Populism and Nationalism

Lord Stone of Blackheath Excerpts

Thursday 19th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stone of Blackheath (Lab)]

As the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, suggests, across the democratic world our societies are increasingly divided, and trust in our elected representatives is alarmingly low. What is worse is that many politicians and people in the media revel in this divisiveness. Their very livelihoods depend on it and for this, cynically, they add fuel to the fire.

As long as we continue to play the same game of democracy as we know it, things will go from bad to worse. It is a system failure and it creates democratically elected authoritarians and dysfunctional coalitions. Yes, people are disillusioned. They feel that their voice no longer counts. Politics has become deeply polarised. The strong centre has evaporated. Both sides now tout their own version of us versus them; the left is often misperceived as anti-business, the right as xenophobic.

We are at serious risk of becoming a closed society, unable to embrace diversity, unable to demonstrate compassion and tolerance for difference and likely to increase exclusion. The deep divisions that we have created may lead to even greater marginalisation. Those who felt left behind before are now likely to experience an even worse version of exclusion, insularity and ethnocentricity than they ever felt.

However, there is good news. Noble Lords will know that I do not like to bemoan a situation, however bad and complex, without being able to come up with a practical solution—and here it is. New thinking has been emerging in places such as Iceland, Finland, Argentina, the Netherlands, and also here in the UK. New technologies across myriad different sectors have now made it possible for very large groups of people to interact and collaborate with each other and come up with better answers.

This phenomenon, described by Professor Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum in his book The Fourth Industrial Revolution, is a fusion of technologies that are blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological spheres. It is the current trend of automation and data exchange technologies and it includes cyberphysical systems, the internet of things and cloud computing. With it, we could create a better future system with a new political platform that actually establishes Abraham Lincoln’s ideal of,

“government of the people, for the people and by the people”.

Business, and particularly in my own field—retail—has already grasped this and is flourishing in the new milieu online and seeing the old forms of shopping in retreat. This technology, and making use of big data, are based on the notion that none of us is as smart as all of us. The crowd can be wiser and make much better decisions than any single representative or group of elected officials.

A new form of governance based on the use of this technology has been termed “crowdocracy”. It needs to be properly managed, to guide how the crowd functions, and this could be our role. Some traditionalists are frightened that this could lead to tyranny. Yes, get the conditions wrong and the crowd nearly always dumbs down and then makes some very poor choices. This should not put us off—it should spur us to modernise more speedily and expertly and use this new technology.

Politicians, unlike business, have failed to grasp the enormity of the benefit of this fourth industrial revolution. If we use this technology correctly and access diversity of knowledge and opinion, ensuring that people are in possession of accurate information, we would foster independence of thought and collaboration, decentralise power, and integrate the collective input into coherent crowd-sourced solutions. We could harness the wisdom of the crowd for the good of the many, not just the few. In this way we would stop privileging a small section of society and marginalising others; we would stop making things worse by creating divisive 48%:52% splits, as the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, mentioned; and instead we would develop the ability to make wise decisions that are in the best interests of all of us, regardless of political persuasion, and not just some.

This is not a fanciful utopia. I have already witnessed and been involved in testing this approach here in the UK, and there are strong indications that it is working. We could lead the world in the modernisation of democracy. We have a historic opportunity to transform ourselves from cynical and suspicious spectators and to all become genuine participants and actors in the governance of our community and of society at large.

I have placed in the Library several copies of the book Crowdocracy, written on this phenomenon by Dr Alan Watkins and Iman Stratenus. It is an interesting and enlightening read and would enable noble Lords to appreciate the potential of this idea. It will require genuine, thoughtful leadership, deep compassion and real courage to test, but together we could modernise our democracy and build a new form of governance for the greater good of all of us. Perhaps the Minister and those interested would be willing to meet experts in this field to examine the possibilities for tackling the challenges signalled by the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, in bringing this debate to your Lordships’ House.