The amorphously uncodified and quintessentially evolutionary constitutional system in the United Kingdom is currently undergoing something of a quiet revolution. Amongst the policies now being considered and reforms in the process of being enacted are:

A comprehensive reform of the way that Parliament operates. The Select Committee on the Modernisation of The House of Commons has so far produced two lengthy reports, the proposals within containing some of the most far-ranging changes in procedure and practice in twentieth-century British parliamentary history.

The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) has produced a report, Electronic Government: Information Technologies and the Citizen, containing a groundbreaking survey of ways in which the Westminster parliament can utilise new communication technologies, both as a means of reducing bureaucracy and connecting citizens more directly to MPs and the parliamentary process. At least some of the vision of this report is based upon the techno-constitutionally innovative thinking which has occurred in preparation for the establishment of the new Scottish parliament in Edinburgh; serving a population much of which is rurally dispersed, and unencumbered by the parliamentary customs of Westminster, Scotland’s new parliament may well become the most ICT-friendly legislative assembly in the world.

The forthcoming White Paper on ‘Better Government’, to be published in early 1998, is heralded as laying the foundation for a greater degree of transparency in government than Britain has ever known. Linked to this is the Government’s Right To Know White Paper, the first proposal for Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation in UK history; until now a pervasive culture of secrecy has characterised British government, embodied in the 1911 Official Secrets Act which ensured that British citizens were (constitutionally, subjects) the least informed in the democratic world.

The Government’s enthusiastic embrace of new communication technologies. The new Prime Minister, Tony Blair, elected in May 1997 heading a party with the biggest parliamentary majority in Britain’s history of the democratic franchise, has announced that all schools in the UK are to be connected to the Internet, and every school student provided with their own email address by the year 2002. In his first speech to his party’s conference after taking office, he committed the Government to ensuring that by 2002 1 in 4 transactions between citizens and government will be conducted electronically.

The Cabinet Office has given its support to an unprecedented experiment in online consultation between citizens and government. The UK is the first national government to endorse such a process of pre-legislative discussion, debate and consultation via the Internet.

The purpose of this paper is to outline and examine the last-mentioned experiment, with a view to assessing the degree to which new communication technologies might be used in the future, in the UK and elsewhere, to break down the virtual Berlin Wall which has traditionally existed in constitutional democracies between the represented and their representatives.

In political communication historical context is paramount. Radio, for example, spread as it did in the first decades of this century not simply because of developments in wireless telegraphy, but because of widespread urbanisation (providing a social context for the provision of services to mass publics) and a sense by the political elite of the value of there existing a single Voice of the Nation in the form of the BBC. Similarly, on the eve of the new century and millenium, a number of factors have combined to make the UK particularly responsive to the need to transform political communication:

The UK’s position as a leading economic driver within the European Union in the field of Information Technology and online connectivity. (30% of PCs sold in Europe are produced in Scotland.)

The major transformation taking place in long-standing forms of political communication: the UK has traditionally had four TV channels (with a fifth opened recently and satellite broadcasting reaching only a small section of the population); the advent of digital TV, replacing the analogue system within the next decade, will give rise to a massive expansion of TV channels (250-300 are anticipated) and much concern about the regulation of content on them.

The UK has developed a unique ethos of public service in broadcasting, embodied within the Licence and practice of the BBC. This tradition is now fragile, threatened both by commercial competition and the possibility of content quality compatible with public service being crushed in the rush towards deregulation.

Like other Western democracies, the UK faces what some have called a ‘crisis of public communication’. Key manifestation of this are marked signs of voter apathy (such as the ITC report on the 1997 General Election which found that 1 in 4 citizens switched channels in order to avoid election news and discussion) and a general diminution of opportunities for and interest in participation in the public sphere of politics.

II. A NEW MODEL FOR PUBLIC DELIBERATION

In 1996 UK Citizens Online Democracy (UKCOD), a citizen-created service designed to promote online politically useful information and democratic discussion in a neutral, non-partisan fashion, came into being as an experiment. (Here is not the place for the history of this pioneering project to be set out; a preliminary account by a researcher at the University of Oxford has been produced, and an ongoing historical record of the experiment is regarded as a key part of the measurement of its success.)

UKCOD’s early work involved setting up information/discussion fora at various levels. In January 1997 an online consultation was carried out for a local council in North London to ascertain the rate at which local citizens considered that their Council Tax should be set. Although by no means a representative consultation, the significance of the experiment was that citizens using the service had access to a much greater body of relevant information which was both accessible and flexible to use. A second forum was run, on the invitation of the UK Office of the European Parliament, in which key players within the European Union could discuss online issues related to European Monetary Union. During the 1997 General Election UKCOD ran discussions on two key policy areas: the constitution (for once, a key issue in the election, but one about which public knowledge was somewhat limited) and transport policy (an issue which figured high in all the opinion polls, but tended to be sidelined in the mainstream media coverage.)

The value of this experiment was the high level of participation, not only of the major parties, but of 14 parties contesting five or more seats in the election. A subsidiary election forum, devised to promote interest from first-time voters, attracted the participation of all three main party leaders as well as the leaders of the Scottish and Welsh nationalist parties. (While TV executives bickered fruitlessly in an effort to stage the first ever televised leaders’ debate in British history, UKCOD had managed to pull all of the leaders on to a single virtual platform.) These were experimental exercises in online democratic deliberation. Measured in terms of the level of public participation, they simply confirmed what everyone already knows: most political communication takes place offline, monologically and non-interactively, via the one-way conversation of television. A few experiments conducted by an organisation in receipt of no public funding and run on a shoestring by charitable funding and volunteer effort was not likely to crack the mass-media edifice. Nor was it intended to do so. It was intended, however, that some key principles of online information/deliberation could be established and tested. These were:

That democratic deliberation is best conducted within the context of a neutral public space, under the aegis of a fiercely independent, non-partisan organisation.

That the provision of public information, and especially the opportunity to discuss issues as a mature citizenry, should be a public service. This need not mean the exclusion of commercial interests; UKCOD received support from several profit-making bodies as it has evolved. Nor does it mean that the state should be excluded (indeed, government at local, national and European levels have seen fit to support UKCOD’s work), but control of the service must not be in the hands of the state. The model for this is a bottom-up version of the BBC.

That government operates better when it is open, seen to be open, and when such openness includes opening itself to the widest public scrutiny and demonstrating that its legislative decisions can be influenced directly by the thought and experience of citizens.

In November 1996 the then UK Conservative Government produced a Green Paper: Government Direct: A Prospectus For The Electronic Delivery of Government Services. Its main policy intent was the more efficient and less expensive delivery of government services, such as tax collection, licence granting and benefits payments. The assumption of the Green Paper was that within 10 years most citizens will access government services online via public access points, PCs or TV set-top boxes. Unlike White Papers, which are traditionally fairly firm outlines of proposed legislation, Green Papers are consultative documents, raising questions and setting a deadline for responses. 7 February 1997 was the deadline for the Government Direct paper. Little political research has been carried out on the process of Green Paper consultations in the UK, but it is fair to say that they have generally reached only the interest groups which already have consultative relationships with government. The space for ‘ordinary citizens’ to respond to such documents has been non-existent. UKCOD decided that it would establish a forum for public comment on the Green Paper in general and the specific questions raised within it. Organisations and individual citizens could make their responses online, on the web site and via email, in the knowledge that all submissions would be passed to the Cabinet Office for its consideration. The Government received just under 300 responses to its Green Paper. UKCOD received 46 responses (6 published online and 40 email messages.)

The entire exercise was probably limited by two factors: the fact that the Green Paper was published in the final months of a dying Government which lacked a parliamentary majority and would not be in a position to implement its proposals in the foreseeable future; the fact that UKCOD’s forum was set up rather hurriedly, in the midst of other projects, and without adequate public relations (PR) back-up. A major lesson for the success of this kind of exercise is that there must be a PR and marketing initiative informing citizens that this route to influencing government exists for them to use. There is every reason to believe that this process of popularising and legitimising a new forum for political communication will take some time, but, once a critical mass is reached the take-off and subsequent influence will be dramatic.

It is impossible to say how much government was influenced by the submissions made via UKCOD

because the policy process stopped soon after they were received as a result of the election being called. Several of the submissions were of a high quality, such as one from the CSSA (Computing Services and Software Association), representing the IT industry, and citizens at least had a point of access which would not otherwise have existed.

Following the May 1997 election UKCOD entered into discussions with the Cabinet Office regarding the possibility of the government supporting a series of online pre-legislative consultations. It was stressed that the principles outlined above were non-negotiable: that UKCOD would not be conducting online focus groups for the Government, but would make every effort to put online information from all sides, opportunities for discussion and, ideally, a chance for direct exchanges between citizens and Government members. After some consideration, and in the knowledge that the UK government would be setting an international precedent in participating in such an exercise in public dialogue, the Cabinet Office acceded to all of the proposals put to it by UKCOD. David Clark, the Minister for Public Service, wrote to UKCOD that

"We are only now just beginning to realise the potential that the Internet offers for improved communication between the Government and the public; your efforts to extend consultation and debate of important public issues on the Internet are commendable . For my part, I would be delighted to accept your invitation to take part both in a moderated on-line discussion, and a live discussion to be broadcast over the Internet, on our proposals for a Freedom of Information Bill."

UKCOD has set up a web site entitled Have Your Say (http://foi.democracy.org.uk) on which the White Paper is available to be read; there is detailed background information on the key issues raised by the proposals; there is a discussion and chat forum into which citizens can enter freely; and submissions to the government can be put. Graham Allen, a Government Whip, stated at the conference on Public Information and the New Media in parliament on 28 October 1997 that the Government is looking ‘with interest’ at UKCOD’s experiments and that ‘although such fora are perhaps limited by the number of people that have ready access to the internet, they provide the means for the public to discuss an aspect of policy in depth in a way that it is impossible elsewhere in most other media.’ Tony Blair has visited the FOI web site and was shown how to use it by a group of children in the village of Trimdon in his constituency! In fact, the citizens of Trimdon have played a significant role on the design of the site. For some time they have been involved in a project of applied infomatics research, headed by Dr Brian Loader of the University of Teeside. When UKCOD designed the FOI site the danger was recognised that it could be inaccessible to many citizens, not just because of the well-known problem of lack of access to terminals, but because its style and editorial tone could be alienating. The prototype design for the site was taken to a public meeting at Trimdon where some robust and extremely valuable criticisms were made. The site was redesigned accordingly.

There is a lesson in the Trimdon pre-consultation. Online democracy is not simply about the gee-wizzery of high-tech inventions. Making dialogue between government and governed easier involves appealing design, high-quality journalism and a sense that the process is both worthwhile and interesting. Our culture has become unused to thinking about political discussion as being exciting, animated, galvanising and influential. Unless this can be changed in practice, no amount of hyperbolic rhetoric about ‘electronic democracy’ will carry conviction.

Between 11 December, when the FOI site was launched, and early February, more submissions in response to the Government White Paper were received online than directly to the Cabinet Office. These included several contributions from unknown citizens and several more from representatives of well-recognised institutions. (There was an excellent contribution from Robert Worcester, the head of the MORI Opinion Poll organisation and another from the Chief Constable of Thames Valley Police.) We assume that the choice to contribute online related to the immediate public transparency of such transmissions. This has led government officials to become more aware of the public nature of the consultation process (a factor with which the officials are quite comfortable) and the decision of the Cabinet Office to place all submissions they receive online via the UKCOD site, so ensuring that the entire consultation is conducted visibly within the public domain. This is something of a significant shift in administrative thinking: from accepting experimentally an independent online forum as an appendage of the formal Government consultation process, administrators have now come to see the online element as the principal sphere of consultation, with other submissions to be added to it. As an indicator of the future consultative power of online democratic deliberation, the experiment has been very positive.

The UK Office of the European Parliament (EP) is planning a major campaign to increase voter awareness in the run-up to the June 1999 EP elections. The Internet will play a key role in this campaign, not simply as a provider of information, but as an opportunity for interactive discussion involving citizens, candidates for the EP and EP officials. UKCOD has been invited to organise the online strand of the campaign. There is a sense here, as with the Cabinet Office’s initiative, that the medium is indeed the message. In short, it is all very well to talk about ‘freedom of information’ or ‘European Union democracy’, but if these concepts are seen as constitutional abstractions, or, worse still, publicity slogans, the public is likely to dismiss them. By vivifying such concepts using interactive technologies which permit them to be tested by citizens, public administration becomes instantly more transparent and credible.

It is undoubtedly too soon to assess the value and impact of UKCOD’s biggest project to date. Most certainly, serious research will be devoted to measuring its success on the basis of clear criteria. Whatever the results of that might show, there is a strong case for arguing that Britain has set a significant precedent which has the potential to alter radically the nature of the representative mandate and allow citizens to take ownership of the legislative process, not in terms of some kind of technopopulist dystopia of rule by endless uninformed plebiscites, but by enhancing and nourishing the vital soil of meaningful public deliberation.