Good governance al fresco
Article posted by James Graham
DISCLAIMER: This article contains the personal views of the author and should not be inferred to be the views of Unlock Democracy.
Having just returned from my holidays in Tuscany, a thought strikes: maybe we shouldn’t be bothering with this written constitution nonsense at all, but instead commission someone to paint a fresco of how we want our constitution to work instead?
Because that is precisely what the Sienese got Ambrogio Lorenzetti to paint in 1328. In Siena we got to see the original fresco. It’s a powerful work, an the ideas behind much of it remain core to the democratic reform movement today such as the separation of the executive and the judiciary, separation of church and state and the importance of popular consent. We might emphasise personal liberty and equality these days, rather than fortitude and magnanimity, but there is nothing in the fresco on good government that we would actually disagree with.
In fact, the Allegory of Good Government is part of a three-piece work, which includes the Allegory of Bad Government (all tyranny and avarice) and, importantly, the Effects of Good Government. The latter emphasises the point that good governance has specific economic benefits; farmers till the soil and merchants ply their trade under the auspices of Security.
This leads me to wonder: how often do we emphasise the economic and social aspects of democratic reform? There certainly are arguments to be made that this is the case: democracies trade with one another rather than go to war, open societies are better able to adapt to changing circumstances. But in recent years, the argument has been made that good governance is inimical to security; I’ve lost count of the number of times a senior politician has presented “liberty” and “security” as competing goods, rather than the former being necessary in the establishment of the latter which has always been the classical view.
In its own way the Sustainable Communities Bill link good governance with positive social outcomes, but should we do more to make this link more explicit?
August 6th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
Thank you.
Our Kingdom should become Our Republic. This will improve equality of opportunity, which is a positive social starting point that will give a postive social outcome.
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland should become the United Republic of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, unless and until Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales wish to secede, which I very much hope they will not.
The United Kingdom should become the United Republic.
The UK should become the UR.
The position of Head of State should not be determined by inheritance. If it is, it remains the pinnacle of unjustified and unhelpful inequalities of inherited wealth and power.
There should be a judicious positive redistribution in each new generation of unearned gifted and inherited wealth, wealth that is neither created, earned, made nor saved by beneficiaries. See “British Universal Inheritance” and http://www.universal-inheritance.org. This will spread more widely the private ownership of wealth and will thereby bring about greater equality of oppportunity. The Liberal Party ( http://www.liberal.org.uk ) – not the EU-fanatic Lib Dems – has already adopted British Universal Inheritance, (but not Republicanism, I am sorry to say) as party policy.
Best wishes
Dane Clouston
Director, OPPORTUNITY – The Campaign for British Universal Inheritance
Member, National Executive Committee, The Liberal Party
Former Liberal Parliamentary Candidate for Newbury, 1970 and Feb and Oct 1974 (Con 24,000. Lib 23,000, Lab 10,000)
August 8th, 2007 at 1:08 pm
[...] Will somebody give this man a proper job. [...]
August 8th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
Under such a plan, England would be the first to secede.
Unless of course, you belive like the Scottish Raj led NuLab ideologists, England no longer exists….
August 8th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
What you fail to mention in your piece is that Sienna was a city state, constantly at war, and its fortunes, trade, civic building and population was totally dependant upon the trade of war, and has been throughout its history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siena
such an ideal is not something that I would want for the UK, or any part of the UK.
August 8th, 2007 at 2:26 pm
#4 Ian, you’re right, I should have mentioned that. The point though, surely, is that such ideas were borne of such instability?
I’m also not entirely sure that you can claim that Britain has exactly had 1,000 years of peace.
August 8th, 2007 at 3:00 pm
I don’t claim a millennium of peace at all. Britain has certainly been involved in its fair share of wars, but on the home front it has been largely peaceful.
However, we must guard against the proponents of ideology over reality, the search for some kind of European utopia, which promotes a policy of appeasement rather than real defence, for that will inevitably lead to disaster if those around you know that you will never defend yourself. Ask any playground bully.
As for “liberty†and “securityâ€, one should never be at the expense of the other, this country’s darkest days during war has proven that.
February 29th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
Why destroy our great country? Dissolving our monarchy would no doubt lead to the end of the Union that we currently have. We would not become greater… In fact the opposite si likley. Instead of having one strong republic, we would have several weak republics. You could then guarentee that Scotland and Wales would become more involved in the EU and would be quite likely to join the Eurozone. Northern Ireland would soon follow and leave England with increased pressure to hand over yet more of its sovereinty to Europe.
The monarchy plays a large role in keeping our Kingdom as good as it is. Nobody seems to respect that.