Empowerment: Here’s why it matters

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Empowerment: Here’s why it matters

19.02.2010 // by Guy Aitchison

The following piece by Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, director of the Muslim Council of Britain, appears in the Independent online:

It was the American political scientist Charles Tilly who referred to ‘democracy as a lake' that should be measured by its depth and wideness. Here in the UK we have a diverse and deep society - but our democratic institutions belong to another era. They are no longer capable of giving voice and power to the different groups who make up our modern plural society.

It is true that the British constitution was once the envy of the world, but it has fallen into disrepute of late, its last vestige of self-esteem felled by the expenses crisis.

Earlier this week, James Purnell, who resigned today, wrote about how and why empowerment matters. He was broadly right.

There is now a clear and urgent need for a new politics that redistributes power to people, in all their diversity and complexity, and opens up spaces for important public debate outside the party-dominated routines of Westminster. It is with this in mind that the Muslim Council of Britain is supporting the POWER2010.org.uk campaign to reinvigorate UK democracy. The campaign is currently drawing up a five-point plan for change through a mass online vote involving thousands of people across the country - the aim is to give everyone a say on how our country should be run.

The central problem we have in Britain is an over-centralised and antiquated state whose constitution is no longer suited to represent the interests of the modern pluralist nation we have become. Power is centralized in the hands of government ministers and Whitehall officials who invoke "parliamentary sovereignty" to justify the loose, flexible power they enjoy.

Read the full article here.