Bless me Father, I've been a bit certain about something...

In a very good edition of BBC Radio 4′s ‘Analysis’ programme towards the end of last year, the columnist David Aaronovich recounted a programme that he produced in the 1980s featuring the Archbishop of York, John Hapgood.

The Archbishop, as far as I can see, had the kind of views that would appeal to a Guardian reader rather that an Anglican traditionalist.

Jonathan Dimbleby asked him if it wasn’t the case that people needed a bit of certainty about big issues in order to live their lives. the response that the Archbishop gave stunned Dimbleby and Aaronovich. He said…

Has it occurred to you that the lust for certainty may be a sin?

The whole programme is really worth listening to – I think that podcast subscribers get the option to download all of the archives and the transcript is here.

One of my favourite political bloggers, Chris Dillow of Stumbling and Mumbling has written a great deal about the curse that the apparent need for certainty places upon democratic politics.

Just for reference, all of these posts are worth reading, but Chris’s strapline – ‘an extremist, not a fanatic’ is probably traceable to his previous career as a stockbroker – and the advice that every trader receives during their career – that not being sentimental about stock is a good thing – and that fanaticism always clouds judgments.

Chris often promotes a Rortean irony as a way of viewing the world, and seems very stuck by James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds thesis – an attractive one, particularly to those who are more open to ideas of direct democracy than I would be.

And what does this distrust for certainty mean for advocates of local democracy? I’d say that it tells us that a great many consultations throw up the most useless information, as opposed to the most useful. If the general public are widely seen as being too apathetic to turn up to a polling station every few years, the idea that the bulk of people with lightly-held preferences will participate readily on a subject that they are not too bothered about, is a bit outlandish.

So we have, instead, the usual suspect problem. Where people with views that they hold fanatically are very keen to participate, and keen to be heard over the noise of the general public. People who have a vested interest are also likely to be much in evidence. But the eavesdroppable conversation – the one where ordinary people who hold their views fairly lightly meet – is one that is never fostered by most consultations.

As a result, we end up with the kind of balance that pervades so much of public life – one where balance is equated as being the mid-point between two poles of groupthink – rather than the balance that emerges from a wide range of views.

Which brings us back to the parliamentarian argument – the need for the distributed moral wisdom of the elected.

I find it almost impossible to take a blog seriously when its central claim is that any British government in the recent past of forseeable future is really lurching towards totalitarianism. It is with this proviso that I offer a semi-approving link to this post.

The elected police chief – like the elected Mayor – cannot seriously be seen as a democratic step forward, can it? If one were to apply the logic that places ‘distributed moral wisdom‘ at the heart of a functioning democracy, then it is very hard to make the case for elections that foreground single individuals.

Surely, it is very hard to make the case that one vote every four years can endorse one individual’s approach to almost everything in a particular sphere? Surely this is little better than holding a plebiscite on a policy issue that most people don’t understand?

The recent London mayoral elections provides a very good case-in-point. Whatever you think of Ken Livingstone’s personal politics, he was an adornment to the Labour Party and he was a net contributor to the quality of parliamentary life while he was there. The same can be said for Boris Johnson in the context of his own party.

I’d go even further than that. Though they were /are all quite controversial figures, George Galloway, Ian Paisley, or Enoch Powell – in the context of 600+ other MPs – improve(d) the quality of the House of Commons. Variety is not only the spice of life, it’s also one of the magic ingredients of parliamentary democracy.

My argument is that this kind of distributed wisdom is the least unlikely way of getting competent and humane policymaking.

But distributed wisdom – whether it’s the type that was promoted by advocates of some versions of public choice theory, by Hayek, or the more swishy up-to-date ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ – only works if groupthink isn’t in evidence. And party groupthink is one thing you can’t – by definition – accuse these mavericks of.

So, should we be comfortable in voting for a political party that we generally favoured if it had one or two candidates that we really deplored? I would suggest that it is almost impossible to find a functioning party that doesn’t have a few problematic characters – after all, organisations tend to thrive as long as they have a diverse base.  In fact, the presence of most mavericks – whether one personally finds them acceptable or not should makes a party more attractive to one, rather than less – if our starting point is that a good democracy is the product of a distributed moral wisdom.

Now, what if the unpalatable candidate is standing for one’s favourite party in the local constituency? How do we address that one? That’s a tougher one – but I’d still vote for them secure in the knowledge that they will be emerged into a more acceptable whole. This would be very different in a contest that would hand them fairly untrammelled power as an individual.

Now, if the party I voted for started doing what The Conservative Party did in Ealing Southall (David Cameron’s Conservative Party went on the ballot paper) , I’d struggle to vote for that party – not because of their overall policies, but because it would interfere with the notion of distributed moral wisdom.

This seems to me to be the paradox of political parties. On the one hand, if they are highly centralised, they are a damaging competitor to any decent model of democracy. But if they aren’t, they could make the whole shooting match work the way that it should.

For this reason, this proposal from the New Local Government Network (NLGN) makes sense. In summary, they want to replace the Greater London Assembly with a council made up of the leaders of London’s boroughs.

Again, on the principle of distributed moral wisdom, I’d go one step further and get rid of the elected mayor as well – and just have a regional assembly made up of nominated councillors, who in turn nominate a mayor.

Perhaps this would not only be a very good idea in principle for London. It would also provide a template for regional government throughout the rest of the UK. You could sack all of those MLAs in Northern Ireland, the MSPs and the WAMs. And you could set up regional assemblies where they don’t really sit properly everywhere else.

It would mean that councillors would have more power, and people would have a reason to care about which councillors they elect. And it would allow you to establish real regional government throughout the UK – without having to have a referendum!