“I vow to thee, my planet, all earthly things above,
Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love.”
Sir Cecil Spring Rice – adapted for our time
UN Secretary General António Guterres’s desperate plea that we must take climate change seriously, at the start of COP27 seems to have fallen on deaf ears, as predicted by Greta Thunberg. The conference draws to a close this Friday 18th November and, although it has welcomed a stream of high profile leaders for very short appearances, nothing much seems to have been achieved.
And so it is with all long-term intractable problems facing humanity: whether you look at the environment, economic injustice, or geopolitical tensions and senseless violence between nations, the characteristics they all share is that they are all long-term challenges, and they all suffer in common from the same lack of progress.
While national governments occasionally state their determination to tackle these issues, they lack both international influence and staying power — so nothing changes.
The United Nations is the only body which gathers all of us together, but it requires authority to bring about lasting change: and that is clearly absent. So in our Thought for this week we explore how that lack of authority might be transformed over the years ahead.
Just over twenty years ago, the Blair government introduced a public consultation on reforming the House of Lords. No consensus emerged for the future of the UK's second chamber, and it continues to be a mix of mainly appointed, but still some hereditary, peers.
I wrote into the submission asking for democratic elections, but with a significant difference to the House of Commons — not only that there should a longer term of office but also that voters should be asked to elect representatives on how they wished to see their country fifty years ahead — in other words, a genuinely long-term perspective, compared to the very short-term time horizon of MPs elected to the House of Commons.
The challenges we face are increasingly long-term in character, but our institutions focus in giving primary attention to living in the present, rather than caring about the future: thus completely out of kilter with the exponential rise in our impact in shaping the long-term consequences of today’s actions. However I do believe that when asked to think seriously about the conditions in which our grandchildren will have to live, people are able to focus on those long-term priorities.
Democratic legitimacy is important, as we have learned in the European Union. International bodies steered by regulators and appointed representatives find it very difficult to make their authority felt above their constituents’ national interests, as the dysfunctionality of the eurozone has demonstrated. We spoke of these problems at length during the Brexit process, and called strongly for an elected EU president who would be able to transcend national priorities. But nothing has changed — EU dysfunctionality still rules.
Building democratic legitimacy for international bodies is, however, key to enabling them to bring about change, and it's becoming essential that the United Nations should start building that worldwide authority. It's highly unlikely that either the General Assembly or the Security Council would agree to bring about wholesale change in this respect, but it can be achieved on a country-by-country basis.
So, our proposal is that people sent to represent their nations should not be appointed by their government of the day, but should be elected directly by their people. That election should be based on the same long-term perspective proposed for the UK parliament’s second chamber, so that the UN increasingly concentrates on those global long-term challenges of the environment, economic justice and peaceful coexistence. In our view it should be for a ten-year term (or less if the individual steps down) and elections should not be arranged on a simultaneous basis so as to discourage Party formation, and to allow for election to be introduced at the discretion of member nations, over time.
Because it’s so unlikely that a wholesale move in this direction would be adopted, the change should be introduced at the initiative of individual countries. Gradually we would see the proportion of directly-elected representatives build within the General Assembly, and those representatives would increasingly command more respect and authority than appointed representatives — so the momentum would steadily build.
In March 2004 my ‘Thought for the Day’ for BBC Radio 4 was entitled ‘Neighbours of Tomorrow’, and it focused on how the consequences of our actions then were already impacting so heavily on tomorrow's outcomes; more so than at any time throughout human existence. And those neighbours of tomorrow are global, not just within our own nations.
That's why the opening quote of this Thought changes the first line of that famous Remembrance Day hymn, ‘I vow to thee, my country’. As we said last week, we need to look increasingly at bodies like the United Nations to put trans-national arrangements in place in order to facilitate a smooth and ordered transition to globalisation.
But in order to do this the United Nations needs to become much more than a talking shop. It needs to grow in authority as the influence of individual nations wane, and that will only be possible if it is empowered by democratic legitimacy. This can only come about as a result of its representatives being elected directly by the populations they represent.
Who will make a start?
Gavin Oldham OBE
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