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Just over a month ago, I helped out at a people’s assembly in Brixton, a neighbourhood of the inner south London at the end of an Underground line, to act as the facilitator of a group discussion. I have been late posting on this, as this post stalled as I struggled to figure out several…
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Frome, a mid-sized town in the English county of Somerset A few of us have predicted that radical assembly-based parties could be The Next Big Thing in politics. But how would one actually work? Assemblies What do we mean by assembly-based? This would partly mean that the party would use the incredible potential of randomly-selected…
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Why am I so prone to bending covers? As the former CEO of Oxfam, the venerable charity for global poverty relief, Danny Sriskandarajah has met with many well-known figures. Among them was Prince Philip: As I began to reply that I had been drawn to an association built on shared values like democracy, Prince Philip…
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I’ve taken a break from this blog for a few weeks, so this post has come later than it should. I was lucky to get invited to the national gathering of the Humanity Project, a meeting of dozens of assembly organisers at a conference centre in Staffordshire. Though they have done meet-ups before, I got…
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(A view of Penzance. No sign of any pirates.) I’ve discussed in an earlier post about the problem that citizens’ assemblies cost so much money to run, and possible solutions. This is why I was intrigued to find articles about a citizens’ assembly in the southwestern corner of England. It was run for only £1,500.…
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This is a follow-up post to my recent one on the House of the People project, a national citizens’ assembly run by Assemble. From what I’ve heard, it went very well, with a facilitator I’m in touch with saying it was “a truly uplifting experience”. Assemble issued a press release in which a participant described…
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Steven Pinker has written some cracking books on how the human mind works, as well as in defence of liberal democratic and progressive values. The most recent is titled Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters (2021). What is rationality? Pinker defines it as “the ability to use knowledge to attain…
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An earlier event from Assemble last August, which launched the work to run the House of the People. This month’s event is at a different venue but will look quite similar. Why rely on the government to start national citizens’ assemblies if you can start your own? This is a huge task. But after over…
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This is a quick post to point out something interesting I’ve found. I’ve been in touch with a few organisations that are working to advance assembly democracy — decision-making through assemblies of ordinary people, whether randomly selected or not. There have been a few of these springing up in the UK, from Newcastle to Norwich…
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I’ve written earlier about an article Roger Hallam wrote on the revolutionary potential of assemblies. I’ve more recently been listening to his podcast, Designing the Revolution, mostly from 2023 with some more scattered episodes since. Though it appears to be aimed at starting an environmental activist group, it has important lessons for starting a people’s…
Assembly Project 