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St Jamess Park in London. Photograph: Hannah McKay/PA

Your article (The insidious creep of Londons pseudo-public land, 24 July) raises an important and surprisingly neglected political issue. Public spaces streets, parks and squares played a major role in the development of democracy, serving as places where anyone, regardless of income or position, could meet, discuss, demonstrate and publicise their causes. The extent to which these spaces are disappearing and the effect on civic life deserves more attention.

Leafleting on the high street is a traditional way to publicise a campaign but is usually banned from the private space outside supermarkets and malls. Picketing is a valuable weapon against a bad employer but may not be possible where premises are inside a business park. Filming in such developments is subject to permission and often the payment of large fees, but it should also be worrying that representation and reporting in large parts of the modern city are restricted to those who meet the approval of property magnates and/or can pay high fees.

I hope your article will encourage more people to exert pressure for legislation to tackle the problem. Margaret Dickinson London

The Guardian is to be congratulated on revealing the extent of pseudo-public space in London and the issues it raises for its inhabitants and visitors alike. How we use land in the city and who benefits from it is a pressing one, especially with the London Plan currently under review by the Mayor.

While the expansion of pseudo-public space deserves attention, even more important is the scale of threat to green space and the green belt across the capital. This year CPRE London revealed a growing number of supposedly protected green spaces under threat in Greater London, with a sharp increase in planning permissions over the past two years. Despite the calls of the development lobby, we dont need to use our precious green spaces to meet the capitals desperate need for affordable housing. Our most recent report, Space to Build, shows that there is enough suitable previously developed land in London to accommodate more than 1m new homes.

We must be vigilant in standing up for the value of public, particularly green, space in our towns and cities so that they remain the civilised, shared places we all need to thrive. Neil Sinden Director, CPRE London

Try taking photographs on a major railway station these days and see how long it takes before youre challenged. Graham Larkbey London

Join the debate email guardian.letters@theguardian.com

Read more Guardian letters click here to visit gu.com/letters

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Our public spaces are crucial for democracy - The Guardian

In this hyper-partisan environment, parties are voting more in lockstep (major legislation like the Affordable Health Care Act passes on party-line votes), Congress faces greater turnover in big wave elections (as in 1994, 2006, and 2010), and local elections (like the recent spate of special elections) are increasingly contested on national rather than local issues. This is pattern is self-reinforcing, making for even more extreme partisanship and even deeper deadlock. The American political system seems to be caught in a straightjacket that gets tighter the more the public struggles.

Richard Hasen, alaw professor at theUniversity of California,wonderedin a 2013 article whether this called for drastic measures:The partisanship of our political branches and the mismatch with our structure of government raise the fundamental question: Is the United States political system so broken that we should change the Constitution to adopt a parliamentary systemeither a Westminster system, as in the United Kingdom, or a different form of parliamentary democracy?His formulation of the question, though, was too blunt. As he noted, any such constitutional change would be nearly impossible, especially given the gridlock that already exists. Thus, a Catch-22: The system is so broken that it needs to be changed, but there is no way to change it because the system is so broken.

One way to out of this paradox might to move toward something closer to a de facto parliamentary system, one that wouldnt require constitutional change. The Senate could remove barriers like the filibuster, which prevents a simple majority from effecting change. Democrats might want to hold on to the filibuster now because its a guardrail against Republican policy, but in the long run, the political system would be more effective and accountable.

Congress could also restore now disused procedures like regular order, which McCain drew attention to in Tuesdays speech.Lets trust each other. Lets return to regular order, he said. Weve been spinning our wheels on too many important issues because we keep trying to find a way to win without help from across the aisle.As Peter C. Hanson of the Brookings Institution explains, regular order is the budget procedure for debating and passing individual appropriations bills in each chamber. Today this procedure has been replaced by the passage of huge omnibus packages at the end of the session, with little scrutiny and opportunity for amendment. A few procedural changes (including, as it happens, limiting the filibuster) could bring regular order back to life, making budgeting decisions much more orderly and rule-bound.

Another important restoration would be in congressional staffing, which was gutted by thenHouse Speaker Newt Gingrich in the 1990s. Prior to Gingrichs slashing, members of Congress had large staffs that helped them navigate the choppy waters of policy. Now, much of that work has been outsourced to think tanks, which are beholden to special interests. For Congress to act as an effective parliamentary body, it needs to more policy advisors on congressional staffs.

Congresscould also limit the power of the presidency, curtailing his ability to issue executive orders and to wage war without congressional approval. This would make the president more of a figurehead, with the real power residing in the House speaker and the Senate majority leader. In such a system, voters would, as in a parliamentary system, have a clearer idea of what policies theyre approving when they cast their vote in the booth.

A weak president and strong Congress is not incompatible with the U.S. Constitution. It existed in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, until Theodore Roosevelt came to power. During that period, presidents had sharply curtailed roles, mainly tasked with making appointments and administering the state while important policies were under the control of strong congressional leaders. Theres no reason why such a restoration of congressional power couldnt happen right now.

Much of governance inthe currentAmericansystemis opaqueespecially in periods of divided government, but not exclusively. For instance, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnells elaborate shell game with health care was designed to conceal the Obamacare repeal plan not only from public view, but from Democrats and even many Republican colleagues.If the existing system operated in a more parliamentary fashion, it would bring clarity to politics. As in the United Kingdom, political platforms would take on a much more meaningful role than a simple wishlist. They would be elaborate policy documents, with parties in power judged by their ability to fulfill their specific promises.

To be sure, a full parliamentary system would still be out of reach, because there would still be a bicameral legislaturethe House and Senate might not be controlled by the same partiesand the president would still have some power (although there could be constitutional amendments to limit even those, including the right of veto). Still, it would be more like a parliamentary system than what exists today.

It could be argued that these reforms are unnecessary given that the main problem with American democracy is Republican extremism. After all, the system worked fine in the brief period of Democratic unitary government from 2009-2011. But that was a two-year window that has only existed once in the last two decades. The greater norm is division or Republican unitary government.

Another objection might be that this reformed system would be less democratic than what exists now, a problem given that the current system already has many undemocratic featuressuch as the existence of the electoral college, and the Senates unequal representation. But surely the most undemocratic feature is the lack of public engagement, far lower in the United States than other comparable democracies (58 percent turnout in the last national election). A move towards a more parliamentary system might well increase political participation.

A governmental reform movement is perhaps the only way out of the current chaos. As American political parties act more like parliamentary ones, its time for the system to change accordingly.

See the rest here:
Why American Democracy Is Broken, and How to Fix It - New Republic

Janan Ganesh is one of the worlds great newspaper columnists, and his column in Tuesdays Financial Times is another stellar entry in a remarkable oeuvre. Casting about for a macro-level explanation to the tumults of our time Trump, Brexit, and their ilk he finds one in the apparent complacency that has overtaken Western society since the end of the Second World War. There is no Passchendaele, no D-Day, no Iwo Jima to give our politics an anchored, foundational meaning; over time weve become bored with the way things are and lost the discipline that did so much to create our current prosperity. The typical view sees Trump and Brexit as reactions to the economic and social dislocations wrought by globalization and its attendant forces. Ganesh sees them as the opposite, products of our faded memories of past trauma.

It is a fascinating argument: It runs perfectly counter to conventional wisdom and raises serious questions about the future viability of our system of governance. But complacency and the fractures of globalization alone cant explain our current predicament. Something significant has also changed in the way that we govern ourselves..

The first half of the 20th century was, for better or for worse, a period of mass democratic involvement in Anglo-American society. In the United States, the votes of the people effected the New Deal, a fundamental change in the relationship between American government and society; in the U.K., something similar happened under the postwar government of Clement Attlee, whose New Jerusalem dramatically rewrote the British social contract or recognized it as having been rewritten to provide a generous welfare state for all. These were times when people mattered, or at least believed they did, and when the choices they made at the ballot box stood a fair chance of entirely upending the existing order, typically for the better.

It is hard to say that sort of democratic choice exists today. Rather, in the words of John Lanchester, democratic choice now has something of a thinned, diminished texture to it, there is a sense that democratic choice [has] narrowed; that, in most elections, a narrow set of economic ideas would be the dominant facts of life, irrespective of where you put your x. The precise date that this diminished texture came into existence is a matter of debate one might say the elections of Reagan and Thatcher were the last times the votes of individuals could recreate the system under which they lived, but even that pair had only minimal success in rolling back the post-war welfare state. What matters is that voters no longer possess this feeling of control over the vicissitudes of their own lives; the system exists, and it cannot be changed.

There is much to the idea that the underlying explanation for Trump and Brexit (and perhaps also Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece) is that people feel powerless to bring about any meaningful change and have thus chosen to direct the instruments of democracy toward ends foreign from the system. Complacency is indeed an evil, and it seems true enough that the fading memory of the great democratic struggles of the mid 20th century is a factor in the tumults of 2016. But an equal factor must be that people feel unable to escape the abiding sense of complacency even when they desire to do so. The Petri dish of radicalism, to use Ganeshs phrase, is not mass suffering, but a combination of prolonged order and diminished democracy.

The solution, then, seems clear enough: Reinvigorate the moribund democratic spirit of the Anglosphere through both cultural shifts and political action. Remind people that they really can effect deep changes in the way their societies operate, that not all votes are simply useless howls into an entirely uncaring ether.

There is a problem with that proposal, though. The institutions that Ganesh describes the ones that may well have generated the complacency that in turn eased the path toward our ongoing troubles are, by and large, good. War, despite the fantasies of the alt-right, is on the whole a bad thing, and the vast human toll of the world wars seems a high price to pay for the reminder that politics is indeed a rather serious business with rather serious consequences. So too do the dual phenomena of Trump and Brexit the former is doing much harm to the United States, both domestically and on the world stage, while the latter seems to be drifting listlessly toward a disastrous scenario in which the United Kingdom crashes out of the European Union in March 2019 without having secured an exit deal of some sort. These phenomena may, it is true, do their part in forcing us to confront politics with a cold, rationalistic mind once again. But surely there are better, less wantonly destructive ways to drag ourselves out of the politics-as-sports morass into which we have been drawn.

Indeed, finding those better ways is the most crucial task before us today. A robust version of democratic choice is a boon to any society it invests citizens with a thickened sense of purpose and meaning in their own lives and it provides the means for an endogenous course correction when the projects and schemes of the ruling elite either go wrong or run out of steam. What is crucial is that a reinvigoration of democratic choice does not mean a reneging on the institutions of post-war governance that have served us relatively well for most of their existence, creating prosperous economies, stable political systems, and open, tolerant societies. We would be better off directing our democratic energies toward the murky and uncertain future to come.

The politician or intellectual who comes up with a solution to that question lying at the nexus of civilizational complacency and democratic inspiration will have gone a long way toward squaring the political circle of our time. And the need to square it is evident. More Trumps could prove a fatal blow. So too could the present democratic malaise. Both problems merit solutions. But let us make sure that in finding them we do not destroy an existing order that has earned its chance to adapt.

Noah Daponte-Smith is an editorial intern at National Review and a student of modern history and politics at Yale University.

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On Complacency and the Thinning of Democracy - National Review

Lashing out at the BJP for its greed for power, BSP supremo Mayawati on Saturday said the recent developments in Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat had put democracy at risk.

The political developments in Goa, Manipur, Bihar and now in Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh are proof enough that the Modi government has put democracy at risk, she said in a statement here.

BJPs greed for power has turned into lust for power. The manner in which the official machinery and power is being misused is most condemnable, she said.

The BSP chief said the central government had misused its power in a very blatant manner in Gujarat, following which MLAs have been forced to leave their state and move to a safer place.

After forming its government in Goa and Manipur by crushing democracy, whatever is happening in Bihar, Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh is an example of misuse of official machinery like ED, CBI, income tax etc against opposition leaders, she said.

All this is being done to divert attention from the wrong policies and works of the BJP government, she added.

The governments in Odisha and West Bengal are also facing official terror, she alleged. On the resignation by three MLCs, two from Samajwadi Party and one of BSP in Uttar Pradesh, Mayawati said rather than bowing before the BJP, they should have faced the challenge.

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BJP's 'greed for power' is putting democracy at risk, says Mayawati - The Hindu

By Jared Bernstein By Jared Bernstein July 28 at 10:44 AM

Jared Bernstein, a former chief economist to Vice President Biden, is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and author of the new book 'The Reconnection Agenda: Reuniting Growth and Prosperity.'

Im at a conference (where I just moderated a session with the great economist Paul Krugman Ill post the podcast at some point), so I dont have time to write much on what happened last night in health care. But if I dont write something, Ill burst, so here are some quick reflections.

It aint over, but what a great win, thanks to numerous people and forces:

the three Republican senators who voted down the latest, and for now, probably last repeal effort;

Senate Democrats, who held fast against a terrible assault on both health-care policy and the political process (more on that point next);

the research and analysis community, with a loud shout-out to my colleagues at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities who quickly, deftly and with consistent accuracy, explained the human costs of the Republican plans for the record, to do what they did is much harder than it looks;

the progressive advocacy community, which came together and relentlessly pressed the issue;

the health insurance lobby (yep ), whose members clearly pointed out the extent to which the latest Republican plan would destabilize markets;

the doctors, via the American Medical Association, who were a consistent and authoritative voice against the damage the various GOP plans would do to people;

Im sure Im leaving out some important groups, people. Please add in comments.

Im a pretty hard-boiled old-timer whos seen more than his share of D.C. cray-cray, but the process by which Senate Republicans were trying to change the way we deal with 18 percent of our economy, and a part thats existentially important to people, was unlike anything ANYTHING Ive ever seen. At one point, they basically wrote a health-care overhaul bill over lunch.

So, yeah, its a great day, and for now, the system worked. But just barely by one vote. Its crucial not to lose sight of how unrepresentative the process has been, how a major party is working against the will of the majority, and how its doing so in a way that is utterly irrational, with no deliberation, no factual input (Quick, lets get this to the floor before the CBO can score it!), false claims (Obamacares imploding!) and no transparency.

Yes, most 10 year olds run their lemonade stands better than that, but the larger point is that this isnt democracy. Im breathing a lot easier for now, and just maybe this in tandem with what partisans from all sides agree is peak chaos at the White House is a sign of the fever breaking a bit. But weve a lot more work to do to get back to where we need to be.

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This moment in health care and democracy - Washington Post