for debate. The mere fact that an idea of this scope was launched in the House of Commons, in the presence of 3 MPs who all offered comments, is reason enough to be encouraged. With this in mind, I would like to offer up my own comments and criticisms but preface them with thanks to Rupert Read for bringing this debate to the very heart of governance in this country.
A great number of people will inevitably greet this report with a degree of scepticism, and may dismiss it without due consideration as unrealistic in its goals. Indeed, in terms of practical application, there are many things that would need to be ironed out. One potential danger is ensuring that the guardians chosen would be able to deal competently with complex legislation covering a diverse range of subjects. But, I think a more pressing concern would be the limits to the power of this body. Obviously, the key motivation for Read is environmental, but he leaves the door open for guardians to make decisions regarding any kind of legislation whatsoever. The difficulty here lies in utilising the democratic power of the guardians, whilst ensuring that important legislation is not unduly held up. One can imagine a question of economic policy, defence, or natural resources being one of potentially enourmous consequence for future people, but it may be less clear cut when it comes to questions of civil law, transport, education and so on. Who decides the limits of this power, and can the guardians be compatable with effective governance?
Moreover, Read's report seems to overlook the fact that, just like ourselves, future people will be formed of many, and not always complementary, interests, and legislating for them will be as challenging, indeed more so, than legislating for those currently involved in the democratic process. For example, it is not too difficult to imagine a particular piece of legislation being potentially beneficial for people in the immediate future, and even for some time after that. But it could quite easily be the case that a decision taken in the best interests of those future people could drastically or even fatally undermine the prospects of future people further down the line.
This brings me to what I think is the crux of the matter. No matter how good our intentions when we set out to protect the future, we are still in all essentials dealing with something that is by definition unknowable. We simply cannot account for unexpected future developments, and the recent financial crisis is proof enough of that. Likewise, we cannot possibly fully comprehend the consequnces of the decisions we make today. For this reason, the legislation we impose on the future can only ever be drawn from our understanding of the present, which is itself made up of our past experiences. Does this not mean, therefore, that when a body of guardians sets out to represent the interests of the future they are not in fact representing the will of future people so much as the idea of the future that present people extrapolate from the world around them? Because of the simple fact of the unknowability of the future, is it not an impossibility to represent its interests? This difficulty is one of huge importance to anyone with aspirations of building a sustainable society.
Another very real difficulty with implementing any kind of guardians-style body is the need to convince present people about the value of protecting future people. This is particularly difficult when more often than not this could involve a sacrifice on their part in order to improve or at least not damage the prospects of future people. As we have already learnt through debate on the question of climate change, this is not an easy sell. Cleverly, I think, Read cites Burke as the modern exponent of sustainability, noting that he insisted on fully representing the interests not only of the present, but of the past and future as well.
"[Society is] a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are not born."
Burke, as I have noted in earlier blogs, is key to the environmental debate, but support of his suggestion that we should 'partner' the people of the future also rests on accepatance of his wider theory of human nature, in which he insists upon the vital importance of protecting social instritutions. Burke is hugely accountable for modern conservative views in Britain and the US, and his insistence that the interests of society outweigh the freedom of the individual gained great traction following the French revolution, an event he characterised as driven by selfish interest. Indeed, if one were to accept Burke's view of the primacy of society, it becomes far easier to accept the need to protect the interests of future people. If the future is not considered, then there is no way to guarantee the continued prosperity of present institutions.
However, the problem remains that the most vocal contestants of environmental protection reject Burke's view of human nature, prioritising instead the liberty of the indivdual over the concerns of wider society. When you confront this school of thought, particularly in its fiercely free-market manifestations, with the prospect of giving up the founding principle of individual autonomy in order to safeguard future people, they are liable to reject you outright with a few choice words. Time will tell whether this will be fatally destructive for libertarianism, but, as it stands, Read's ideas, and his appeal to Burkean conservatism, can simply gain no traction here.
Whilst I agree that there is a vital need to counteract the viscious short-termism of much of modern day politics by enshrining the concept of sustainability in legislation and governance, I find it difficult to fully endorse Read's idea as it exists. If a body of guardians were to be initiated, I could only view such an institution as a means to an end rather than a goal within itself. The key aim for anyone who wishes to build a sustainable society should be to demonstrate that sustainability is a good in itself, not something that has to be forced upon us to save us from ourselves. Rather than the existenace of a failsafe mechanism to ensure sustainable legislation, it should be a necessary requirement that any piece of legislation should be premised on the concept of sustainability itself. That said, until we throw down the false idols of short-term interest, what other option do we have to protect our future?
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