Equality by lot

Green ‘super jury’ idea proposed to protect the future environment
by ClickGreen staff

A new report has been launched proposing the creation of a green ‘super jury’ of ordinary people to act as guardians for the country’s future.

The ‘Guardians of the Future’ report by University of East Anglia philosopher Dr Rupert Read calls for radical constitutional reform to safeguard the basic needs of future generations.

He proposes that a council of randomly picked members of the public, like a jury, should be placed above the House of Lords to oversee all government decisions – with the power of veto to stop legislation which threatens the interests of future generations.

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The abstract of George Christos’s essay Democracy by random selection is:

Abstract: We propose a non-political parliamentary system where the parliamentarians are randomly chosen from the public, using computer technology, and there are no elections. In this ‘random parliament’, government is by ordinary people with proportional representation by all groups including women, men, workers, managers, old people, young people, and so on. The random parliament is the closest thing to true democracy that is currently attainable. Local government may be a suitable place to trial the idea of random representation.

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