The crisis of Western democracy and leadership in a media and opinion-poll driven era; national impasse? local solutions?

On 9 June Martin Yarnit posted a news item about a WEA initiative in Liverpool: Talk Shop - Making sense of the big issues, together, which merits a place in ongoing Pascal OTB dialogue. It was introduced thus: “The British general election turned into another dialogue of the deaf, with voters reduced to their usual role of passive observer while the politicians honed their skills in question evasion. But there is an alternative: Martin Yarnit and Perry Walker report on a new experiment in voter democracy in Liverpool. It’s called Talk Shop and this time it is the voters doing the talking.”

As Martin is travelling I agreed to post on OTB on his behalf. Not only is it about Big Issues, which OTB seeks to address. Martin is also an archetypal OTB thinker, the original creative intelligence behind NIACE Adult Learners’ Week, long since now mainstream and emulated globally. For the Pascal Conference in Hong Kong in November 2013 he challenged received wisdom about the language of learning cities, arguing that ours did not resonate with local governments. They might adopt the practices but not gain from understandings buried in unfamiliar discourse (see Yarnit Whatever became of the learning city? in Cities Learning Together RMIT 2013).  Talk Shop is relevant to both OTB ‘Changing the narrative’ and ‘the Crisis of Western Democracy’ where I‘ve chosen to post it.  

Martin Yarnit: Talk Shop - Making sense of the big issues, together

The public mood remains disillusioned and disengaged, with many indicators of engagement stuck in the doldrums. This cogent assessment as the general election campaign got underway came from the 2015 Hansard audit of political engagement which finds that 68% of those surveyed think that our system of government needs improvement while 58% believe that our democracy does not address their interests or those of their family. As if to confirm these findings, politicians displayed all the signs of gearing up for a painfully long period of blather and evasion. The best hope for voters keen to understand big and complex issues such as welfare reform, immigration or Britain’s relationship with the EU was to pin down a party canvasser on the doorstep and keep them there until they extract an honest response.

Desperation with the traditional election campaign is forcing many to look for alternatives to the usual dialogue of the deaf which reduces the voter to passive and often frustrated observer of political jousting matches on the TV. The Workers’ Educational Association in Liverpool – not a city to hold its tongue in the face of political doublespeak – has been running a series of mould-breaking debates under the title, Why Vote?,  using Talk Shop, a new format we have developed that puts voters in the driving seat. 

Talk Shop is an active way of getting to grips with tricky public policy issues. It encourages people to search for workable solutions rather than to repeat mantras from press or politicians, and it promotes the search for consensus. Above all, it creates an appetite for political debate and involvement, something that seems unlikely to come out of the general election campaign. 

The origins are Perry Walker’s work for the new economics foundation on deliberative democracy – giving rise to prototype formats such as OpenUp and Crowdwise – and Martin Yarnit’s preoccupation with citizenship education. Our aim is to make Talk Shop as popular and widespread as book groups, at the same time helping to raise the level of political literacy and engagement from a rock bottom base. The approach has been tested with widely different audiences in Edinburgh, Sheffield, Liverpool, Newcastle and Worcester and there is a growing repertoire of themes including inequality, immigration, the EU, fracking, housing and energy security.  Now the search is on for partners who want to host an event and who want us to run facilitator training as we have done for the WEA in Liverpool and Edinburgh.

The response of those taking part in a recent Talk Shop debate about inequality in Liverpool suggests we are on the right lines. For 96% of those taking part, the discussion was very or fairly constructive, and a similar percentage reported that they felt very safe voicing their opinions.  For Bernie Kennedy, a WEA Tutor Organiser, the experience was an eye-opener: ‘My political thinking evolved a lot during the event. Towards the end, I found myself making an impassioned speech, and I thought to myself, 'where did that come from?'" One participant tweeted that the event was ‘generous and playful’. Imagine – politics as enjoyable, no wonder that the first event has turned into a series with other topics such as housing under examination. Local councillor, Barry Kushner, commented, ‘If this was more common and people were able to engage with the big issues, it would be much healthier for our democracy and there might be less suspicion of politicians.’ [To see a video about the Liverpool event go to the PASCAL Website News or view it on Facebook.]

Instead of the conventional fiction that complex problems have simple either or solutions, Talk Shop facilitators present participants with four or five options. In the Liverpool discussion about how to tackle inequality the options included imposing a maximum salary alongside a living wage, convert to a green economy and devolve power into the hands of local people, while in Worcester our partners there – the RSA and the Church – added the Tobin Tax for debate.

The two-hour sessions begin with a straight (preference) vote by the participants on their preferred option. Then the debate begins. People attach themselves to one of four or five discussion groups, each advocating for one option, and talk through the pros and cons of that option. Then all of the options are presented to the group as a whole for debate. With horse-trading fully permitted it isn’t long before alliances emerge, often advocating a merger of two or more of the options. In Liverpool, when the final vote took place, the surprising result was the sudden emergence of a school of thought that saw that the best way to tackle inequality was by implementing all the options.

Greg Coyne, the WEA’s head of curriculum believes that Talk Shop has been a hit for several reasons. ‘We’re re-learning how to do what we call social purpose education in the WEA - or citizenship education. That’s what we were set up to do a century ago but it’s something that we’d let go of for some time so we need to find approaches that work, and Talk Shop is not just a very good way of getting people talking about complex issues, it is definitely fun as well and that’s a big bonus because normally if you say political discussion people tend to run a mile.’