Unlocking Democracy

"Yes, and it’s looking forward with contributions from a lot of different people, such as David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Nick Clegg, Helena Kennedy… It’s a pot-pourri for anybody who wants to start on the issue of how to reform the British political system. It’s got a very good, broad perspective, and then I go into much more detail with the other four books that I’ve chosen. Well I think it is interesting, with an election in Britain, to get the rather general views of the three party leaders. But for me the fundamental issue about Charter 88 is that it came at a point when the SDP [the Social Democratic Party] was more or less folding up, and I was always very impressed as foreign secretary with Charter 77, which is really an international campaign for doing something about human rights, and what seemed to me in 1988 absolutely crucial was that we had to involve the non-politician. The founders of Charter 88, I think, managed to keep it all-party, and they did manage to build support for quite a lot of the constitutional reform that the politicians agreed on, or at least, had championed. Much wider support. That was very necessary when you think that we went into referendums on Scottish devolution, and Welsh devolution, which was only just won. Yes. That was in 1979, and I, in fact, supported it as a member of Jim Callaghan’s Cabinet. But it was very obvious that the Labour Government, and certainly the Labour Party, was very split on devolution, and took a long time to convince Labour that there had to be a legislative devolution. I like to think that the SDP during the 80s, which was a very strong campaign for constitutional reform, helped generate that movement. But as I say, it needed something much more, and Charter 88 came up really as the result of a letter in the New Statesman . It’s done extremely well. And Anthony Barnett and people associated with it, such as Geoffrey Bindman, have done great work in my view."