The Commissioners

The Commission plays an important role in our proposed system and therefore the selection of the commissioners is an important subject that needs careful thought. We offer here one possible method of selecting candidates for the Commission.

As the Constitutional Commission is envisaged as only being a small committee, with perhaps as few as ten people serving for only two years, it is difficult to find a democratic and accountable process that would enable 44,000,000 voters to choose just ten commissioners. One possible process would be to have a delegate system similar to the one used in US primary elections. Instead of having the people vote directly for the Commissioners, a system could be set up whereby the British people vote for local delegates to represent them.

This would be an easy operation to set up, as we would use the existing 646 electoral constituencies for electing local delegates. As well as electing an MP at every general election people would also be asked to vote for a local delegate whose sole job would be to decide on the composition of the commission. Such delegates would be drawn from those trusted in the local community, such as doctors, head teachers, and local leaders of other organizations. This would also include those who have retired from such positions of trust.

The commissioners would be chosen from amongst the delegates by the delegates themselves. They would select the Commissioners for the first two year period, after which time the commissioners must retire, and then the delegates would select their successors. At the next General election all delegates must stand down and a new group of delegates must be elected.

As mentioned previously, we envisage the members of the Constitutional Commission to come from a variety of backgrounds, including non-party politics, reform movements, business, academia, administration and the non-profit sector. Once the Commissioners have been selected they must be independent from Parliament and the political parties, if they are going to truly serve the interests of the people. In order to ensure this, a code of practice could be put into place to guarantee the neutrality of the Commissioners.

The Civil Service Code provides us with an example of such a code. It defines four core values that civil servants must adhere to: integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality. We would expect our commissioners to follow these four values. Furthermore, our commissioners would be strictly non-political, they could not be, or have been, members of political parties or any other political organization that could compromise their neutrality.